TheLeviathan
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Everything posted by TheLeviathan
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It appears to my Friday morning brain that you most certainly are. The claim is that the Rays can spend significantly more money than they do now. 20, 30, 40M....whatever it might be. That's several impact players as your DocBauer-like essay explained. (You know...."Money can buy stuff: The War and Peace explanation) They need not abandon everything else they do. They can still kick ass at churning rosters and developing pitchers, but they could also add a couple pieces here and there that could help them. Instead they cry out about a level of poverty they aren't actually in to pocket that money for their ownership. Are they at a disadvantage relative to the Yanks and Red Sox? Hell yeah. Baseball needs to fix that. Are they as impoverished as they let people believe? Absolutely not. That's the point. Kudos to them for their development and trading. Shame on them for their duplicitous "woe is us" garbage.
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Bring on the computer, knock off the framing
TheLeviathan replied to mikelink45's topic in Minnesota Twins Talk
Well, if this conversation is any indication: The rampant fallacies on the part of the "don't let it get automated" crowd only add to the argument for it. Not only are there no good reasons against implementing it, the crowd against it is so incapable of generating a good argument we need not even have the discussion. We can just proceed. I'll add though, I think as pitchers get more and more dynamic in their offerings (93 mph sliders were once thought to be impossible to throw for example.) it only gets harder and harder for the humans behind the plate to accurately use just their eyes to tell the movement of a pitch relative to the strike zone. -
A couple years ago I said that by far the two most important decisions for any FO are on their QB and their coach. It's 1A and 1B. I got some flack for that but I still believe it. These are the two individuals that create separation on a week-in, week-out basis. You can win with a shoddy O-line if these two foundations are in place. You can win with shoddy playmakers. You can win a less talented/experienced defense. All of those things can be schemed or overcome if you have those two pieces locked down. Cousins is a good QB, but not great. And he needs his FO and coach to understand his strengths. Zimmer quite clearly does not. Worse, Zimmer relies too much on everything having to go perfectly for his schemes to work. He can't seem to get young players to produce early, he's far too passive, and boxes himself in to the thinking of "this is how I do things to win" rather than "this is how we win this week". I'm game to keep Cousins and Spielman, but Zimmer has to go.
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Or the defense is causing chaos, creating turnovers and playing stout.....then they are a complete sieve in critical moments. The inconsistency is on coaching and that, far and away, is my biggest reason for wanting a change.
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One step closer to a full rebuild.
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I am so sick of watching this run defense get gashed 7 yards at a time.
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Bring on the computer, knock off the framing
TheLeviathan replied to mikelink45's topic in Minnesota Twins Talk
Clearly this argument is foolproof. You have boxed me with your completely fair, not-in-any-way-ridiculous hyperbolic approach. Unless...... Keeping the human umpires over a demonstrably superior technology may lead the human race to conclude that Umpires are a superior kind of human, thus installing them as our new overlords. El Presidente Joe West sounds like a real dystopian future to me. -
Bring on the computer, knock off the framing
TheLeviathan replied to mikelink45's topic in Minnesota Twins Talk
No one is firing them. Just removing a responsibility from their taska that they are demonstrably worse at than the alternative. Keep testing and fine-tuning it and I hope it's in big league parks by 2025. -
But he was here, he took the job, and he was bad at it. For the record, I typically defended Ryan during his first run and I would still do so today. But I struggle with some of the phrasing about how great he was at the time. He almost never made free agent signings or trades...how great can you be when you purposely ignore 2/3rds of your ways of acquiring talent? Especially since that kind of kick-the-can hesitancy directly led to several of Bill Smith's biggest blunders. Ryan had a system - pitch to contact guys on the mound with good defenders who used the whole field in the lineup. It was a smart, cheap team building strategy. However, while that box had a high floor it prevented him from ever approaching what the team's ceiling could be. And as the years went on that vulnerability became more and more apparent. In his second go at GM it became obvious.
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You separated them, not me. And, I agree, it's hard to make this judgment right now because we haven't seen the pipeline. It's why I have been consistent saying I want to see how 2022 plays out before making any decisions on this FO.
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Agreed it would be nice to have the counter factual to prove it and I'm not trying to only give credit to them. Clearly they have some deficiencies as well, but Polanco and Kepler and Garver and several pitchers basically transformed into entirely new kinds of players. Maybe that was the player but it seems unlikely. I would agree that Sano might be an example of the flip side of that coin.
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It's almost like Garver, through the Twins, used all those computer compiled trends to create coaching techniques that dramatically improved a player outside your ability as a fan to notice. Close enough to fairy dust to the naked eye.
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Marvel gets ripped for being sexless and therefore unable to create fully formed emotional characters, but that argument is such nonsense and No Way Home is a testament to that. That movie threw emotional haymakers that had real tears shed in the audience. It was fun without being overly quippy, it was a coming of age story, a tragedy, fanservice, and so much more all wrapped into one glorious package. Marvel might not be Citizen Kane or Casablanca or Goodfellas or whatever....but they consistently tell heartfelt stories that are fun. I'll buy a ticket for that anytime. You can keep the overwrought cinema opinions...those movies are great too!.....but if I'm going to a theater I want the kind of product Marvel gives me. No Way Home was laughs and tears and gut-wrenching and cathartic and all kinds of other great emotions. That studio knows what the hell it's doing.
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Fair, but if you think analytics has value to on-field performances I don't think its that unfair to separate them. Hell, I think if we had hired them after Bill Smith we might have seen completely different career tracks from Sano, Buxton, etc.
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Ok....sure....let's include playoff "success" for our previous regimes. You know, the ones who have set all-time sports records fpr postseason futility. Yup....I change my stance bow to F- <<<< I
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And many of those same scouts still work for this FO. Smith signed the IFA that this team rode to success recently yet we somehow give Ryan credit for that? Worse yet in your post, Ryan gets credit when you claim he openly didn't draft the players or have any say in that? Well, if Ryan wasn't drafting people, he was a no-show in FA, and barely traded when we were bad or good....what are we actually giving him credit for? Keeping a nice office chair warm? Towards the end, that actually sounds about right. I'm disappointed in some things this FO has done (and not done this offseason) but it's clear Covid and now the lockout have dramatically impacted their timeline. I'd hate to fire them on the precipice of their team building strategy coming to fruition. The pitching talent looks really, really enticing. As you say, and I agree with you, their position players leave a lot to be desired. But let's see how things play out, that's the incomplete grade for me. The past FOs were clearly either wildly incompetent at trading (Smith) or basically useless (Ryan). Seems easy to declare that, as of now, this FO is still ahead of them.
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Are we counting Bill Smith or Ryan? And, as has been pointed out, those players raised their profile with help from this FO.
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The current regime made several great, impact offseason moves as newbs and gave us some great seasons. They have made some really smart trades. What we don't know is how their drafting will pay off. But for that info, thanks to Covid, we may need to wait just a bit. So they get an incomplete with reasons to be hopeful and some to be wary about. Ryan was no longer a good GM and hadn't been for some time. He let the game pass him by and the results show it. So as of today? As Brock said: F < I.
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Our problem dealing Cousins is he won't be the top QB on the market. Hell, he might not even be top 3.
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Well crap...I read that void differently. Dammit.
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I'm 100% on board with a reboot too. I'm just not confident it happens.
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The Twins can't count past 5 digits unless decimals are involved. In all seriousness the Vikings should be able to trim that down fairly easily and tweak this team. Anthony Barr gone and a few restructures and they're at least able to do some things to add.
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I don't understand the point of having a Hall of Fame at all if you're contorting yourself into reasons to keep Ortiz out. Seriously, just say you don't like Halls of Fame. I'd probably agree. But if such a thing exists....Ortiz should be automatic. I don't care if he's been a DH since he was a baby or was allergic fielding. He's a HOFer.
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This. The HOF never had any integrity or aura beyond what is falsely peddled. It's a museum of baseball immortality that includes all sorts of racist, drug abusing, human abusing low life a-holes. It already includes people who cheated in all sorts of ways too. We just have these weird moral lines we like to think are consistent, when really they're just a bunch of writers getting their last guffaw at the dudes they covered. No matter how much we want to pretend, those players are part of that immortality. Shame them if you want, but their role in the game was what it was. Put 'em in and be done with it. Then do better to stop the next cheater.
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The Wild are not only good they're fun as hell to watch.
