S.

They could also safely obtain it themselves. Its not like B12 and iron vitamins are regulated in any way or difficult to find at any number of stores. And what does the trainer benefit by spending their own money on performance enhancing drugs when their client asked for some cheap ass vitamins?

Thats good, because they still haven't got any.

If he pitches poorly, the end result is the exact same regardless of if there is an opt out or not. The opt out really only comes into play if he pitches well for 2 years. Maybe I'm misunderstanding Chief, but i think a big part of the issue is that we weren't even willing to offer it.

Honest question, who else do the Twins still have access to that has the same ceiling as Darvish? I don't think anyone is treating him like a bona fide ace (or I certainly don't see him that way), but he was the closest to an ace that we're ever likely to sign in free agency. There is no way we're signing someone like Kershaw in FA and we'd have to gut our entire farm system to trade for someone who is already an established, bona fide ace. And we clearly haven't been doing a very good job of developing our own bona fide aces. The presumption with the saved money is based off of history. The Twins are not taking the money saved from the last decade of not signing big FAs so they can throw 300 million at Kershaw next year. They're not stockpiling that money for future signings. They are putting that money back in their pocket and then its gone. There isn't some saved up reserve from all our unimpressive offseason or anything like that. I mean, sure, they can take some of the money they "saved" by not signing Darvish and go sign Cobb or whoever this offseason but I don't consider that a serious win or something that is going to give us a great chance in a wild card game or a playoff series against a real contender. Edit: I should add, of course not signing a big free agent gives you more flexibility with money down the line, but what big name pitchers are we really going to be in the running for next offseason? David Price? No thanks. Every year we delay going for it, we lose time on our current young, reasonably priced, offensive core. The longer we delay, the more expensive that young core gets. And then some of them are going to go elsewhere and some of them are going to age and decline and at some point if you want to really contend you have to stop worrying about, "well, what about the impact that might have on our payroll in 5 years?" because your window of contention may be long gone by then.

And the rest of us would at least like the possibility of 2 years of a really good pitcher, but not signing him completely eliminates that possibility. And just like always, we aren't using that "saved" money on anything else worthwhile.

What do you really need to plan for? If he pitches great in the first season and starts off the second season well, you start thinking, "well, decent chance he's going to opt out after this season, so lets start planning our options for if he does." If he doesn't pitch great, he's likely still better than any pitcher we have besides Berrios or Santana. Or you can go with option 3 where the Pohlads pocket that ~20% of payroll because its not like we're going to use that extra money to sign Kershaw next offseason, and the FA pitchers outside of him for next season are not impressive.

This is what upsets me so much over the FO's vocal disdain for the opt out. No one opts out of their contract if they just put up some garbage seasons. They opt out of their contract if they pitched spectacularly and they think they can get even more money. Everyone wishes they could get a great pitcher on a short contract with none of the fall off on the tail end, but instead our FO is out there saying how they aren't interested in even offering the opt out. It's one thing if you're trading a bunch of prospects for a guy with an opt out, but in this case we had absolutely nothing to lose in offering it, unless you consider possibly having to shop for a pitcher again in 2 years as a loss.

Exactly what other high-caliber starting pitchers do you see available, because I don't see any. I don't know how Santana missing a big chunk of the season to keep him more well rested for a playoffs we probably won't reach is a good thing. None of this stuff is good. Nothing we have done in regards to our starting rotation this off season has been good. I'm not sure why you're basically writing a PR puff piece for the Twins when our starting rotation looks like one of the worst in the league even if we do add one of the available arms like Cobb.

Darvish may not be an ace, but he'd probably be as close as the Twins are ever going to sign in free agency. There is a 0% chance we're going to land Kershaw next year in free agency and then the next best potential options in 2018 are David Price and Gio Gonzalez and I certainly don't consider either of them aces either. Kershaw is also likely to make 1.5x as much as Darvish, so it isn't exactly an apples to apples comparison of "huge dollars". For the price of a true ace like that in FA, you're talking about paying as much as it'd cost to sign Darvish and some additional quality players. Beyond that, your FA options are limited. Real aces don't make it to free agency all the time and when they do, everyone wants them. And when it comes to a pure money bidding war on someone like Kershaw, we aren't going to win. Thats the unfortunate truth of the situation. If we want good pitching we're either going to have to sign high end, non-ace guys like Darvish or we're going to have to trade the farm, because we're certainly not doing a very good job of developing any ourselves.

I'll probably get blasted for this, but I'm not in the camp of always automatically believing the accuser. Thats not to say I don't believe her either, but false accusations happen more often than people might think. Or the stories get changed a bit from the real reality - either intentionally or the person simply remembers it differently because it was a traumatic event. Maybe its exactly as she said, maybe it isn't. Maybe he came onto her and she said no and he tried to convince her for a minute but it felt like 10 minutes to her. I don't know. You don't know. The only people who know what really happened are Sano and the photographer (and the agent/anyone else was around if they saw some of this take place). Basically, I'm in the camp that it needs to be investigated before people jump to judgement. It wouldn't be the first time an athlete has done something ****ty. It also wouldnt be the first time an athlete was falsely accused. If she physically resisted him grabbing/tugging at her for 10 minutes she almost certainly would have had bruises or abrasions. And she is a professional photographer, so it seems like a reasonable assumption that she would've taken photos or some sort of documentation of this. The exif data on photos could easily verify the date and time.

I'm not exactly the most positive person on this board, but c'mon, It's not even 2018 yet. Even if your expectations are low, give it a few more months before you start to panic.

Why would the Twins do this? If we were going to trade Sano (which i'm quite certain we aren't), I'm pretty sure we'd be putting together a package to get someone better than Archer. You really want to trade Sano for a 28 year old pitcher who has put up a 4 ERA, 1.25 WHIP and was worth 3 WAR combined over the last two years?

I expect Hughes to contribute as much in 2018 as Perkins did in 2017.

Fish used for sushi is always frozen. Though, I'm sure it is cheaper on the coast.

Plenty of good pitchers have played horribly in the playoffs, it happens. Kershaw wasn't exactly impressive for a lot of years in the playoffs. Also, plenty of mediocre and bad pitchers have also played horribly in the playoffs. Also, in order to pitch poorly in the world series, you have to get to the world series. Hell, you have to get to the second round of the playoffs first, which isn't something we've been able to manage for a long long time. You can't discount a guy's history due to 2 games, especially when there was the whole issue of them using different balls that were slicker and not breaking as much, thus a lot of breaking ball pitchers struggling more than usual.

Because no other managers want anything to do with that mess. And both parties are probably well aware that they'll get a new manager before the Tigers are competitive again. Because it pays better than being a bench coach or any other non managerial job he'd get with another team. The real question is how many times do we think Gardy will get ejected next year? And how many of those ejections will come while playing the Twins?

Yeah, lets just keep doing the same thing with our pitching staff that we've been doing for the last decade, because its been so successful. Berrios has the possibility of getting more consistent, but thats far from guaranteed. Mejia is a back end starter at best, Gonsalves and Romero have no MLB experience, May is coming off of a missed season due to injury. Why should we reasonably expect any of those last 4 to be upgrades over what we got this season? Our pen is bad and mostly full of guys we've seen be mediocre to bad for multiple years. Once again, if you're saying its "reasonable" to just assume Hildenberger improves drastically and we call up a bunch of guys from AAA who immediately have great success, then I think you're in for some more disappointment. Our track record with our minor league RPs has not been good. How many guys have we had in the last few years who do well in AAA and can't do a thing in the majors? At some point, we have to change tactics because clearly we're garbage at developing our own pitchers in the minors, as has been proven time and time again over the past decade+

Been saying all year that I think we should push hard for Darvish. I'd like to see us get him and a solid #3 and then spend some money on some bullpen pitching who can actually strike people out. A top 4 of Darvish, Santana, Berrios, FA/trade #3 type pitcher would look pretty decent with a stronger bullpen behind it. Or if I'm really dreaming, I'd like us to get Darvish and then use his presence to help us make a play for Otani. Another japanese pitcher who he can connect/easily communicate with, a team full of young exciting players, and with the current situation with him, its not like there is a bidding war to lose, so he's going to be picking his team based on where he wants to be/who he wants to be with. I think we could actually have a chance with Darvish here. But, I'm probably just dreaming on that front.

There is absolutely no reason to sign him to another contract at this point. Its not like he's going to hit free agency after the 2018 season and we're going to be in a massive bidding war with other teams for him. Even if he plays out of his mind in 2018, I can't imagine a scenario where Joe goes elsewhere unless we're lowballing the hell out of him and some other team is offering him big money. And I can't imagine that happening. Best case scenario of signing Joe to an extension early is we save maybe $4-5M tops (even that is unlikely). All the other possible scenarios end poorly for us with him injured, production dropping off, needing to move Sano to first, etc. As productive as he's been this year, he isn't young and he doesn't hit for a ton of power. If we sign him to 2 additional years and he loses some of the power he has, all of a sudden we have 3 years of a slap hitting first baseman in the decline of his career, clogging up first base, who isn't an asset off the bench due to his lack of speed or power. Its a high risk, no reward scenario. Unless you consider saving a few million a reward, but if a few million is making or breaking our payroll then we have bigger problems anyways.

And when they bounce back, the bullpen will still suck because this isn't a one off thing where they're good the rest of the time.

Man, our bullpen is embarrassingly bad.

Don't we have some young pitchers who we could give these low leverage innings to for major league experience, seeing as it's September, instead of wasting them on Perkins? He is clearly cooked, he wasn't even able to pitch effectively in the minors. I hope that was his last Twins appearance.

I find LaPanta's Wild play by play to be pretty good. But, I also ****ing hate Doc Emrick, who lots of people seem to think is a good hockey broadcaster, so maybe I'm the outlier here. LaPanta can be a total homer, but I'm not sure why you'd consider him to be awful.

Different strokes I guess. Personally, I think he's been the best of the fill in broadcasters this season. Though I also know not everyone shares my dislike of Torii or Smalley in the booth.

I feel like some other people on here are acting like Mauer calls the shots, which seems like a very unreasonable assumption. As you said, Molitor makes the lineup card. If Molitor says Mauer is playing, then Mauer is playing. If Mauer says "No, I'm healthy but I'm taking the day off," and Molitor allows this, then thats yet another reason to fire Molitor. If Molitor said, "Joe, you're taking the day off," and Joe said he'd like to play, it's still Molitor's call at the end of the day. Blame for any lineup issue should be placed directly on Molitor (or the FO for the players they provided him with). In this case, this one is entirely on Molitor unless we hear otherwise. If someone comes out and tells us, "Mauer makes the decisions over Molitor," then Molitor should be fired today for not understanding that the manager is in charge. But, we have no reason to believe this to be the case and its foolish to act like it is.