Dodecahedron

With Torii's stats, he needs a couple of WS rings to be considered a hall of famer. He won't get in. Looking back at his stats now, I am even more underwhelmed by his numbers than I remember. His personality had a bigger impact than his production. For his personality to matter/be considered, he needed to win some championships.

In the late 80s, people loved the Street Sports Baseball game, and the franchise in general. By this time, Hardball had been out for a while, so I found this game (and every other baseball game of the era) unplayable. https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Street_Sports_Baseball La Russa's Ultimate Baseball is a close second to the original Hardball. Hardball's drawback was once you started running (or stealing), you could not change your mind and run back to the base. Ultimate Baseball had this feature, but was otherwise a tad boring in comparison.

There are people who play the original Hardball on the C-64 and manually keep track of stats. If you go to the "Forums" section on this website, you'll find the thread. https://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=34474

There was a rumor that the Sox are also bring back Dummy Hoy and Fielder Jones, to help out with coaching batting strategy and fielding. I did not believe the rumor at first but I saw a picture of Dummy's new locker, so it's real.

I expect him to ask for a 4-year contract. He might get three, but it'll be $15M/per either way. I see $12M thrown around in this thread -- he will get more than that even if he can only get another 1 year deal.

He retired at age 87, which is incredible. I wonder how much he cared about making money by the end. One wonders how much work he was really doing by that time, or if he was like Joe Paterno who was "the coach" at Penn State in spite of never appearing on the field for several years.

This is a genius move by the White Sox. They add another hall of fame manager while spending, well, nothing at all. Dollars-to-wins, this is the best move in MLB history.

A lot of teams will be looking at Odorizzi, in spite of him being a career #3. I would caution against overvaluing his 1 year as a #1/#2, unless the Twins are certain that it wasn't a fluke. Odorizzi will want a long contract, and he will not be cheap. I'm not sure the Twins want to plop $60M on Odorizzi right now.

To answer the question in the title, I would think the money would need to come from the MLB team. It does not make much sense for a minor league team to pay its own league for the right to become an affiliate. It would certainly make sense for the MLB team to need to pay for the privilege.

La Russa is going to be fine, I wouldn't worry about him being "cancelled" -- whatever that actually means. La Russa's hiring seemed out of place from the start, just by the fact that he has not managed for a decade and his age. Seems like once we turned over the stone and looked at what was underneath, his hiring seems even more out of place. It's correct for people to say he does not seem to be a fit for a team in Chicago, given the other facts that are coming to the surface. (Even for the DUIs -- Chicago may be a huge drinking city, but there are trains. )

To be fair, he was barely over the limit for his first DUI and he seemed to take responsibility.

This will be La Russa's second DUI. We will see if this makes a difference to the White Sox at this point. 76 seems a little old to be getting DUIs. I'm 50 and binge drinking hasn't been fun for me for as long as I can remember. After a while it's sort of like, "Oh, this feeling again. Big deal."

La Russa being back is interesting. Calls of him being "out of touch" are impossible to verify. He last managed ten years ago with a WS title. Some of his St. Louis teams were light on talent (and low on spending) but high on wins. He knew something other managers didn't. What the La Russa hiring says is that the White Sox want to win it all *right now*. Expect them to go all in with spending. You don't hire a 76 year old manager to win three years from now. This is an interesting strategy in the middle of a pandemic and in a city that has stricter quarantine rules than the rest of the state and country. Perhaps the White Sox expect it to be cheaper to go "all in" now than in the upcoming years.

Rigged!

He did that well? Wow. The Twins could have used that last year for sure. If you believe the window is closing for the Twins, the Twins lost that trade. I doubt anyone here believes that, but it's a possibility as there will be changes next year.

"The Shift" has taken on a new life in the statcast era. In retrospect, this is an obvious evolution and was no doubt one of the selling points of statcast in the first place. Teams would be dumb to have all this data and not use it. The MLB would be dumb to give them this data and then tell them they can't use it. HOWEVER, I can see the MLB banning the fielders from using the lineup cards they are using while in the field. Using these "cheat sheets" to know where to stand is not cheating, but it seems against the spirit of baseball. Players should either memorize where to stand, or the dugout can use signals. If pitchers and catchers can't use cheat sheets to do their jobs, neither should anyone else in the field.

With the new rules around when you can switch out a relief pitcher, coupled with his declining performance, Romo has no role.

He sure was. No Hrbek = a different Puckett, et al. I know we all appreciate and love Hrbek, but we also take him for granted too. Hrbek was the first player who learned to get hits by chopping the ball downward to the Metrodome turf straight in front of him, sending the ball careening to the back of the infield as if it were a high fly ball. More than once, I saw opposing defenders catch the ball and not throw it to first, thinking they just caught a fly ball. Other times, the Twins could simply outrun the ball and make it to first before the defender had a chance to throw to first. Genius stuff, and Hrbek showed the others how to do it. The Twins hit the weights just to be able to do this as hard as they could! After several turf changes, this did not work as well by the late 80s/early 90s.

If this ever happens, the Twins will win the WS.

The Twins, like all of baseball, no doubt see themselves as having taken a significant loss on 2020. The Twins will not want to take on risk at this time. These are likely their priorities: 1) Don't take on more risk 2) Don't throw risky money at at unknown 2021 season What is the least risky thing to do? Keep the status quo as much as they can. The budget is always important, but it's less important than reducing risk this year; though of course the team could go all Terry Ryan and strip down to nothing, I'm certain the team learned their lessons there when people stopped showing up at the stadium. More teams than usual in the MLB are also going to be taking this strategy. This will probably not be a great year for free agents and there may even be some unexpected retirements. I see the Twins largely trying to keep who they've got. Some disappointing players will be let go, but a full reboot in a division championship year is not in the cards. Don't expect a big free agent signing, and don't expect anyone who performs well to be let go. 75%-80% of the team next year should be faces they already have, minimum, even if the Twins have to spend to keep things as they are! There will be no earth-shattering moves to improve the team, nor will there be a stripping the core talent.

I thought for sure you were Terry Ryan until you got to item 6.

It's not time to move on, it's time to add more players like him.

Were the Twins hitters reborn as rookies in 2020? How much influence could a pitching coach possibly have on the 2019 players?

Some will disagree, and probably quite strongly, but in my mind this is still a young/inexperienced team. Any "rebuild" the Twins have been doing is not yet complete. Starting a new rebuild before finishing the current one sounds very Terry Ryan-like. Let's not do that again. This team took a giant leap forward with pitching and hitting was down leaguewide. After last year's record setting offense, we knew the hitters were going to be closer to normal this year, didn't we? Much of the advice I'm reading here is to strip something and build anew. After a crazy, shortened season where three teams in the the AL Central feasted upon weak AL and NL Central teams (and promptly got bounced from the playoffs), I don't think you can read too much into this year. 2020 will not have an asterisk (nor should it), and years from now when people look at division championships, it won't even dawn on most people that this was a shortened, wackadoodle season. The Twins looked downright miserable at the end, and it was a strange year all around. Say what you want, the simple fact is this team was done; how the team performed over the course of the year is almost irrelevant. When it came time to play in the playoffs, their heads were somewhere else. This was a different team that what we saw just a couple of weeks earlier. My only advice is for Baldelli to practice what he preaches. He sank the team by managing ahead. He needs to focus on the current game like he says he does. Don't pull healthy and performing pitchers or hitters to rest them for later. if you don't win today, tomorrow does not matter. It was a stroke of luck that the Twins won the division, and of course you don't win in the playoffs by luck alone.

Yesterday's game was hard to watch. The Twins were not aggressive enough when hitting -- ya gotta swing to hit the ball -- and the pitchers were dinking around the edges of the strike zone way too much. Baldelli made pitching moves which were questionable, but I can see what he was trying to do. Hopefully this was just some jitters and they got this out of their system. This felt like a playoff game in that the Twins were way too far in their own heads as they tend to be in the playoffs. Still have to give credit to the Reds for making the Twins doubt themselves, I suppose. To make the playoffs with such a poor hitting staff calls out how great the Reds pitching is.