ashbury

Concur. What's hidden under the surface when you have a reliable starter is all the sifting you had to go through to find him. Except for the very top draft choices (and probably not even them), there's no assurance that any pitcher can handle the workload of a full season of 32 starts and, on top of that, excel. Even when you trade for a "major league ready" arm like Joe Ryan, there are doubts, and you are paying the price of risk-analysis by acquiring him (look at it this way, the Rays weren't sold on Ryan or he would have been untouchable). Look at Ryan more specifically. The same season we traded for him, we were also crapping around giving starts to such luminaries as Beau Burrows, Lewis Thorpe, Charlie Barnes, Griffin Jax (who was later repurposed to the pen). The Joe Ryan we see today isn't simply this singular talent; he contains these other guys too. There's a high potential for a lot of losing baseball while we work at replacing him. And yet, I can't disagree that the we're headed toward trading him and Lopez away. The die was cast, when the FO traded away all of the established bullpen talent. What I just said about sifting through to find the gems applies even moreso to the relievers - we're not getting back to the general level of bullpen competence (it was never "shutdown" like some teams achieve) in a single offseason. I didn't advocate for a teardown and I don't particularly like it and I especially dislike giving the same FO another rebuild given that the last one they architected has fizzled, but here we are. I don't advocate half-assing things now. I hope the FO doesn't try to muddle through. LFG, finish the remake by getting something in return for the value our best pitchers provide in a pair of coming seasons in which the Twins won't reap any benefits anyway. FWIW though, I have taking this approach at times when I play OOTP as a general manager. It almost always doesn't work out the way I hope, and instead puts the franchise in a death spiral of declining revenue and ever-narrowing options. A final note: I don't think you can leave out of the analysis the possibility that there will be a work-stoppage of some kind in 2027 when the Collective Bargaining Agreement is renegotiated. If 2027 was already questionable as a year of contention for the Twins, it tilts the decision even stronger toward trading away the assets controlled in that year. OTOH the other teams read the same tea leaves, and it's possible the "prospect haul" will be lower than most people are expecting.

I stopped reading here, thanks.

Don't phrase it like that. Call it Consistently Humble.

I dunno. I'm not good with MS Excel charts ("Chart Title," LOL), but the data you provided looks like a pretty strong trend with one outlier (the White Sox).

Stop beating around the bush, Nick. Tell us how you really feel.

Franchise—front office steering, straight into the ditch. Two bad years, ’21, ’22— already had me leaning, thinking: 2023, prove it. And they did. Competitive, sharp, one nice postseason series— a tune I could hum along to, and remember. Then ’24 slipped, ’25 worse— notes sour, melody lost. Now it’s “rebuild.” But why the same conductor? First movement failed, second sounds the same. Ownership nods along— complicit, complicit. We thought they’d leave the stage, but no. Still here. So now what? Silence. I don’t know.

"Hello, Twins Offense. Whaaat's happening? Ahhm, I'm gonna need you to go ahead and start producing some hits. So if you could do that, starting next game, that would be great. Mmmkay? Oh, oh, and I almost forgot, ahhm, I'm also gonna need you to go ahead and turn some of those hits into runs right after that, too. We, uh, lost some games this week and, uh, we sorta need to play catchup. Thaaanks."

"Hello, Twins Offense. Whaaat's happening? Ahhm, I'm gonna need you to go ahead and start producing some hits. So if you could do that, starting next game, that would be great. Mmmkay? Oh, oh, and I almost forgot, ahhm, I'm also gonna need you to go ahead and turn some of those hits into runs right after that, too. We, uh, lost some games this week and, uh, we sorta need to play catchup. Thaaanks."

No. As usual, Betteridge's law of headlines applies here.

Yes, I believe Hayes made such a speculation.

Twenty-six Larnachs—imagine it. Payroll balloons to a paltry $130 million, 2026 and broke before spring. So, yes—ship Trevor out. Value near zero, I know. But don’t you dare say it’s the money. Fans hear that line, it cuts deep. No—his bat never bloomed, his glove weaker still. Even MLB minimum feels heavy. And that hurts. Him, the team, us— all of us, left holding the tune.

That was the working title for one of the Turtles albums until their record label stepped in and put the kibosh on the word "crap" on the cover.

Events since mid-July have already established that.

Okay, okay.

Don't look now but perennial All-Star and two-time Hall of Fame inductee Luke Keaschall is OPSing .604 in his last ten games. Buckle up and strap in - 2026 will be a bumpy ride.

Apparently, Onion News Network's bid to provide coverage lost out.

This "get to know him" article didn't mention what seems to be an interesting tidbit, that Kyler has an older brother (or cousin or something) named Christian who also played at UConn as an infielder and who, although undrafted, has gone on to play three years (so far) of independent ball in the Frontier League after graduation. This involved no deep research on my part of course, merely typing the name Fedko into b-r.com.

There has to be more to what they're saying than "Single A is less difficult than major college." Because I don't see the record as bearing that out. (Although I by no means performed a careful study.) Can you point me to a link for each of these references?

Is it? I would guess it's generally harder. Reason #1, we're in an era where draftees are often not thrown immediately into the full-season leagues that same season - if it were easy the teams might be more inclined to say "why not?" Reason #2, I took a quick scan down the full list of 2025 draft's first-rounders, and in the small set of top players who both were from a college and also have played in single-A, not one has put up better numbers this year as a pro as they had done in college. I feel like paraphrasing the "Ron Washington" quote from Moneyball: Low A is incredibly hard. 😀

You jest but non-numerical analytics is a thing.

That goes too far in my book. I want my sport to be healthy in all aspects.

I did check, and it's covered in the Official Baseball Rules, Rule 9.17(c) Varland's 1/3 inning facing 2 batters pretty much fits this description, so the Official Scorer gets no choice but to award the Win to the guy, Hoffman, who otherwise would have gotten the Save. That's a different kind of Vultured win than we usually think of, since Hoffman totally did his job. Sorry for the tangent to the actual purpose of this thread. Hopefully someone besides just me finds it interesting.

You were talking about last night's game and I responded with what I thought to be an interesting Baseball Quirk (and I don't mean Jamie). Now it seems you wanted to talk about something broader; I can leave that alone.