Willihammer

Fair enough. Its safe to say Mauer's best days are behind him. It still seems premature to me to say that his new mean is a .730 batter. The concussion recovery being a big wildcard here. I still hold out hope that he can settle in at the high .700s despite the last 15 months. YMMV.

Is that based on any research or just personal preference? I would be curious to know. I know there was an article written a few years ago on fangraphs that looked at "inconsistent" pitchers including Liriano, and the conclusion was that streakiness amongst SPs was actually preferred to consistency. I wonder if the same is true of hitters.

I just can't get worked up over a 2 month stretch of .670 hitting. Yeah its not great but that's just baseball. You get hot, then get cold. Its where you wind up that matters more. If he finishes the year batting in the .718 range again I'll be complaining but he could easily get hot again and wind up in the .775 range which would be fine. Also, Mauer's glove is solid IMO. He regularly makes difficult plays look routine, eg. the over the shoulder catch last night.

HOOTERS BABY!

Steve Stone, "As good of footwork that Suzuki has, he does not have an overpoweringly strong arm."

Berardino wrote that last fall. May relieved this spring, got the back spasms again, and now... what? Back to relief?

http://i.imgur.com/YjXK1qP.jpg

Gotta get this guy up against the lefty http://i.imgur.com/AW1Jugo.jpg

Snot running down his nose

Swinging thru strike three with meh intent

Think if we pull a Twins jersey over Swarzak and point him to the mound for mop up duty, anyone will notice?

We... we found the antidote, and its name is Neil Ramirez!

Maybe he was thinking, double cutoff? http://stream1.gifsoup.com/view5/2760783/manny-cutoff-throw-o.gif

LOL. Tanaka is a stud. Park will be okay. Kepler should be embarrassed.

I think it is fair to have high expectations of Rosario. Any idiot can take a pitch, its not a skill. But players need to understand why its important to work deep counts, and it doesn't look like many of them do. Maybe coaches could do more in that regard. The league bats 1.796 in 3-0 counts, and 1.366 in 3-1, .976 in 2-0. If I were Jake Mauer, I'd move the goalposts away from "drive the ball" to "get to those counts." The aggressiveness will take over from there, it doesn't need encouragement, and the walks will follow incidentally, as they should. Pair that with an emphasis on 2-strike hitting in order to keep strikeouts in check.

Probably wise to keep that in mind. The Twins could just be gauging trade interest at this point. Also this is helpful: http://www.mlbtraderumors.com/dfatracker Tim Federowicz at the top of that list. 28 y/o catcher with a .910 OPS in 1100 AAA PAs anyone? He also has not been given much of a chance at the MLB level.

Twins' talent evaluators have been in lockstep with the rest of the league for some time now. Since they are currently the worst team in baseball and Arcia the last man on the roster, we can be confident no other team will claim him if he reaches waivers. Not.

Who else is just hoping for another small meltdown by Plouffesy after the inveitable strikeout. Maybe a thrown bat or someothing. #voteTwins

Why is this guy not the GM of the Twins right now? Or, yesterday?

Park is on pace to be a ~2.5 WAR player this year. Assume that is his true talent, factor in decline, and you're looking at about 4.5 to 5 surplus WAR over the life of his contract. Plus a team option. That should be an attractive chip for someone that needs a RH bat / 1B at the deadline I would think.

The Hughes extension is a good snapshot of some of TR's weaknesses IMO. 1. An over-commitment to free agent acquisitions. Particularly the multi-year contract signees. Hughes had an outlier performance, something other GMs would recognize. His trade value probably wasn't that high, but I have to believe a trade opportunity would have been there, if Ryan had pursued it. But he has built this image of the Twins as the anti-Marlins. It sounds callous to say, but sometimes the best thing for the franchise, is to uproot a player and ship him off. They do it every time they recall or option the Buxtons of the system- Buxton has a wife and kid too. But for whatever reason TR cultivates this image that if you sign with the Twins you don't have to worry about being flipped and I believe that costs him trade opportunities. 2. Poor appreciation for the forces of regression. Kinda ironic because a big part of the justification for signing Hughes in the first place was, his HR/FB would normalize into something resembling league average if he moved into a more league average home park. But Hughes' HR/FB in 2014 wasn't just normal, it was 6th-lowest in baseball. A correction in 2015-18 seemed completely possible, if not likely. And then there was the K/BB rate which was the GOAT, practically screaming regression. 3. Poor appreciation for age related decline. Again, sort of ironic because the other appealing thing about the original Hughes contract was that Hughes was one of the younger free agents in the class. But instead of letting him walk at age 30, Ryan made sure he locked Hughes well into decline years. 4. Lousy timing. As mentioned already, there was no point in extending a player likely to regress, with 2 years remaining on the contract. Not trading him- okay, maybe a deal wasn't there. Maybe. But to go so far the other way and extend the guy? Just completely unnecessary. It turned an asset into a liability, and will handcuff the team when all the young talent they've drafted during this downturn is ready to audition in 2016-2018.

To be clear, "luck" is shorthand for variations in outcomes that appear to be random. That doesn't necessarily mean they are random. It could mean that the causes of those variations aren't easily measured.

I wouldn't want the owners to be like Jerry Jones either. I mean, I have a job and I know that it sucks to be micro managed. Too much involvement hurts output. But I wouldn't expect to be completely unaccountable to my boss either. I know I wouldn't do my best work if that were the case. Neither extreme is desirable.

"Line of Succession." Begins with the owners, doesn't it? Presumably Carl knew something about baseball and the Twins when he chose to purchase the franchise in 1984. But the Pohlad boys, do they even like baseball? Do they watch the games and root for the team? I mean we moan about the incompetency of TR and Molitor, but what can you really expect if the CEO and owners aren't baseball people? Is that the case? I mean, I hope that's not the case. But from where I'm sitting, 2/3 of the family is completely hands off this team. Making movies and whatnot. Jim is the only owner who even sits in the front office. And whenever there's an interview like the one Scoggins did, the man sounds ambivalent about the team. If the insularity begins with the owners, then its no surprise the rest of the front office follows suit, is it? And why should fans expect any differently going forward, as long as the Pohlads remain owners?

Exhibit Q in the stinking Whities out-defending the Twins today.