ALessKosherScott

IMO, the biggest problem most people have with with prospects and young players is the tendency to overbuild hope when things are going well, and abandon ship too quickly when the stats go south. Benson wasn't a future all-star in 2011. But he's at least got a a valid excuse in a bum wrist for what happened in 2012. At the bare minimum, he has the brand of defense and platoon spilts you like to see in a good fourth outfielder.

Looks like another first round pick that won't work out for the Twins.

I'd call it more another example of when you have a virtually unhittable robot fronting your rotation, you tend to make your own luck come playoff time. The problem is virtually unhittable robots aren't an easy commodity to come across.

Sign Conseco!

Ponder has his limitations. He's never going to have that John Elway arm. But you can build around his flaws. Brad Johnson won a Super Bowl and look at how Alex Smith has evolved in San Francisco when they started giving him more tools to work with. Those two probably represent Ponder's upside. And there's something to be said for a quarterback who knows how to manage the game. Even in the Lions one, you can give Ponder credit for realizing he didn't need to go downfield. He really wasn't in any situations where he needed to throw it deep. He needed to be smart with his passes and let AP find the open holes to keep him in second and manageable and third and short. With that said, you're right that he needs a receiver and probably an upgrade on the right side of the line as well, or at the very least the left guard who can move Johnson to the right side or the right tackle who can move Loadholt inside to guard. The bright side is Justin Hunter, Robert Woods and Keenan Allen are probably all better bets than Justin Blackmon, with Allen being very similar to Blackmon albeit an inch taller. And he's probably the worst of the three mentioned. The downside is that a 7-9 record may take you out of a position to land any of them.

Should I drink a Brewery Vivant Zaison while watching football? When you don't have something you really need, it becomes a very easy and rhetorical question.

I remember my friend turning Bob Ojeda into a sociopathic character whose only goal was to bean every batter. That, and the Twins were almost unstoppable thanks to extreme power in the middle of the lineup plus the ability to sub in Randy Bush and Roy Smalley for Lombardozzi and Laudner with no defensive ramifications. Plus, I've always wondered how many times it took them to get this YouTube video right:

Fun fact of the day: When added together, Sal and Drew have a combined career OPS+ of 102.

The magic squirrel hypothesis holds more water I don't know about that. Arguing against the hypothesis means you're making one of two cases. 1. It hasn't been hotter and more humid in 2012 than in 2011 or 2010. 2. Einstein and the fathers of physics were wrong when they said the warmer and more humid the weather, the less air resistance there is.

I'd wager the warmer weather this year is playing a bigger role than anything. But that's just hypothesis.

My two cents is that it's a pretty risky bet that you're going to win two out of three of Arcia/Hicks/Benson. They're all good enough prospects, but they're not exactly Harper and Trout either. Or even Kubel really. Each one has serious warts that threaten their upside, with Benson's contact problems being way more severe than Revere's power issues. That doesn't mean you don't dangle Revere. No one should be untouchable on a team that's heading toward another 90 loss season. That just means you have to be pretty quick to take him off the market pretty quickly when the market for leadoff hitters runs dry.

The calling up of Nishioka should lead to all kinds of fun jokes with Asian stereotypes. And we all win when that happens.

IMO, the best backhanded compliment you can give Dedundo is he's the most exciting pitcher in a rotation stocked with AAAA players. Is he headed for a crash? Probably. But who knows, maybe Rick Anderson can live up to his old Anne Sullivan word filter and shave a walk or two/9 from him and make him a little more interesting.

Problematically though, there isn't an impending log jam of potential middle-of-the-order hitters coming up through the system. I don't think Snider is the right fit because we already know that lefty pull-hitters aren't a match with Target Field. But it is the right idea.

With Kepler and Goodrum both learning the difference between a ball, a strike, and a beach ball thrown from the stands this year, I'm hoping whomever the hitting coach in Elizabethton is getting big raise and/or working with Sano next season.

Probably not, but mostly because Grossman is the headline prospect and he's essentially Aaron Hicks without the defensive range and arm. The other two prospects sat #13 and #16 on BA's Pirate Prospect List and profile as potential #4 starters or LOOGies. But at the same time, in theory this is the trade you're going to get if you trade Liriano. Since you're not going to get the best and brightest from another team's system, the question becomes how do a Dave Hollins for David Ortiz trade and lift a valuable prospect out of the system without your trade partner realizing it? This used to be Terry Ryan's forte (Liriano himself being an example of it), but it hasn't for some time.

At the same time, Denard Span didn't have that gap power until he was 24. The problem with all the irrational Ben Revere hate is that it forgets that he still has time for improvement. He'll never hit for Josh Willingham power, but all it takes is Luis Castillo power to make pitchers stop grooving pitches to him every time he gets to ball three, which will push his OBP north and make him a legit all-star candidate in any given year. Revere isn't perfect. The arm is a problem. But at the same time, there's plenty to like. The range in the outfield makes Kirby Puckett and Torii Hunter look like bad defenders. His bat control rivals Mauer and maybe even Rod Carew. He knows the strike zone very well and doesn't chase pitches. And then there's the speed on the basepaths. That's not two tools. That's three-plus tools. And while the lack of power hurts, the historical comp to Juan Pierre is off on one thing-- that Revere doesn't use the same O.J. Simpson-esq choke down on the bat that kills any power Pierre might have. My advice would be unless you have some sort of Flux-capacitor equipped DeLorean and know for certain that Revere goes the next 1,500 plate appearances without a home run, lighten up, Francis. 99.9% of prospects come up with some sort of warts they need to work out, this includes every prospect currently in the Twins system including Sano. If we're going to ever witness a good Twins team again, we need to take the 1999 Twins approach and let them develop and not the 1996 Twins approach and harp on all of their flaws until we trade them off for fossils of former baseball players. Who knows? Two years from know you may feel the same way about Revere that you do about Span right now.

It's off, to an extent. The pitcher isn't going to throw Revere the cookie on every pitch. He's going to throw it when he's down in the count or risking a walk to Revere. Curt's numbers take a look over every pitch. But what happens on the ultimate payoff pitch-- 3-2? Revere gets strikes 84% of the time. Using Carroll as a control, he gets a strike 76.1% of the time. But it gets more interesting when you look at where the pitches are in the zone. Here's Revere: http://pitchfx.texasleaguers.com/batter/519184/?pitchers=A&count=32&pitches=AA&from=4%2F1%2F2012&to=7%2F11%2F2012 Here's Carroll: http://pitchfx.texasleaguers.com/batter/425206/?pitchers=A&count=32&pitches=AA&from=4%2F1%2F2012&to=7%2F11%2F2012

I don't think Revere's plate discipline is a problem at all. His swinging strike percentage is currently sitting at 3.2. To put that in perspective, Mauer is sitting at 4.0%. He doesn't walk because there's no reason for a pitcher to not groove him a meatball when he's down in the count. The worst case scenario is a well-placed ball becomes a double. If he starts hitting more doubles and the odd ball over the fence, his walk rate will jump because pitchers will have to start being a little more fine with their pitches. If not, he's still a useful player.

http://www.dailyspeculations.com/about%20us/archives/archieve/11%20Stock-Slugging%20Tips%20from%20Ted%20Williams.htm Ted Williams' rules of hitting: Rule No. 2: Study the first pitch Williams let the first ball pitched to him go by without a swing about 95% of the time. He used the first pitch to find out as much as possible about the pitcher: his speed, how far his curve broke, his patterns and his motions. In one anecdote, Williams described how Bob Lemon, whom he rated one of the five toughest pitchers he had faced, knew that Ted always let the first one go by. So once, when Williams whacked Lemon's first pitch for a home run, the pitcher yelled, What the Hades you doing? FYI: Mauer is hitting .563 with a .750 slugging percentage when he swings at the first pitch (which is only that high because he only swings if the pitcher gives him the pitch he wants). I wish every hitter in the Twins' system had this approach to hitting.