ALessKosherScott

Moving the guy coming off Tommy John Surgery on his throwing elbow to a position that relies less on throwing the ball makes perfect sense for the coming season. I question whether Sano is fast enough to be a good outfielder long term though. The question is if he fails do you move him back to third or does he become a 23-year-old DH?

I think you can put some blame on Gardy, but Mackey hit it the nail on the head when he said that baseball is a series of individual matchups that masquerades as a team sport. You can't run a zone-read spread option to make up for the fact that you have bad pitching and defense. More than in any other sport, talent wins games. And there are a lot of factors that go into where the Twins are at right now. Who in the front office really thought Kevin Correria was the answer to our pitching problems? Why does the front office continue to believe they can convert college closers into starting pitching in the draft? Who didn't do the math to see every team in baseball is headed toward more strikeout pitchers? Gardenhire has done enough to earn a pink slip. But there's a lot of incompetence that caused where the Twins are now.

I think the difference between May and Gibson is that Gibson is more valuable as a starter pretty much no matter what. With May, you could throw him in the pen and watch him become unhittable because he'll sit 93-94 instead of 91-92 with a wipeout changeup. In the rotation, he could become Matt Cain theoretically. But more likely he's Jorge de la Rosa.

In Nolasco's defense (and to the question of how good could have Hughes been), you don't go out and spend millions on two of baseball's most extreme flyball pitchers and give them one of the worst outfield defenses in history. Not if you want the results to be good. With May, IMO, he's a major league pitcher. The question is can he reign in his control problems enough to be a starter or will he simply be a really good reliever. His problem with BABIP is simply that he's missing the zone, and that's leading to the double-ended problem of walks and very hittable pitches. It will be interesting to see what happens with him next year.

I doubt Lavine gets many minutes at first. He's too raw to throw to the proverbial Wolves right now. My two cents is you want a healthy split of the SG/SF minutes between Wiggins, Martin and Brewer with Wiggins and Brewer emphasizing a defensive lineup , Martin and Wiggins giving you better offense and Martin and Brewer working when you want Wiggins to sit and learn. You want Dieng to steal some of Pekovic's minutes to hopefully keep Pek healthy and because Dieng has a chance to be the great interior defender the team hasn't had since Garnett left town. With that said, you still need Pek around to score because the last T-Wolves team that was this weak offensively was coached by Bill Mussleman. Outside of that, you have guys like Bennett and Budinger trying to play their way into the rotation. Mo Williams gets the backup PG minutes with Lavine getting the scraps at PG and SG. You have to get rid of Barea to open up a roster spot for the Little Big Dog though, and I'm not opposed to that thought.

Comparing Meyer in terms to Hoey in terms of upside isn't a fair point. But asking if Meyer has enough command to make him a viable major league pitcher at this point seems pretty fair. There isn't a qualified major league starter right now with a BB/9 over 4 (AJ Burnett at 3.97 is the highest). For my two cents, it's not like Meyer is Santana or Liriano (or even Garza, to a point). He's down in Rochester because he's working on something.

I get Meyer perfectly. To put it in perspective, Jim Hoey had a 4.5 BB/9 rate at Rochester. That's not saying his command is as bad as Hoey, but even if he (unlikely) holds at 4.5 BB/9 Meyer is going to have a hard time being successful in the majors. Would we really feel better about this season if Meyer were up in Minneapolis taking some of his sheen off?

To me, the question of moving to Santana to shortstop opens up the question of "What do you do with Escobar?" He's older, and not as sexy of a long-term prospect as Santana. But he's having a good season and his power spike and solid-to-good defense at short gives him value, something the Twins have rarely had at the position. I don't have any qualms about leaving Santana in centerfield for that reason, to see what he can do long-term against major league pitching.

It's not-so-much luck driven as it is sometimes his flaws don't show as deeply. Erickson was the #3 starter on the 1991 Twins, not some proto-Brandon Webb type. He was lights out against right-handed hitting that year (.191/.255/.290 2.62 K/BB) and challenged against left-handed pitching (.295/.363/.424 0.89 K/BB). Erickson had a great power sinker and slider, but not much else and that's not a good arsenal for getting lefties out. Gibson is pretty much operating with the same pitches. And you could see the pluses and minuses really clearly in the Tigers game. That sinker he threw to get Miguel Cabrera to ground into a bases-loaded double play was a thing of beauty, and his three strikeouts were all people chasing sliders out of the zone. But it's harder to get an opposite-hand hitter to chase a slider out of the zone. Not impossible, Andrew Romaine did. But harder. Example, the Alex Avila at-bat in the seventh. Gibson goes up 1-2 in the count, and then tries to get Avila to chase two sliders out of the zone, to which Avila lays off. Then, he fouls off a sinker and nails a 3-2 changeup into the gap for a double. Long story short, there's a reason Gibson is carrying a big lefty/righty spilt this year, as he did most of the way through the minors. Brandon Webb didn't become Brandon Webb until he developed a better changeup in 2006 to hold lefties at bay. Tim Hudson has his splitter. Roy Halladay had his curve. But for every pitcher who figures out a new wrinkle, there are ten power sinker pitchers like Erickson or Jeff Weaver who keep heading down the same path. So the question becomes what trick can Gibson come up with to stop lefties?

When a pitcher has a BB/9 rate that starts with a 0, that's a vintage sign that Anderson had something to do with it. Then again, Target Field not being the band box that Yankee Stadium is also has something to do with it. When it's all said and done, if the Twins wanted to go out and find more former top prospects and try and do similar things with them next year, I wouldn't mind.

For my two cents, there's an interesting story being told by Gibson's splits. His K-rate is pretty solid against right handed hitters, but against lefties his K-rate makes Nick Blackburn look like Nolan Ryan. To me, if you want to make him a top 20 pitcher, you have to figure out a weapon against lefties which probably means can you get Bobby Cuellar to get a better changeup out of him. I still think he's headed down the Scott Erickson path though, and that's not bad, but not top-20 either.

Any who scored points off Rik Mayall is a bloody bastard. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-27770448

As a redraft though, he has to give permission to the team to pick him again. Can't see that happening.

You have to turn 21 at a point before the draft.

I don't know about that. IMO, with this draft class it comes down to which flaws are you willing to ignore. There's a lot of talent in this draft, but there are no Strausburgs. And there may not even be a Kris Bryant. There's a risk factor to everyone at the top of the draft. Nola may be a risk-adverse pick, but right now there's so much risk in Meyer, May, Berrios and Stewart with their walk tendencies that you could argue you need a safe pitcher to counterbalance them. Gordon scares me if he has to move off shortstop, but at the same time there really isn't a shortstop of the future in the system right now. With the way this draft is shaping up, you could make an argument there are seven or eight people who make sense at 5, and it's harder than it is in normal years to tell the busts from the future all-stars this time around.

Alternatively, we'll be in the middle of bitching about how the 22-year-old Buxton is a bust while the 26-year-old Hicks is starting to blossom on that timeline. Morneau was a bust until 2006. Ditto Cuddyer. Hunter took time to figure things out too, like most prospects do. Let's give Hicks some time to figure things out and see what he can be. If he needs to go to AAA, that's what Fuld is for. We don't need a stopgap centerfielder. We need to develop the talent we have.

If we're going to give Hicks the Becker treatment, this is going to turn into 1996 really quickly. Gomez should be the history lesson as to why we should have a little patience.

1. Gina, 3b 2. Linda, 2b 3. Sheril, rf 4. Kris, lf 5. Dania, cf 6. Susan, c 7. Emma, 1b 8. Hong, ss 9. Lian, p

The guy Gibson has always reminded me of is Scott Erickson, which means he'll never be as great as you think he is during the good times or as horrible as you think during the bad ones. There's nothing wrong with that kind of a career trajectory if you can get it. But it's never going to be the kind of thing you build a rotation around.

Top box office draw from 1939 to 1940, spanning two decades.

Anyone who scored off of Harold Ramis dying is a bastard.

When you're coming off a rotation in 2013 that featured five guys who could best be dubbed 4A starters, I'm not sure you can ever act "too aggressively."

Snark or no snark, I refuse to acknowledge that the ex-Cuban dictators ever made up the left side of the Twins infield.

IMO, the big problem with this whole debate is the overrating of Florimon's glove. Maybe he can hit hit like Gagne next year, but that's setting the bar pretty low offensively and Gagne made up for his bat by being the best defender the Twins have had at shortstop in my lifetime. Bartlett is second. Florimon was better than what's been there the past couple of years, but that's akin to comparing a car to a Yugo. He was also somewhat inconsistent, and ranked anywhere from average to above average in metrics. He was also a pretty big negative sabermetrically in the two partial seasons before that. Call me crazy, but is it a little premature to be calling someone elite with that resume? And I'm not saying Drew is the answer, because a team that's looking two to four years down the road shouldn't be looking to sign a shortstop on the wrong side of 30 to a long-term deal. But I'm really skeptical the long-term answer exists in the Twins system right now.

The Twins still have a rotation? Who knew?