bird

I recognize my strategy would be somewhat contrarian but: A lot of things would have to go right for the team to remain in contention. Santana would have to rebound back to #2/3 type production, Berrios and Mejia would have to give us #2/3 and #3/4 production, Santiago would have to be a #3/4, and no injuries among them. Likewise, no injuries to our top 5 or 6 position players. Additionally, at least one and probably two relievers would have to surface and immediately produce in high leverage situations. So, I'd take my slim chances that I could be a seller and maybe still get lucky and have a long shot at the playoffs here in 2017. I'd be a seller of surplus, specifically looking for an overpay in prospects. I would not be expecting to find immediate rotation help from the outside, because the demands are going to exceed my tastes. I'd "solve" my immediate rotation problem by (gulp) either plugging my nose and relying on Hughes and Gibson, or by dipping down to get Gonsalves, Slegers, or even Romero and hoping to be surprised. (I'm really missing Trevor May!) So, I'm shopping Dozier for sure. I'm listening to offers for my bullpen arms and would be willing to part with any of them. I have a price in mind for each. A steep price. I doubt teams will be lining up. Same with Santana and Santiago, but it would have to be a fantastic haul to get me to pull the trigger for either of them. And if by some fluke Dozier, packaged with a couple of legit prospects like Vielma/Palacios and/or Baxendale/Bard (surplus) could fetch us a promising young rotation arm, great.

Ditto. Bob, can you rattle off the names of the five prospects that impressed and excited you most the first time you saw them? And which several prospects currently at EXT do you think have the best chance at becoming MLB studs? I realized they may be the same names. Thank you so much for these reports!

I'm not big.

I believe that was Bremer once again. First, looking at the team ERA for Cleveland and saying they have "the worst rotation", then glancing at the road record and home record and asking Morris something about the team hitting better on the road because they're relaxed. Morris basically suggested maybe it had something to do with facing pitchers who were performaing poorly. Like Ubaldo tonight.

....said his mom, quietly, to herself.

I agree, and Mauer was looking for a specific pitch. A ball.

Jeez....Bark, keep yours. Dave, can we be friends?

Holy....I want one of the pipe dreams YOU'RE having...

Hey, quit peeing on my pipe. Please pass the opiates.

A friend. Yeah, right.

I don't want Escobar off the roster. However, I want my GM to ALWAYS be looking for opportunities to sell high from surplus in exchange for prospects. The Eduardo Nunez trade for example. The Giants took Nunez and his $4M cost, likely motivated by both need and thoughts that he could keep it up. They gave up a prospect in Mejia they knew had a higher projected value, but were willing to let the Twins assume the risk that it would never be realized, exactly the kind of risk trade-off I want the Twins to assume. The Giants would probably like to give Nunez and his .290 OBP back to us in exchange for Adalberto. So yes, every other GM in baseball would be aware of the fact that, in Adrianza and Escobar, we have a surplus of one and will listen to an offer. Take your pick, but "overpay", please.

I wish all cats were like that. The birds could breath easy then.

Thanks for the reminder to read the labels on products like Preparation H. Very topical.

Predictable. First pitch called strike. ball hit in the air to left.

Sorry I was unclear.

I'm finding this information difficult to overcome.

Man, that was hard work. One last comment. I apologize in advance. IF I had posited that the ONLY variable that impacts a prospect's results was, say, coaching, several of my pals on here would have strongly opposed that argument and one of them would have tried to hurt my feelers. But instead, I argued that we put too much emphasis on the whole messy selection process itself and give too little consideration to other factors that contribute to success. If I hurt anyone's feelers during the course of the discussion, I assure you it was unintentional, but I recognize I can be grating to some, so I apologize if you were offended by my words. Peace.

Nice description of Gonsalve's experience and performance, and what a treat to have access to his own words on the matter. Thank you, Seth.

Source?

I'm wondering if you know what a straw man argument is. If you do, I take offense at being accused of intentionally misrepresenting another person's argument here. But I'll assume you're not making that accusation. I agree "no one in the world"said they knew how good Youkilis was going to be. But neither did I. To suggest I did might very well be a straw man. Oh, and I never called anything a "crapshoot". That's not a description I'd generally use to discuss something so complex and nuanced. Reiterating here: I have asked others to put forth an argument that reconciles the inconsistencies between "skill" in one round and "withholding" that skill in the next half-dozen rounds by a given team. I'm merely pointing out the absurdity of this idea. I asked the question: if Boston didn't know what the other teams thought of Youkilis, weren't they lucky to find him still available for them to select? And if they did indeed exhibit superior scouting acumen, help me understand this. Did Boston rank him 30 picks better than the next team? Ten? And how much extra skill do you think this suugests? And missing on Dozier implies no skill deficit ? And don't just add up some WAR and call it a day, pretending no other factor played into Youkilis's development and eventual success after the scouting decision. Don't you think there's at least SOME portion of his WAR that could be attributed to good development, or the Green Monster, or good teams, or good coaching? You stated a couple of "facts" you couldn't possibly know, BTW. For example, another team may have had Youkilis ranked as, say, a 5th rounder but also had three other prospects available to them prior to the 8th round that they had ranked even higher. You also suggest this infallible connection between a team's player ranking (skill) and WAR, without accounting for any other possible variables playing into it and want to pass this off as a straightforward statement of fact. It isn't. Example: when Danny Hultzen was picked #2 in 2011, it was lauded as a great pick. He was "accurately ranked". Skill. Now ? No results. According to some, that equals skill deficit. I disagree. I don't believe skill played any role at all Injury did. Luck did. Really bad bad luck.

Sorry Mike, I can't help you there. It's a question with zero relevance in my mind. Maybe if I tripped out on LSD, I could ponder such a question. But you're choosing to assign an absolute to what I described that completely trashes the point I made. So let me repeat it for you. The scouts apply the same amount of skill whether the decision results in something good or something bad. Of course there's skill involved! But you and others are the ones who insist on a direct link between a scout's skill and a prospect's results. And even a team's results. I have NEVER said talent evaluation doesn't play at least a minor role in team results, have I? I have consistently, for many years, pushed back at you and others about your bad results/bad scouts mentality. It's the draft. It's messy. Scouts make good decisions that go bad. Scouts miscalculate all the time. There are other variables at play. I've spelled them repeatedly for the purposes of discussion.

I couldn't agree more. Thank you for bolstering my point. There's more than one reason Buxton's stat line is inferior to Sano's. Similarly, there's more that one reason the Twins have a worse record than other teams. I have put forth one argument and one argument only, and that is that the reasons for the Twins' historically crappy record is primarily due to roughly ten other factors much more than it is to being poor at finding talent through the draft.

Because it's an unanswerable question with no value whatsoever. Mike, the scouts have the same skills in every round. Why would anyone think otherwise? And if they apply the same skill regarding each and every decision, why isn't it painfully obvious that something other than their skill is coming into play? Because if good draft choices were solely the function of skill, wouldn't the skillful evaluators always make good choices? How many times can a team take a chance that another team will select a player they like before they're lucky someone else didn't take them? If a player is really a first round value but a team mistakenly believes he's a 9th round value, why do you insist on tying the mistake to a skill deficit and the fortuitous selection to a skill advantage? The same evaluator made a fortuitous selection in one round followed by six straight mistakes in the subsequent rounds. Strassberg was a consensus #1, Had the Nationals passed on him, I think we could all agree they weren't unlucky. No team in baseball would have passed on him. If Strassberg delivers a HoF career, according to many of you, this would mean that Washington had superior talent evaluators on staff on that day. I think that logic is kind of weak.

That's a good question. If I had to guess, I'd say he had Hurlbut and Tepesch are a step better than the types of guys we're used to parading up here like Kris Johnson and PJ Walters and Cole DeVries and AJ Achter and...

I vote I really really really like him where he is.