TheLeviathan

Well said. Buxton has got to play a significant, uninterrupted stretch of baseball before this is even a conversation IMO. Sano is a regular contributor with some warts. Buxton, at this point, isn't even a regular for this team.

He looks electric.

The yearly "Byron Buxton is in the best shape of his life and won't get hurt this year" article is the new "Joe Mauer adjusts X, feels great in Spring Training".

The bullpen wasn't bad last year. Of course, you can almost always use more bullpen help, but it's hard to argue the bullpen held back the 2019 Twins. It's also hard to argue Pressly would've helped a ton given his second half performance. (Whatever the reason may be for it) I'm not sure, even with hindsight, we can say keeping Pressly would've moved the needle a whole lot given how his circumstances/performance played out. What remains to be seen is how the prospects we received play out. SSS...but I like what I saw from Alcala as a reliever last night. His stuff is nasty. But time will tell.

Your study was challenged for the lack of context. Factually speaking, you did not hear crickets, you heard rebuttals. Secondly, I was neither aggressive nor emotional nor disingenuous. I pointed out your lack of consistency. Given this post seems to reflect many of those adjectives, perhaps you're projecting. Thirdly, both political parties are trying to win an election and both have used this virus to win political points. As they do with all things that have the public's attention. I would say something about the quality of the science behind both of those parties' efforts, but I'm not here to debate with you. My point all along was that you appear to believe there is a, in your words, "big lie" and here you admit that. If you want to believe it's all a big lie. Ok. I won't debate that in a forum, it's not worth the effort. But don't believe the big lie and then say, paraphrasing, say you aren't denying that the virus "is what it is". At least own your thoughts, but perhaps consider the caveat you put at the end is your own reason trying to plead with you to listen more often.

My guess, given you seem to believe all you said was "this is being used politically" when it fully danced with several falsehoods actively being espoused...implies my advice would go unheeded. All things are used politically. You spent quite an effort to speak the obvious. The only absolute in play is that someone who posts they are not espousing falsehoods ought not dance around ideas layered in them. Sorta makes that final paragraph caveat feel unearned.

The Twins can fix this! Keep giving him at-bats so a ridiculously small-sample size is no longer the primary basis of our worry. It could well be that Garver is going to have issues adjusting, but there isn't sufficient evidence anything has to be "fixed" at this point.

It seems to me that this part at the end is completely unearned by the two paragraphs that preceded it. It's like a reverse prescription drug commercial. Rather than a rosey commercial of all the drug's benefits for 25 seconds followed by 5 seconds of "here's all the ways it'll try to kill you too!" in rapid fire succession....you went the other way! Two paragraphs of implied conspiracies and mostly unsubstantiated, implausible conjecture followed by 5 seconds of "But I'm totally cool with facts!" With all due respect, if your last paragraph was true, you wouldn't have typed the first two.....which means you wouldn't have had to hedge SO hard on the last one trying to appear rational in spite of them. If you truly aren't trying to suggest something else, the simple remedy is to, just spitballing here,....not spend the rest of your post suggesting something else?

This is a good bumper sticker, but it's mostly naive about how humans and biases work. Throughout sports there is significant under representation of minorities in leadership positions. Coaches, administrators, front office, and any other example you want to give. Professional or Ammy. This isn't unique to baseball (or even sports) but is a real thing. The sentiment you express would be a great one to have in some utopia in which people truly did hire the best person for the job, but in reality that isn't the case for a number of reasons. The best, maybe only, solution to that problem is to call attention to it so people are consciously aware of their biases and we can start to change that reality. It's especially important for a sport that has an ever diminishing player base of black players and fans. Baseball hides behind profit margins to ignore deep systemic problems that are threatening to push it into a niche category while most of the 50 year old white dudes who make up their average fan are still alive to see it. Calling attention to these issues, no matter how unpopular with utopian thinkers, is necessary.

It might be time to conclude that, for whatever reason, Buxton's body will not stay healthy playing baseball.

His talent is clear. His impact is clear. He's a great kid and a great ball-player. His durability? A major question mark and until we see a season in which injuries don't flare up for random, odd reasons, it's going to remain a question mark. At some point a series of events we keep calling bad luck may not be luck at all, but a sign of something he simply can't avoid. I sincerely hope that isn't the case.

I thought all of TROLPO's brilliance was lost to the sands of time. This was wonderful, thank you sir.

There are similarities as well. Those statues in the south were also built to rebrand those men absent their failures as human beings. Hence the South being portrayed as plucky underdogs, "Rebels with a Cause", etc. Those statues were not just intended as support of racism, they were intended as falsified versions of those men to glorify/whitewash them. Likewise, having the name Landis on a trophy as a celebration deliberately ignores all of the many awful things he did as well. I guess I tend to think that if we are choosing to celebrate someone we should directly celebrate specific accomplishments. In more generic examples like this one, perhaps their great acts or tendencies shouldn't be massively overshadowed by their awful ones. In such a case, and Landis easily fits that, I'm not sure why we should feel remorse for choosing a better representative. As a suggestion, how about Ken Griffey Jr.? Very few men who have played baseball have better represented the idea of an MVP than him.

It seems that the premise of your point here echoes a false equivalency running rampant on this issue. Statues are not "history". History is taught in museums. In textbooks. Statues are there to celebrate a legacy. They have little historical value beyond reminders to consult real historical information. Instead, their value is mostly tied up in their worthiness to be celebrated. In the case of Calvin Griffith and many others, their worthiness has been legitimately dismantled. His place in history is no less secure. His name will appear in wikipedia or whatever form our encyclopedias take next, as well as in various things the Twins have done and will do in the future to remember their team, and will always exist in the annals of time. What was done by the Twins is to stop pretending this man's conduct deserves celebration. The same argument can be used for every statue in the south. Confederates were traitors and racists. Their cause was romanticized and bastardized by history that was part coping and part manipulation. Not a single man who served in that army, fought under that banner, and joined in that cause deserves "Celebration" They were racist traitors. However, museums and textbooks across the country will make note of Robert E. Lee's brilliance as a strategist. At the conduct of the soldiers that could be rightly called bravery in the middle of a war. That is where they belong: no longer romanticized, merely a part of history. Statues to celebrate them, just like Calvin Griffith, should not be confused as "history". They are monuments to a legacy. A legacy that was falsely conceived and one that can change as time and information changes. Unfortunately, we've always had the information, and it took far too damn long in terms of time, but we've reached the point where those false legacies that deserve no celebration are meeting their end. It's not erasing history - history can neither be erased or preserved with some statue - it is righting a wrong. Undoing a folly that should have never been done in the first place. Wrapping yourself in some bogus false equivalency only preserves the original mistake of making the damn statue in the first place.

NEWBS!!!!!

Pfft..change? Why change awesome?

Seems to me your posts have provided significant evidence for character assessment, were that the actual issue. Instead, you've chosen to feel slighted by the mere call for humanity. Perhaps some introspection is overdue before the conversation can begin for you.

I appreciate you and what you said here Nick. Healing and change won't happen in silence. Pure solidarity with you.

Be good my friend. Stay safe and well. My best to you and yours.

We agree completely.

I want to feel good about those numbers. I just can't, I feel like our polling is still broken and we haven't figured out how to fix it yet. I admit, I have no good basis for that skepticism, but I can't shake it.

Which peripherals? He is a groundball pitcher that seems to do well limiting hard contact and homeruns. Yeah, the Ks aren't out of this world, but he's not Bob Tewksbury. What don't you like?

I tried to do some digging on this but it looks like Stroman is a passionate, animated pitcher and for some they look at that as disrespectful or cancerous. I couldn't find anything seriously alarming in his profile though. I hope we don't dismiss the idea of a talented kid like him based on notions like that. We have players on our team now like Berrios and Rosario that play with that kind of passion. I think good teams have players with an edge like that.

Mostly i see people chomping at the bit to beat their personal dead horse. The bullpen performed well in April and May. Ive said all along that they need more bullpen help. However, my belief in that isnt grounds to play pretend about their performance so far. That kind of nonsense is how obnoxious threads start.

Honestly, this is a bad take. Stroman is a fiery, passionate kid with a ton of heart. I'll welcome more players like him to the Twins all day long.