ashbury

Perhaps Germany Kepler will become similarly renowned for something clever. Well, time for this cold-infected east-coast denizen to depart for some shuteye. Bring the win home, folks.

Disagrees:

Took you a little longer to get that one out, eh?

Straw poll: ick, or ish? / I know, I know, "yes".

All at once? Better check the bit bucket, it might be full. / joining the chorus, I now see...

Looking on the bright side, if you have no free time to spend the money you don't have, don't you come out ahead or something?

Look for a writeup soon in this august publication: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_4607aWHTvKI/SQT5TCaUgQI/AAAAAAAAA_8/GVaYlDykB50/s400/header_old.jpg

http://images.hellogiggles.com/uploads/2014/08/18/peewee-herman-humblebrag-300x300.jpg

Is my game feed lagging yours, or did you just predict Dick's comment?

I'll take TD Generation Gaps for $100, Alex.

Mongo straight. Buddy Bizarre, on the other hand...

/edit - wow, scooped badly by Dan and Spin. Guess I wasted too much time finding the image The game used little pink and blue pegs, not pawns. http://media.thelarkins.com/2011/2011-11-26.GameOfLife1977Version.jpg

Alex Karras played a closeted gay man in Victor Victoria, I think was the intended reference. / edit - sorry Chief, I hate to leave a pal twisting in the wind too long.

I'm more than a little tired of the Buxton Uppercut.

Bad trip man. We're here for ya.

Does there exist a pitch far enough out of the strike zone that Rosario won't swing at it? Maybe Arko has some interstellar pitch data.

Like I started to say, not that there's anything wrong with that.

Not that there's anyth-... whoops, wrong motif.

And Bruno gets credit from the announcer for a Hitting 101 tip.

I always felt sorry for Mongo. I know it might be an unpopular opinion, considering how he would cold-cock horses just for fun, but I had a novel thought occur to me, that ultimately he was only a pawn in the game of life.

Neil Allen is back! I missed the announcement. / edit - ah, and now I see there is a TD thread on it this afternoon... you gotta keep up

OK, someone has to play along. "Candygram, who?"

I think the "process" in this case goes back months, if not years, further. You construct your 40-man roster during the off-season. While changes to this roster are inevitable once the season starts, by around Opening Day it represents your best guess as to how you're going to get through your season, as it specifies the players you can place on your 25-man Active Roster. Some guys on the 40-man are veterans, about whom you have some established track record to go on. Some guys are untested rookies who have been recently added to the 40-man, and they may or may not be ready. If they prove unready, they have 3 years of options to send them back to AAA or wherever, for more seasoning. (A few such guys are always unready, and are being protected from Rule-5.) It's the unproven guys, whose 3 options have been consumed, that require the talent assessment staff to make a decision: are they unproven but capable, or are they washouts? Either way, if you have one of them on your 40-man, you are more or less committing to having them on the Active Roster, because of the difficulty in demoting them without losing them. And if they're active, what will be their role to extract maximum value? If that question's a real poser, as in the case of Arcia, it's time to re-think his being on the 40-man. Nobody wants dead weight on the 25-man. It seems to me that the Twins have had more than their share of 40-man problems in recent years from an accumulation of players who were out of options. Once a guy is out of options for the coming season, his trade value plummets unless he has established himself; other teams will have the same troubles you will, if they acquire him. Of course, whatever little trade value remains, vanishes in-season. The Twins, unfortunately, just seem to go with the flow, hoping like Mister Micawber that Something Will Turn Up, rather than be proactive in their decision making. So, going back months to the 2015-16 off-season, the decision to keep Arcia needed to mean a commitment to playing him. The unexpected acquisition of Park likely should have triggered a re-evaluation on Arcia and probably an attempt to trade him for whatever they could get. (Or else, a cold-eyed assessment that Park might benefit from some months at AAA, salary be damned.) But going back an extra 12 months, the problem was not being able to establish Arcia while he still had any minor league options remaining. His injury during 2015 was bad luck in that regard. But Arcia had the two previous seasons under Bruno's tutelage to blossom, and perhaps sharper talent evaluation could have identified Arcia as the right guy to trade while he still had significant value.

What happens a lot, I think, is players being sold for a nominal amount of cash, with a fig leaf of a PTBNL as an alternative.

Thankfully no. Nothing was launched in our vicinity.