bird

This became fun.

I feel like I'm becoming more familiar than is comfortable with your dirty dishes, dirty toilet, and now your dirty laundry.

Yeah, well at least he pulled the ball to left center for his out.

FIFY

I never had to grow a beard for my mother in law. She hated everything I did.

Gordon may end up being an okay MLB shortstop, but when it comes to triples, he won't hold a candle to Sano.

Matt Garza has produced 14 WAR. Perkins gave us 9 WAR. It's the draft, so I don't have any expectations, just the hope that Jay gives us better than the average #6 production over time in whatever role he has.

1-2; 1-2; 2-3; 2-3; 3-4; 3-4; 4​-5; 4-5; 5-6; 5-6; 6-7; 6-7; This is how I think about pitchers. In my mind, Ervin is a career 2-3 who is having a 1-2 season so far. I'm hoping he finishes by giving us a 1-2 full season. Or that someone takes stupid pills and gives us a 1-2 prospect haul at the deadline. Hughes is a career 3-4 at best, giving us a 4-5 season at best so far.

Yeah, let's pull off another Butera thing, which I think went Sulbaran to Nunez to Adelberto Mejia, correct?

There's a difference between a discipline and a plan. Sure, you make exceptions when it makes sense. If we had a surplus in the minors, say at shortstop with Javier, Palacios, Vielma, and Gordon, then trading from that surplus does not deplete you, by all means, look for a way to move that surplus player for a player that fills a need or for higher-ceiling prospects that are further away. That's part of your discipline. And a clubhouse cancer is a liability, not an asset, so you look for a taker. If I'm the GM, I'd even have an articulated set of guidelines for dealing with recalcitrants and what your process is for making qualitative judgments about discounting a player's on-field performance due to harmful off-field or clubhouse behaviors. Ryan, in my opinion, was tactical, not strategic, and valued intuition, which is great, but only if you put some guidelines (discipline) in place to force you to really think things through before making a dynamic move, I really believe that some of the catastrophic trades under Smith were a product of his lack of a trade discipline (and advanced metrics is a part of this) and his lack of intuition.

Yeah, they've missed on a good share of those guys, as all teams do because the odds of ever seeing a MLB paycheck drop off a cliff. Duffey, Burdi, Chargois, Melotakis, Rogers, and maybe a couple others will change the perception that the Twins are particularly weak when it comes to early round successes.

Charles Brown's "I Stepped in Quicksand" deserves a place in every cultured person's music library. But it shouldn't be off-limits to TD'ers either.

I'm not concerned much about whether the Twins get pitching or position players in return for Dozier. For a number of reasons. One, I don't think Dozier fetches a MLB starter who vaults the team from pretender status into contenders. Two, if I'm GM, my sell discipline is not violated, and says I only trade from surplus, and I always get what I believe is an overpay, meaning I keep guys like Dozier when the offer is DeLeon. Because teams are not likely to overpay with anything other than prospects, I'm not counting on trading my way into instant contention. I have to be willing to make the occasional FA deal. Oh, and I'm NEVER depleting my farm system to make a run, ever. I want to avoid cycling in and out of the picture if possible. So, I'm trading Dozier, who is surplus, for prospects with a design on sustaining competitive excellence over time. I'm keeping Ervin, because I lack a current surplus and no one will overpay me anyway. He's worth more to me than to another team. How do I get from pretender to contender in 2018? Internal progress, taking my chances that the young guys come into their own, that guys like Chargois and Gonsalves come through, that guys like May and Thorpe recover, and one special FA move for a bona fide frontline starter. Can't count on trades or this year's draft.

Me too, but I think we have to acknowledge that there may be only two, possibly three consensus #1 pitching prospects available in a given draft. You obviously take Price and Strassberg . But if Dillon Tate is your best pitching option, the strategy of going for a position player makes all the sense in the world to me. The Twins took Gordon instead of Nola, Freeland, or Hoffman, and I think they'll be happy they did. If they had a disciplined draft strategy to take position players when the alternative is a pitcher with a #2-3 ceiling, perhaps we'd be enjoying Benintendi or Happ instead of asking if Jay is off the DL yet. However, I don't believe this "position player priority" strategy plays out past the first round of the draft. In fact, I'd probably resonate to a strategy that says you either find a high-ceiling HS pitcher and overpay when possible or take your chances on a fallen angel like Seth Romero or Clarke in the second round. And I agree that the draft this year dictates they take a pitcher with that first selection.

Concur.

I absolutely agree that the Twins have been serial criminals in failing to bring in that one elite relief arm in the off-season. Unsurprisingly, it has resulted in a scramble for a band-aid every season, and that's because the relief prospects they thought they might be able to count on were unavailable due to injury stifling their progress or because of other hiccups in their progress. They can be blamed for failing to bring in that elite reliever. They've been very unlucky when it comes to injuries to practically every relief prospect being mentioned now as languishing unnecessarily in the minors. Burdi, Chargois, Melotakis, Reed, Jones, Jay, Bard, Baxendale, Wimmers, Rosario, Cedaroth, Booser, Jorge. I believe every one of these guys has missed significant development time due to injury, many missing an entire season or more, all missing months at a time. So, we can argue that a number of these guys appear to finally be ready, and that's good. But I will cut them a little slack for being a bit more patient than I am, and I reject the argument that there's been a misguided and deliberate pattern of moving these prospects along too slowly. Well, okay, maybe just a little too slowly...

Yeah, I think it's important to remember that last year when they pulled the plug on him up here, his head was spinning and his breaking ball was not so much. He probably suffered as much from his lack of poise as he did from his lack of polish. Let's hope he will settle in this time.

In really suuny sun, the head is really that El Purple, Bark. That's why birding is so dang cool, even without LSD.

Both are delicious served on a bed of hummingbird.

Haven't seen one in four years, which was the last time I was down in your neck of the desert, Chief. Saw my first in Madeira Canyon, saw many later in various places, most of them in and around Lake Patagonia. It's easy to mix Anna's Hummingbird up with Costa's Hummingbird. And Bob Costas is a possessive guy.

Wrong, Ash, but it IS Anna's Hummingbird.

Okay. For the curious among you, ....Oh. That's right. Never mind.

Okay. I choose Arvid. No reason in particular.

How much do you want for it?

Great discussion and a comprehensive collective articulation of the problem that's causing this quagmire. In terms of reducing or even solving this quagmire, as a GM, I'd be engaged in this line of thinking: A. ADJUSTING HIS APPROACH. I'm dealing with a $23M annual expense that has a huge impact on the top line sales in a $1B annual business. Therefore, I've already verified that considerable energy has been put into trying to fix this costly problem that even the people over on TD can readily see just by watching games and glancing at a few spray charts. Now, because my coaches can't coach Mauer into making the necessary adjustments (and remember, I fired Bruno), and because Mauer either refuses to adjust or can't adjust, I now accept the problem as unfixable. We have stopped expecting a new approach. Mauer isn't going to change and the problem most likely will get worse. B. ALTERNATIVE ASSETS. Okay, my people tell me they have certain hopes for Vargas, Park, and even Palka for 2017 and 2018. Beyond that, we can't fully foresee, but they keep mentioning a hope that a light bulb goes off for this Lewin Diaz kid. And since all the talk was this hope stuff, I even tried to partially solve the quagmire myself by signing that Napoli guy, who, as an important aside, would have actually been a fun guy for the players and someone who would project some energy out to the fans too. So finally, it looks like this Vargas guy could supplant Mauer. Time to sit Molitor down and get a clear understanding of how he's thinking about these things. I'm very concerned that I'm going to have to do a lot of the talking, because I agree with a bunch of those TD people. At best, we need to give up some of Mauer's superlative defense in favor of an exciting power bat. Or two, even, if Park turns out to be the real deal. This needs to happen now. I've lowered my opinion of my manager at this point. C. LINEUP CONSTRUCTION. Speaking of lower opinions, I'm going to step in and put an end to this nonsense. I mean, does my manager really think the fact that Mauer doesn't strike out as much serves as a deterrent to walking Sano? I'm walking that beast to face a .250 singles hitter who lets my defense play on a half-field almost automatically. If my manager wants Mauer in the lineup against righties and for his defense, then he's damn well going to adjust his lineup construction. So we're going to have a meeting of the minds right now 1) about just how often Mauer sits, 2) about where he and Castro fit best in a lineup and 3) about who, if it's not Vargas, is going to make the opposition think twice about walking Sano. D. 2018 AND BEYOND. I've already concluded that Mauer won't be with us in 2019. The question I'm going to answer during 2017 is whether he makes my roster in 2018, quite frankly, and if so, I've already determined in my own mind that it will be in a drastically reduced role. I've already decided that either Vargas and/or Park and/or Palka get past the hope stuff. If none of them are considered to be a reliable and superior alternative to Mauer as a 1B regular, we're going outside the system for one over the winter. But in any case, Mauer will not be our regular 1B in 2018. In conclusion, I'm reducing the Mauer Quagmire by immediately reducing his role in 2017 in two ways, accelerating that role reduction for certain in 2018, and possibly eliminating the quagmire altogether in 2018. My focus is on top-line sales. That $23M is already sunk.