ashbury

"David Petersen couldn't properly call a strike if his life depended on it." -- Enrico Pallazzo, Major League umpire

I guess the idea, by the end of the series, is to look at what kind of (future) team has been assembled, moreso than the trade value of the components?

Baseball-reference.com has a draft history with filters that can be applied. Here it is when you choose #27 overall. Twins in this slice of history are Carlos Gutierrez and Scott Stahoviak. Not auspicious.

I've been off the Nick Gordon bandwagon for a while now. Still, it's not impossible that he winds up being a very competent major league middle-infielder (probably 2B), and at fourth round he seems like less of a reach than if picked earlier. This in turn means that Steve Lein got a couple of pitchers and a very good bat, so at the moment I think I give the nod to him.

Was sort of wondering whether you were just checking if we were reading carefully.

How about Pete Harnisch? I thought he was picked higher, but apparently not. He carved out a pretty good career, and in comparison to a reliever who really was never dominant I'd put him at #3.

Clete epitomized Twins misery. Full stop.

So you agree with the post that kicked off this whole discussion. Nick Nelson said it plainly, "If Kepler wants to stand on the sidelines, defining himself simply as a ballplayer while rejecting any personal stake in the situation, that is his prerogative." I don't really see a purpose in going around in circles like this.

Ah, so you are taking it personally. The corruption of the system is reflected in the comfortable ignorance of people like me, and probably you, while a small proportion of law enforcement does the dirty work.

Now you're just being silly. I stand by my statement. Horrible outcomes don't necessarily happen because of some nefarious top-down plan. They easily come from the bottom-up, when the higher-ups don't show a little backbone, and/or the upper echelons contain a few of the lowlifes that were described in the post I responded to.

That is, as Brock said, your "privilege."

Isn't the latter a good working description of how the former is implemented?

Boo! (No, I liked it.)

Could have worked out, if others on the team hit like you'd expect. Nossek could have been the hero, of sorts. The Dodgers held their entire league to a .224 BA that year. You might expect the pennant winner from the other league to exceed that by a little, but instead the Twins hit a buck ninety-five. All the analytics in the world won't help you when all but two starting position players underperform.

Caucus is the people (noun), black is the descriptor (adjective). I'm not suggesting it's a hard and fast rule that will never have an exception. But the example you asked about, fits. "The Blacks in Congress" would be jarring in a way that "the Black Caucus" somehow isn't. But, again I have to say, depending on which decade you were living in, the implication of using Black as a noun has varied greatly. At a certain point, I believe it was a preferred usage. Someone growing up at a certain time could have gotten habits ingrained. Regional usage may also have varied at any given time.

In that case you would miss out on one of my favorite old jokes involving an English teacher turned cab driver in Boston being asked where's the best place in town to get "scrod". I'll take your question at face value. A noun got drilled into me as a "person, place, thing, or idea". I'm sure there are exceptions. Adjectives on the other hand are words that describe nouns. I'm 6 foot 1, which sometimes gets me described as tall, though certainly nothing out of the ordinary. If someone lumped me in with others and referred to us as the "talls", well, we haven't been subjected to much prejudice so I would be confused more than insulted, but I would wonder why they didn't just say "tall people". It's like that - somehow using the describing word as a substitute for the people themselves makes a person go "hmmmm". I will say, though, that what's OK and what's not OK terminology for black folks has made multiple shifts in my time on earth. So I run afoul at times. I probably wouldn't have said what Brock said - but when he said it, I felt I understood.

Adjective versus noun. Language is subtle, but "a black" in 2020 sounds demeaning as a noun. The tipoff in this case: typically in English one doesn't pluralize adjectives.

By the way, and again not to diminish law enforcement, but they are not a uniquely dangerous job. From FBI data: "89 law enforcement officers were killed in line-of-duty incidents in 2019". There are approximately 700,000 US law enforcement officers. By contrast, there were, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 142 on the job fatalities, for "First-line supervisors of landscaping, lawn service, and groundskeeping workers," coming from a workforce of around 100,000. That put them #10 on the list of most dangerous; you can consult the link I provided to see a list of the other 9 above that.

By no means do I diminish the job that police do every day. The example you provide is suitable evidence. Being a police officer is a dangerous job. George Floyd, equally, is evidence that being a black person in the US is a dangerous job. There is good reason why the first would be true, no good reason at all the second should be. I don't remember the last time I read about a black police officer killing a white civilian. That would be the opposite to discuss.

The reactions to your article were so instantaneous that I didn't have time until now to come back and discuss an aspect that I think hasn't been brought up yet. Buxton and Baldelli and Trevor May have posted on Twitter (that's the only platform I'm checking for this comment, sorry), regarding the protests, Tyler Duffey is posting some thoughts, and Jake Cave seems to have reposted some others' views. But, what about other Twins players? I'm going to focus on the veterans I think to be white and American born (lots of in-between area, that possibly could be mistaken or debated). GarvSauce? I hear crickets instead of tweets. Jake Odorizzi? Similar. C.J. Cron (no longer on the team but I'm running down the stats list for 2019) posted recently about the SpaceX launch and nothing else that was timely, suggesting something about his priorities. Homer Bailey? Not sure if he even has an official Twitter account, which is one way of finessing the whole matter but still runs afoul of "complicity" by not speaking up. Kyle Gibson (likewise no longer on the roster) is voluble on many topics but I see nothing about the current matter involving the protests. Taylor Rogers? Nada. I'm sure the team advises players to be very careful about public statements. So "inertia" more than anything may lead players to not make this be an exception. Also, as I stop to think about it ... I don't use Twitter very much. I'm not expert at it, at all! Maybe I'm missing some players contributions to the public discourse. Kepler stumbled into this topic, if we're charitable about his motivations for that photo. It's fair to critique how he followed up. But why are we holding the silent players to a different standard than Kep?

And endless bilateral snark as a consequence.

Bamboo bats. Thanks to this article, I went from "not a thing," to "huh, I guess it's a thing." Might be the best article I'll read all day, although that probably says more about the day than about bamboo.

Non-concussed Mauer fits in just fine with Mickey Cochrane as a comp, so I have a hard time thinking this should be a close decision for the voters. Catchers should be considered apart from other players, for a variety of reasons, and stats that accumulate (as opposed to rate stats) will always feel a little light compared to players who are expected to play every day.

Since you inferred that the way you connected the dots is nonsense, I'll leave it to you to re-connect them. Or, try walking up to a black police officer and ask - I'm sure he or she will explain it kindly to you.

Because it's what gets rolled out instantly as soon as anyone suggests the police are behaving as though black lives aren't especially valuable in the course of doing their work. Deflect deflect deflect. It's also hard to find a black officer wearing one of those flag insignias. I'm sure an exhaustive google image search will turn one up. Meanwhile, I go with the Occam's Razor explanation, from the photos I do find, that it's exclusively a white cop thing. That's troubling.