Sure, Mauer has been uninspiring, many of those names are enormous regression risks for future seasons, Hicks has been a miserable failure thus far, Arcia is still working through his issues, Nolasco has been terrible, and there is the pile of flops the team has since cut bait with that contributed much to this season. Again, there is reason for hope because there has been roster turnover for the better. I've said before I think we're starting to see the climb uphill beginning just based on the fact that we've shed a lot of the 30+ filler. But that climb uphill is still going to include a lot of bad baseball on the way to developing these kids for the biggest jump. The question posed here in this thread is about the quality of baseball being played by the team and this season has not been "good" by many measures. I would caution against confusing the idea of increasing hope with increasing quality of play. At some point they will intersect, but it ain't now.