ashbury

I don't think it's that dire. The June draft is covered by a bonus pool for each team to distribute amongst all their draftees. The pool is computed by adding the slot bonuses for each pick the team has. Failing to sign a given draftee reduces their pool by the amount of the slot the player was drafted at. Conversely, going over the total pool limit is taxed punitively by the league, including loss of draft picks for going as little as 5% over. Within this structure, there's some game theory involved. For example, it's harder to sign high-schoolers than college players, for a combination of reasons, and thus the bonuses necessary to sign them tend to be higher. Saving some money on the early-round draft picks gives the team flexibility to lure lower-round picks to sign. The Twins are likely to spend their full bonus pool, or close to it, as will every team. As the #1 picking team, their pool is the largest. They will spend the most. There are various reasons to be critical of the Twins' spending pattern, but I don't think draft bonuses are one. These two links show this year's pool sizes, and the rules governing them, respectively: http://www.baseballamerica.com/draft/2017-mlb-draft-slots-bonus-pools/#PZVTGOX2RXUPsp7Z.97 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_League_Baseball_draft#Bonus_pool

Moderator's note: even more so than usual, it's important to stay on the topic, and not make fellow posters be the topic. Do not scold people for having opinions.

Earlier I expect it was the high walk rate. His last 7 appearances have been pretty clean in that regard. I'm guessing a promotion is in the offing at last.

1 walk in the last 7 games (8+ innings). I was on the go-slow side (a small faction here) due to earlier walks, but now the last obstacle is removed. Move 'im on up.

I never heard that particular formulation of the principle. Into my handy-dandy quotes file it goes. Very nice.

Well this spiraled quickly.

In college we had students from all over the place, so when a Professor in one of my classes said as an aside, "it's all Greek to me," probably because he had written some math symbols that were squiggly Greek and he didn't actually know what he was writing, he paused and put Nick, our token Greek guy, on the spot and asked what people back home said in that situation. The reply was "it's all Chinese to me". Well, we had no shortage of Chinese guys in the classroom, so we asked them. "It's all Russian to me," was their response in unison. I guess my school wasn't hot stuff, because we didn't actually have a Russian, or maybe it was the quaint custom in those days to not invite our adversaries to learn secrets along with our students. But I bet they had some other language to blame, and so on, and so on, and eventually it would have circled back to "it's all English to me" if we had kept at it.

I took a look at his 2012 Adopt-A-Prospect page. Back then, at 17, he was 6'4" and 175. He shrank.

What happens if Heston pitches well in Santiago's absence? If he's kept on the 25-man, who goes down when Santiago returns? He can't be optioned, so do we DFA him after a good game or even two? I can't imagine Heston being a long term answer, but even a AAAA guy can surprise you in the short term, and the optics of then discarding him would be bad. This roster is still a nightmare.

Moderator's note:I needed to remove a couple of posts that weren't relevant. As always, respectful discussion is expected, but especially so when we have a guest. Bear in mind also that the Official Scorer does not write the rules of baseball, so there is no value in arguing that a given rule is "bad".

Aaron Whitefield, age 20, is having a good season in CF at Cedar Rapids and I believe he is unclaimed. Over at Ft Myers, Chris Paul and Zander Weil catch my eye. Also, Shane Wahl started some pages for prospects simply to give them a start, and if you ask him you can probably take over for one or more players. / edit - I see you mentioned Busenitz elsewhere, and he is available too

His name is pronounced SLAY-gers, with a hard-G I believe, which may help with the spelling of Slegers. And last night's game probably provides the answer to your question. Five runs in five innings, on 12 hits and a walk. He's a legit prospect, but he's not ready yet. Give him time, he's young.

He's pretty young, and it's his first taste of AAA. He started the season with a mix of good and very bad games. He's at a streak of 4 consecutive good games now; not all of them would translate to good against major leaguers of course. I would let this sauce simmer a bit longer. Finish June with almost all good starts, and maybe bring him up for July - a little less consistency and maybe August or definitely September.. Simply bringing up minor leaguers who have had a good several weeks strikes me as a panic move. But of course if the coaches at Rochester say he's ready, I'm the last to complain about his promotion.

I just noticed, it's 21 K, not 11. Should have been more but that 2 strikeout game against Scranton was good except for that detail.

I have high hopes for Curtiss and he's close to ready for a promotion, but I have qualms. Until a few games ago he was walking a lot of guys. He retired the bottom of the order yesterday. Not his fault, because that's when the manager put him in. There's something about pitching the ninth inning that is good practice for a prospect. But I want to see him against the best AA hitters for a little while longer, too. I tried to look at other game logs for him but bb-ref.com seemed to be missing the recent few I wanted. Maybe after I can look in detail, I'll feel better about him.

As the Adopt-A-Prospect monitor for Aaron Slegers, on his behalf I'd just like to thank all the little people who made this award possible. (I'm sure my guy Felix Jorge sends along his thanks for Honorable Mention, too.)

Hi, baseballmom15, and welcome to the site, as I see it's your first post. (Perhaps you've "lurked" for a while but never felt motivated to post.) If you're new, I should start out by saying that this is a moderated site, and I'm one of the team of moderators. This typo completely slipped past my attention today - there are a lot of posts every day and I just hadn't gotten here. If I had, and if no one else had already commented on it, I'm sure I would have fixed it without mentioning it to anyone. Given the several comments in response already here, I'll just leave it alone. But I know Seth well enough that he would not have been making a wisecrack like that - not even close. As already noted, it looks like an auto-correct snafu, from a device where a mistake can slip past. Similarly, the responses chortling over it don't seem mean-spirited, and were rooted in the incongruity of Seth ever making such a wisecrack on purpose - but, in those cases, it is well for posters to think when making such comments, as they can be prone to misinterpretation by someone not among the community of regular posters. I can see how someone might think the laughter was over the offensive term itself, and I hope the posters see the problem too. The site has a Comment Policy, and if you look there you'll see a section on Inappropriate Language that covers, in particular, "Please be sensitive to the fact that comments relating to racial, cultural, national, gender and sexual identity can be offensive, even when there is no pejorative intent." The owners and moderators at the site take action at even a first offense in a baseball discussion thread. (We do have daily "Game Threads" where the banter is a little more free-wheeling, but even there a malicious comment would not escape moderator attention.) In summary, I am confident the offensive term was completely inadvertent, but I am also very embarrassed that it happened and that the ensuing reponses were ambiguous, and I hope you accept our apology for it and won't think badly of the site.

Yeah, if he's walking so many but otherwise succeeding because that's how he avoids the toughest batters at AA, that form of strategery is going to stop working when he reaches the majors and finds he has to walk hitters 1 through 7 in every lineup, and #8 in a few. Best to get that, ahem, under control now. He's been better about that lately, maybe. I want to see a bit more before drawing a conclusion to promote him. But he's close.

http://www.saintannparish.org/media/1/19/Chicken%20Dinner(1).jpg

Except in Little League the coach would give me that advice leading off, or any other situation for that matter.

All he does is drive in those sweet, sweet runs.

I'm sending Mauer the same message I always got in Little League: "walk's good as a hit".

Late contender for best post.

We all know this rally just sets us up for a different flavor of heartbreak in the bottom of the 9th, but it's fun anyway.