bird

Yeah, for sure, you know, unless they round up everyone that was hired under Terry Ryan and fire all of them.

Or maybe shave the name Mauer in your back hair?

I agree. About the bad baseball decision I mean. The TR bashing is really refreshing.

What an interesting thread. Nicely done, Nick, and thanks to everyone for the really thoughtful contributions.

How ironic that, if we were to trade Mauer now, we'd have to settle for a middling relief pitcher.

I remember not liking the trade, not because I had an opinion about the players involved, but because it reminded me of the Capps for Ramos deal, which sickens me yet today.

Okay, I can accept that perhaps their rate of success at signing and developing (and yes, they get some credit for successfully developing Liriano, Ramos, Guerra, Hendriks, Solarte, Pinto,, and even Ortiz) international prospects is in line with their success at drafting and developing above-average position players. If that's also suboptimal by your definition, fine. Are you limiting your observations to 2014? Sano and Kepler and Rosario, and it's still suboptimal? Compared to...? I've never been one to tout their expertise as superior to most other teams with either domestic or foreign prospects. But I strongly believe that the constantly stated opinion that they are somehow inferior, worse than average at it, is false, and unsupported by the evidence. This holds true in particular when one examines more recent history, say, the past decade, and when one rightfully factors in the main mitigating circumstances, such as draft position. What happened 14 years ago, when Jose Mijares was signed, hardly tells us a thing.

re: Duffey a. He was lousy for a long while there. Now, when you look at his decent starts, he's giving us what we should expect from a decent start. I see IP's of 6,6,8,6.2, 7,7. I think it's fair to expect better than 6 innings most of the time, in other words. Duffey doesn't present us with a problem of running out of gas. He presented an even bigger problem though, and that was short starts when he was going bad. The point being made in here was that perhaps he's put those inconsistencies behind him.

I disagree.

This is what I find so maddening about the boy. A middle-in 88MPH 4-seamer, and he flies out oppo field.

Chief watched it to celebrate his AARP membership.

Oswaldo Arcia, Wilson Ramos, Yangervis Solarte, Deolis Guerra, Liam Hendriks. More reasons to question an opinion that the Twins are slouches when it comes to international signing and development of foreign-born talent to the big leagues (Liriano, Morneau, even David Ortiz).

Likewise, Mr. Sixel.

Yes, I think so. I know we didn't draft all of them, but I see about ten foreign-born players on the current MLB roster, including Rosario, Kepler, Sano, and Santana. Roughly 40%. Looking down in the minors, it looks like the current roster representation from six clubs is closer to 40% foreign-born. I presume you're attempting to conclude that the Twins are less effective at signing and developing foreign-born players than the average team?

We may have to solicit the services of the CNN fact checker here. The International Bonus Pool is set pursuant to a contractual agreement we know as the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA). The CBA is an agreement, a contract, running among and between the 30 MLB teams and the players, who are represented in the agreement by their union of course. This contract has hundreds and hundreds of provisions, most of which are spelled out in th body of the contract,but many of which are spelled out in some of the dozen or so Addendums, including those provisions of the International Bonus Pool (p. 265 I think). So, for starters, it is certainly NOT an addendum to some "internal operating document" as you are presuming. It is a contact, and it is an agreement. There is no confusion about this. All parties to the agreement are guilty of a breach whenever they break a promise (a rule). Specifically, one of the "rules" is the annual assignment of the pool allotment. The language of the contract is poor. This is my opinion, and also the opinion of a handful of other lawyers I know (I'm retired, but was trained as a lawyer and authored a handful of Code of Ethics in my career). Because of my background, I know quite a few ethics professors, and have asked two of them for their opinion. They concur that, although the language sucks, the intent is fairly clear that teams are to abide by the pool allotment. Otherwise, why waste the ink? I reached out and asked one of my ethics professor acquaintances if she'd be willing to take the time to post a comment on the thread. It's a lot for me to ask, but I did anyway. We'll see if she finds time. But, you have declared that absolutely no law professor of ethics would say that breaching a contract is per se wrong. Don't know how to help you with that perspective, and I have real people with backgrounds in ethics work that disagree with this statement. Legal crap aside, the question for me is, did teams agree to the bonus pool allotment procedure when they signed the CBA, and did this involve at least the intention on the part of every team to live within the very clear rules spelled out regarding the annual bonus pool allotment? I think they did, and it was. Where I grew up, it was just plain wrong to break a promise to someone, especially when it caused them harm. But maybe I just have a really warped moral code. Based on the last paragraph of your post, can I presume you spent a year or so studying the issues? I DO understand why people want to think of this as simply a matter of it being a piece of paper suggesting that you can either stay within the limits of the pool if you want, or, if you feel like it, bust through it and pay a penalty. Sorry, it's not.

That's a good observation. I have read the agreement, and find no explanation as to why the penalty steers clear from nullification instead of financial and privilege penalties. Your state law explicitly provides for confiscating that stolen car and your drugs too. Shame on you. My guess is they were considering the consequences to a kid who signed a contract with a team, and what the damages might be to his family and him were they to void the contract he signed through no fault of his own. There are some ironic things about how the Twins have been affected by the changes (some self-inflicted wounds, no doubt). I can recall having a long personal conversation with Andy MacPhail, obviously many many years back. He described the exhausting effort it took to convince Carl to finally dramatically jack up the international budget so the Twins could embark on what Andy and Bill Smith described as a ten-year project to build the physical and organizational infrastructure necessary to become one of the best at procuring IFA talent. The economic tide has incrementally shifted favorably for the franchise (revenue-sharing, salary caps and taxes, Rule 4 allotments, Target Field). The team has gone from trying to out-scout others during the pre-video days but still being handcuffed by financial constraints. Then, as their fin ancial handicaps became less pronounced, the playing field on the scouting front leveled because of technology and other teams making larger commitments to scouting as opposed to FA acquisitions. Then, along came the bonus pool allotments, which very much make it difficult for one team to out-scout and outsmart the competitor. SO, some teams opted to tilt the field in their favor by cheating the compliant teams because a poorly written legal document allowed them to breach the agreement.

That's my point...

Yes there is.

Compared to...?

This is a false description. Every team agreed to the CBA. It's a contractual agreement. By agreeing to it, teams agreed to abide by the provisions of the contract. Right there, in the contract, teams promise not to go over their allotment. Teams that failed to comply with the provisions in the CBA regarding the Rule 4 draft breached the contract and breached faith with the other teams. No professor of ethics at any law school would argue otherwise. The contract has no language in it that can possibly be construed to say, "you can go over it, but if you do..." The contract calls for penalties in the case of a breach of the contract by the parties. As for a separate examination of the Twin's record of success in this arena, any statement made on this rings hollow when it's simply a biased opinion unsupported by any comparison to the other teams. I can make the same statement about all 29 teams and be just as accurate in saying something as vague as that they have "almost nothing to show for their work". And in my opinion, this statement about the Twin's record would draw chuckles from the farm directors for all 30 teams.

If you check the facts, I think you'll discover that they have essentially spent their full allotment every year since the system has been in place. So, by appearances, they have been going "all-out". So, I think you're off-base here. Busting through the allotment, like many other teams have done and like many fans want the Twins to do? There is a very clear ethical and moral argument against doing this. I know I'm in the minority, but I find it reprehensible that teams have violated an agreement that they all signed. Those teams broke the rules after determining that the consequences of doing so are, well, rather inconsequential. It's still wrong, and I wish the consequences were more severe myself. That said, I have no idea whether the Twins have opted to comply with the agreement out of ethical considerations, or not. Others can go ahead and presume that they're doing so strictly for economic reasons, I suppose, but I'm not going to.

Good thought, but I'd suspect there are uncontrolled variables at play. Wouldn't some managers bench a player, even a star player, if they had a prolonged period where they're flailing up there, exhibiting no power to speak of, and continuing to at least give the impression that they're almost as happy with a walk than they are driving a teammate in when there are runners on? Wouldn't good managers at least move a guy with ONE lousy double in 208 plate appearances to the bottom third of his lineup? Do I have the impression that Mauer (he's not the only one, mind you) gets coddled by the manager and maybe by the organization as a whole? If I'm GM, I'm asking his agent to tell me in no uncertain terms what it's going to take to get Joe to waive his NT clause. If it's not completely stupid, I'm meeting his price and living with his list of teams he'd go to. Then, since it's a sunk cost anyway, I'm telling those teams that we're eating the remainder of his contract and looking for the best prospect package.

Sure he is. And Mauer catches.

Hell, they don't need to pay someone an exorbitant hourly wage for that information when we can just fire it over the internet to them. I mean, who among us doesn't know that David Hurlbut is the next Pat Dean and that Domenick Carlini is the next Jason Wheeler?

Well duh. Sam Clay.