ashbury

I missed it too, but the video clip on mlb.com Gameday shows him heading to the dugout under his own power. That does not rule out several other bad outcomes.

The box score shows it that way, at least for the moment. Will be interesting to remember this question and check the official one tomorrow.

I don't buy into sports teams never losing money, no. It's a vanity project. As I said, it's fundamentally unlike running a chain of dry cleaners. Take the America's Cup, for example. Some of the richest men in history have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in an attempt to own it..They don't demand that a fast sailing boat turn a profit. Horseracing, similarly; some racing stables are self-sustaining, many are not. There's no reason except a scoundrel's handshake among 30 billionaires that each individual baseball team must make a profit every single year, either. Once you get over that artificial hurdle, my point of view is clear and consistent. Owning a sports team is a privilege, not necessarily a profit-center. My point of view is not very important, because of exactly that agreement among billionaires; the Pohlad family is hardly alone in this (though there are occasional exceptions like the Tigers for a while and the Padres recently). So I'm not holding my breath. But there is absolutely no reason a team like the Twins, who have a good if not stellar farm system, can't choose to pay 4 key players a total of $100M, as was suggested further up, to supplement their roster of rising players. Throwing out challenges to compare to low-revenue teams is what's incongruous, for the several reasons I stated.

Sorry. I don't accept the terms of discussion you stipulate. Revenue is not the independent variable. On the contrary, it's an embarrassment that the Twins' revenue is lower than the Cardinals', despite having a larger economic base; it speaks to decades of failure going back to Calvin Griffith and would take many years at minimum to turn around. The Twins should also be on a par in revenue with the Mariners but they are not. More importantly though, owning a sports franchise is nothing like running a chain of dry cleaning stores or even a health care behemoth. There is no rule except a corrupt handshake deal among 30 billionaires that profitability is inviolable. The competition is on the field, not among 30 CFOs. You've bought into bean-counting as a competitive sport. Most of us do not. For these reasons I'm not playing along with your rhetorical games. PS. The Forbes franchise value page seems to have Minnesota ranked #16, so while that's technically "bottom half" it's pretty disingenuous to limit the discussion to teams below them. So even if I did want to play along, the discussion's rigged before it starts.

There are no guarantees in life but $30M generally brings you a good player. And 4 good players on your roster before you start factoring in your low-cost players is a good position to be in. The $100M is a privilege to pay. Oscar Wilde said that a cynic is one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.* The value of having good players is high. * In fairness, this is only half of a dialog attributed to Wilde that was also aiming to make an equal and opposite point about knowing the price of nothing and assigning absurdly high value to too many things. Real wisdom is finding the middle path between cynicism and sentimentalism.

The Twins will nonetheless find a way to make the windfall income tax-exempt.

GoFundYour$elve$, Twins.

Congratulations. Most of us here have accumulated far less.

A quick followup: the kind folks at b-r.com answered my question overnight, to say that their Stathead tool can't be used for what I want. It tracks streaks of games, but not streaks of individual plate appearances. Even though the answer was in the negative, I appreciate their dedication so much!

Lefty reliever alert! Diamondbacks just DFAed Joe Jacques to make room for Puk. Should we grab him? Just kidding. He looks terrible.

You use the word "could" in two different ways in one sentence, one slightly more probable than the other. If you manage to score dinner with the man, please consider finding a way I can tag along too.

Gosh darn it all to flipping heck. I figured out my main mistake from yesterday and tried again.. I think I'm really close to answering this question by using Stathead, but now we may have a slight problem with definitions, or possibly software bugs, or both In several cases, Margot has come into the game as a pinch-hitter, but then stayed in as the defensive replacement. When I ask Stathead for a streak and specify pinch-hitting appearances, it seems that it only looks at games where the hitter came in and then was immediately replaced the next inning (most often for the pitcher, historically). For anyone who's paid for Stathead, this link may give you my starting point and let you experiment. For almost everyone else probably, you can have a look at the results here. But to summarize: the player with the longest hitless streak when "strictly" pinch-hitting is Charlie Gilbert, a 1940s journeyman who flailed his way through 50 fruitless attempts. Or maybe it was 57 - there could be a bug in the database or the software that presents itself. Oh goody, another bug report to send to my good friends there. (It's a SABR project and I do like to support it every way I can.) So maybe Charlie Gilbert, maybe not, but our good friend Margot is likely very far from setting any all-time records. Second on the list is Mike Mordecai from 1997 to 2000, playing for Atlanta and Montreal, with 40 hitless appearances. Our other good friend Billy Martin shows up high in this list too, at 33 failures spread across 1950 through 1961. You know, the more I look at this, the less I trust the results - would the Yankees have kept trying him so many times? I'll have to get back to y'all on this; it will likely take days and I know you're all waiting breathlessly. 😀

If the dying man's explicit instructions included, "and whatever else you do, make sure you trigger serious cash flow problems before the end of the season," I might absolve the GM of blame. 😀 Oh man. Now you've given me the heebie jeebies at the thought of Dave St. Peter scheduling an off-the-cuff press conference to discuss the trade deadline. "Due to the deadbeat fans this franchise has managed to attract like vermin to a rotting... well, I mean, our fans are bad, and we're fine, let me just leave it at that. It's not our fault, but we're looking to trim a couple million in payroll. Any GMs out there looking for a washed-up backup infielder? Oh, did I mention the broadcast situation is very much in flux, still? The fans need to come to the ballpark and watch a couple games in person, instead of sitting on their fat wallets watching the boob tube, I'm trying to say."

Okay, but the dropoff of what you get in return is pretty sharp, once you place the Untouchable tag on about 5 players we all can name. I'm happy to cash Tanner Schobel in for something, but to get a real difference maker is going to take more than even a package of 5 Tanner Schobels or his equivalent. I hope our FO surprises me.

I tried to tease this information out from b-r.com's Stathead tool, but misused it or something because I never came up with anything close to what I was asking. Did you find this at some website, or have a good way of doing the primary research yourself?

If Preller himself didn't take the step, there has to be some drone in the organization with "risk assessment" in their job title, who should have suggested setting up a line of credit, so as to avert a dire situation that results in a scramble. But I suppose that is 20/20 hindsight. (Which a risk assessment drone on the payroll is supposed to avoid, but I repeat myself.)

I see a trenchant point made, down in the comments section of that post from 9 months ago: "How does Preller still have a job?" 😀

For a team with post-season pretensions, we sure have a lot of dead wood and/or underperforming youth.

Have you seen some of that contact? Just going from memory, those weak grounders don't look like the kind of drives that earn the average ballplayer a BABIP around .300. Possibly my memory is selective and/or my sample is skewed.

My time horizon where it comes to the White Sox is longer than my expected remaining lifespan, sonny. 😀

Isn't that something that would get a GM (or whatever title-inflated name is given) fired? A. J. Preller seems to be gainfully employed by the Padres still. But I don't keep up with the news.

I'm not sending any prospects that help the White Sox. Schobel, sure, okay, I don't see him as a help. He has some trade value, but not a difference maker. Except, I'm not spending Schobel on someone like Paxton.

Not only that, but they had been running with 21 position players and only 19 pitchers. That's a very unusual ratio in this day and age. It was pretty much going to have to be a hitter that made room for Brock Stewart.

This was an underrated headline that I somehow missed.

Yes we all saw that. Passan is a good read but he doesn't say anything here to identify it as anything other than his own analysis; it happens to coincide with my own picture of things although that doesn't matter. But the OP here talked about the team making "statements" in contrast to keeping their "mouths shut". Are there any links to actual "statements" from FalVine's open mouth? Or Rocco's? Or even Associate GM Carlos Correa's?