ashbury

I don't think that quite conforms to how guaranteed contracts work, and he'd be a fool to take free agency. Basically, you have to carry a guaranteed contract on your 40-man. Barring a trade, you can get rid of the contract in a couple of ways - DFA him and if some other team takes him then your problem is solved, otherwise back onto the 40-man he goes - or, you simply cut him and eat the salary, if the roster spot is that important to you. In the latter case, a team that then signs him is on the hook only for a (pro-rated, if mid-season) major league minimum salary, and the cutting team continues to pay the rest. There would be no reason for the player to void the guaranteed contract and elect free agency unless he felt he could get more money, which clearly would not be the case for Hughes, or I suppose if he felt so strongly about what team he wanted to play for that he would sacrifice the money. Bottom line for the Twins, though, is that no roster shenanigans are going to save them from having to commit a 40-man spot to him.

Small world. Take away Rogers's games with Cleveland and his season ERA jumps really fast, to 4.50. Cherry-picking works both ways. I like Rogers but he didn't even achieve a league-average ERA for relievers, just as Kep's OPS was just a bit below league average. I'll take a full time player over a reliever when their results are both in this range.

The Clinton/Kaine poster in the front lawn might also be a tipoff to the neighbors. What, the NM Republican Party thinks there are a bunch of voters talking big about Trump, but in the secrecy of the voting booth will snivel and vote for Her?

Was this in relation to some prior comment? There are plenty of unfunny comics out there. How did you happen to laser in on this one today?

It's what I do when I type. You can't read it unless you do the same.

Look at that eyeball, and tell me why it wouldn't.

He came to mind too, but the point being made concerned the good teams where another player might have put them over the top.

The difference between Polanco and DSan, making one not a very good comp for the other, is that Polanco was playing full-time at single-A at age 19, and acquitting himself very well at the plate. His progression up the minor league chain was consistent. Santana hit less well, at one year older, at single-A, and his progression was likewise consistent. At young ages, such differences are huge, unless you disbelieve their birth certificates. Of course you have to have a Plan B on the 40-man roster to cover for Polanco, if you decide to trade Dozier. All kind of surprises can occur. That doesn't mean taking the most pessimistic view on him.

While I can see the logic behind the grade, I was expecting to see "Incomplete".

I don't see a reason for such cynicism, nor to deny what was said plainly in the article, nor to look for hidden subtext. "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

I liked the Monty Python's Flying Circus re-make starring Jerry Van Dyke, Bert Convy, Jim Varney and Pat Paulsen.

I saw Nate's discussion of this a day or so ago. Maybe the choice of distribution makes sense earlier in the election process, and a more "normal" one (pun semi-intended) as we come down to the wire, since some kinds of Black Swan events (e.g. definite signs of a recession's onset) are coming off the table. Individual polls have sampling errors in the 3-4% range, if not worse, but part of the whole idea of poll aggregation is that this kind of range drops off pretty sharply when independent pollsters are considered. (Of course, they independently could make the same mistakes of certain kinds, given the state of the art.) I dunno. We are potentially one debate away from being able to judge that the needle isn't going to move anymore, at least not in Trump's direction, and with a lead where it's currently at, it's possible that reputable analysts will begin to call the race. Silver's outfit not doing so seems overly cautious. Call it 99% and leave open a really monstrous Black Swan. But, I suppose, that cuts down on page clicks.

Stew added a lot of good insights. In case it's still unclear, the membership dues go to the National organization. Go to sabr.org and click Join - or save a couple of steps and use this direct link: https://sabr.site-ym.com/general/pick_username.asp

Let's not turn this big-picture tangent into the focus of this thread about shortstops, but have a look at b-r.com which offers tools to answer questions like this, and then start a fresh thread if you feel the need. http://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?overall_pick=5&draft_type=junreg& My quick estimate is that about one-third of #5 picks turn into something, but those that do are often substantial players.

You're asking about the present, and I have a data point from 70 years ago. My mom grew up in an impoverished farming family in southern Indiana, looked down on by the folks in town as they were thirty minutes from the nearest paved road, and she absolutely could not wait to move from there to the "big city" of Indianapolis, three hours by car and a world away, once she graduated from high school. The pejorative she heard before and after she moved, which she was eternally embittered about, was that "Shirley always was big feeling'ed" - I guess some combination of egotistical and not knowing her place. They could have been more charitable and said she had gumption or spunk, or tried the fifty-cent word "ambitious". I bet it's not very different there now, but I don't know for sure. My sense of the place, which I loved visiting as a child, is that it doesn't change very fast.

Rooted against Indiana Jones. LOL. Guy's a talented comic writer, at minimum.

A question regarding Milone, or anyone in a similar contract situation. He's off the 40-man now. He'll be non-tendered, or not offered arbitration, or whatever is the terminology. Suppose he signs a AAA contract with us (or, I guess, anyone) for 2017. Does he earn a standard AAA salary, which I believe is tied to years of experience? Suppose at some point in the season he is called up to the majors. Does he earn major-league minimum? Or does some arbitrator take a guess at what he should have been awarded the previous off-season and pro-rate it?

Correct. Seth's "37-44" observation is the other side of my view. Other teams face exactly the same roster pressures. One of Terry Ryan's core competencies was finding such guys on the cheap, and signing them to AAA contracts for us; these kinds of guys are always available on the open market, and I presume our new brain trust will be able to do the same, so assigning one of our own to the 40-man for the off-season needs to be done with a real purpose in mind. And I don't see that purpose for Pat Dean. He has developed to his full potential, having had the misfortune of experiencing his (likely) Career Year in AAA. He represents AAAA filler for a bad team with no role I can think of on a good team, as he doesn't seem to be especially deadly against lefties - I suppose you could invest time trying to turn him into a max-effort LOOGY, or you could move on. I'd rather protect a prospect with a higher ceiling who carries some small risk of being snatched away via Rule-5, if it comes down to that.

If in 2017 we wind up regretting losing Patrick Michael Dean, the coming off-season can be deemed a failure.

Of corse.

Maybe he is trying to avoid throwing Terry Ryan under the bus in his public comments, but in private he is telling the front office that if Ryan had given him full control in the system things would be better by now. Supposing, for now, that Ryan somehow undercut Allen's authority.

The problem with the mullet was that it also had the potential to cause leprosy in previously healthy people.

I kind of missed this part of your post the first time. There is the national organization, which is a prerequisite to joining the local chapter. You get a couple of print publications each year, journals called The National Pastime and The Baseball Research Journal. Lately, there has been a rapid growth in the number of digital publications coming out, bringing the yearly number of items to read to half a dozen or more. Membership allows you to join the SABR-L listserv, which provides a daily digest of emails that usually contain a research element. It's not meant to be a sounding board like Twins Daily is, but even if you don't have research activities yourself, most days there is some nugget of interest, I find. You might find that the research bug bites you, after interacting with the organization for a while. One relatively easy way to dip a toe into those waters is to take part in the SABR biography project, which has a goal to have an online bio for every major league player - obviously some of the older players are very difficult to track down, but many recent players do not yet have a bio and would not be too hard to put one together. Over the course of years, I find the personal interactions of greatest satisfaction. Several hundred members attend the annual convention each summer, usually in a major league city, which allows for a shared experience at a ballgame. It's three days of hard-core baseball history and other research, plus trivia contests and guest panels and other features. The 2017 convention will be in New York City. Not everyone has the freedom to travel to these events, I realize. If (as you are) you're near a city that has a SABR chapter, then that is an opportunity to interact more frequently than once a year with fellow baseball nuts. The Halsey Hall Chapter in Minnesota has two meetings per year, but there are other activities like a monthly book club gathering and an occasional hot-stove breakfast on Saturdays. You've probably already investigated the chapter, but for reference here's the most recent newsletter at the chapter's website. For others such as Ben who wonder about other locations, you can take a look at the national organization's list of chapters here. (I don't think a critical mass of members in the Dakotas has ever been achieved - setting up a chapter basically boils down to a few members deciding to make it happen, which of course is somewhat of a chicken and egg scenario.) In additional to a geographical orientation of chapters, there are also research committees organized along fields of interest, such as 19th Century, Ballparks, Baseball Card History, Statistical Analysis, Latino Baseball, Science, Women In Baseball, and about 20 others. These generally conduct their business via email and the most active ones have their own publications and even annual meetings.

I hedged a little but stated it clearly enough. Asking again makes you sound incredulous. Among various things, I admire his grace under pressure. The well-known situation of the 2011 Press Corps Dinner, where the order had been given to go after Bin Laden, and he's killing in a different way with comedy, is such an example. Republicans in 2008 expressed frustration that people seemed to be voting for Obama because he was "cool"; little did we know just how cool he could be when the chips were down. Posts that have shown up elsewhere in the thread contain other reasons. I hadn't really thought about it in these terms until this came up in the thread, so consider it an evolving position. Ironically, the heroism I see and would aspire to has little to do with agreement or disagreement with his political positions and policies, or even achievements in the usual sense. Getting Bin Laden isn't the point, in what we all saw at that Dinner.

I've been meaning to write up something along that line, as well, for the reasons you outlined. I think I have some vicodin left over from a year ago, maybe I should give it a whirl. I have relatively few heroes. Most people I look up to end up disappointing me. Jackie's a guy I probably should have named one of my kids after. Barack might be one I should lobby for as a grandchild's name.