ashbury

If you offer Wilson Ramos you can always get a Matt Capps. If you offer a Matt Capps, it'll be rare that you can get a Wilson Ramos. All it takes is one GM, of course.

Good observation. Now to sell it to the M's.

The context matters, a little bit. A 23 year old and a 29 year old might be contributing roughly the same offense in the here and now, and still the former deserves a little more enthusiasm due to the potential for further growth, and is not just an endorsement of the status quo.

While there is overlap, I'd say it matters quite it bit in how you go about reducing the temperature of the whole situation.

Absent primary scouting, I am willing to give a mulligan to a player for a bad year, and Zunino's 2015 looks like the kind of season to forget. The rest of his resume looks like typical progress at the plate. Seattle looks like they are just letting him get his bearings in AAA this year. I doubt Nunez or Escobar snags him for us.

May I suggest shifting the discussion of the truck tragedy in France to the other thread I just started?

Please continue the discussion of this breaking news event here rather than in other threads.

That would be for the two Tim Horton's.

With regard to the issue that this thread is about, fear looks to me like the core problem. Cops fear for their lives all the time (but particularly during encounters with citizens), black citizens fear for their lives in police encounters. White folks who aren't in law enforcement haven't been aware of this so much. Racism is part of the cycle of fear - a proximate cause but also an outcome when things continue to go badly. It might be we need all sides to focus a bit more on the fear factor (and not the TV show by that name).

Diagonally across. As in, if you're outside the Starbucks on the northwest corner of the intersection, and you want to get instead to the Starbucks on the southeast corner, you can save a little time by going catty-corner.

My two favorite Kevin Jepsen moments have to be when he joined Oswaldo Arcia's organization.

Yeah, I've kind of lost hope on him too, as being any kind of impact player on a contending team. Players need to be judged in two main ways: 1) what's his ceiling, and 2) how often does he reach that ceiling. There are a lot of ways the latter question can be answered disappointingly, without it reflecting on the player's character. But, if you never know if you're going to see the Good Kyle or the Bad Kyle on the mound for you, well, maybe a .500 pitcher is an improvement when you are trying to avoid a 100-loss season, but not an asset when you are ready to shoot for 100 wins. I'm sure Kyle understands all this, but for whatever reason, he can't find the week-to-week consistency that is required.

As far as the Red Sox are concerned, I don't think I'd push very far with what their AAA manager had to say. (So why did I even bring it up? Because it's a data point.)

It wasn't there.

A data point: I had an opportunity a few weeks ago to ask Pawtucket manager Kevin Boles to scout his upcoming opponent, the Rochester Red Wings. The first player he mentioned was ABW, and power was naturally what he pointed to. That's a very imprecise data point, for various reasons I won't bother going into in a thread such as this. But it at least tells me Walker is on other teams' radar. "Real" value? Yeah, who knows.

You're rooting against our prospects stepping up? Because it would be validation for positions you don't advocate? Remind me not to sit next to you at games. I'm no fan of Nolasco but I'm still rooting for him to throw a no-no everytime he takes the mound. (Oops, did I just jinx him? )

A couple of breaks, more? Every break went their way as it was. For example. League-wide 2015, OPS was .711 with bases empty and .753 with runners in scoring position. The Twins' numbers were .660 and .791 respectively. That differential is not a repeatable skill, it's just bunching your hits to maximum effect, resulting in runs being scored at a higher rate than your underlying abilities would sustain. Some of us were saying so at the time. The same batters, more or less, find it not so easy this year. Go figure. It was fool's gold - not that I didn't enjoy the wins. Wins are good. But I'm glad Ryan didn't gut the farm system to go for it all.

Good point. But swapping little for less comes uncomfortably close to what Bill Veeck used to call his Cat And Dog trades with Frank Lane. In the linked page, I love this quote. "Generally, I have always found that if I want to deal I have to go out and propose one myself. Except for Frank Lane, nobody ever offers me anything"

I like this angle on the question. I can't say I'm overly enthused about any of the prospects you named, and I hope you are erring on the side of caution in what another team would like to make available, but I'd still want to aim higher than serviceable lefty starters and light hitting middle infielders and 27-year old career minor league relievers and so on. I'd try to add more cash or secondary prospects of my own. It's hard to pry away legitimate high-ceiling prospects via sheer quantity, though. As for the question that launched this thread, I'll go light on the specifics but say that my aim as GM would be to improve the roster flexibility going forward. Not being able to find, for example, a spot on the active roster for Polanco, now that his bat appears ready at (recently turned) age 23, is a symptom of congestion on the 40-man; I would trade either Dozier or Polanco, probably whichever would bring me less (relying on my internal evaluations of course), on the likely notion that other GMs aren't dummies either and they value the same things for roster construction that I do. The Plouffe situation is not urgent because it can be resolved to my satisfaction with a non-tender, so trading him for trash simply isn't enough to offset whatever I get from his performance the rest of this season. And so forth... I don't think Pohald would hire me, though - I view the baseball operations side of the business as a cost center, and I think Pohlad expects his operations guy to focus more on the P&L side. I want a budget under which I choose how to invest for the future, and unspent money in a given season strikes me as a waste. I'm more of an invest for the future guy, and I understand that most businesses in the US focus on a profitable bottom line each and every quarter. So, I would be butting heads with the higher-ups on the most basic principles of running the baseball operations, such as using my cash reserves to trade off the Nolascos to free up roster space. Because, while baseball is obviously a business, it's unlike most businesses you can name in certain important ways. Oh well, next lifetime.

Hated hated hated the trade at the time. Hang on to your starting pitching prospects; you can always convert some of them to relief when the time comes. Trading prospects for any but the best relievers at the deadline is a mug's game.

Also: aboot = about eh = don't cha know kitty-corner = catty-corner loonie = dime poutine = a word randomly added to every sentence, just ignore it

Approves: http://cdn.govexec.com/media/img/upload/2015/06/11/061115clinton/medium.jpg (Hey, it's the sports bar forum, not a baseball thread...)

If by "right now" you mean 2017, Ryan is quoted as saying as much. http://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2016/07/al-notes-red-sox-yankees-beltran-twins.html If by "win" you mean a playoff push for this season, I think it'd be equally easy to dig up a quote saying no, he's a seller at the deadline this time around. If you mean he wants to see his team finish strongly, split the difference between these two views, I suppose.

I see also this game a couple days earlier. http://www.milb.com/milb/stats/stats.jsp?gid=2016_07_09_gvlrok_elirok_1&t=g_box&sid=milb Why do we have to wait until next June to be able to trade this stiff?

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