Mr. Brooks

Still no word on Meyer? If he's being blocked at AAA by Andrew Albers I think I'm gonna lose it.

Please, I can't handle the thought of turning over to Antony, and having to watch a 70 year old Terry Ryan come out of retirement for tenure #3 when it fails epically. I've had a LOT of patience these last 6 years, and I'm willing to be patient for a few more years if there is a legit blueprint to success laid out. If the replacement comes from within though, I just don't think I can do it. I don't think I can handle perpetual bad baseball with no payoff in sight.

1) Agree completely. He throws 95 and had some bad luck and SSS contribute to his results this year.But, even if he turns it around in LA, who cares? This team has no chance to compete this year. Fien had no chance of contributing to the next contending team. And with his awful start, it would take months to maybe flip him for a lottery ticket in July. But, his spot should have went to Chargois, not another older filler like Kintzler. 2) The Perkins deal was fine. Where you can blame Terry is for not trading Perkins when he had value. Perennial 90 loss teams have no need for a closer, and it was highly unlikely he'd be a valuable player by the time we were ready to compete. The shelf life for elite closers, outside of Rivera, is pretty short. I'd say half this board was begging Terry to trade him at the time, so it's not hindsight. 3) I'm not sure worse contracts have ever been moved, and I don't think even a full year of this production is going to convince anyone to take that contract. But, it's a moot point. Mauer would never agree to a trade. 4) Personally, yes, I would have traded Plouffe for whatever I could get, even if it's basically nothing. Sano is a potential superstar, and you build your team around him. 5) Jepsen is fine, but he should be a depth guy. A 6th inning guy, not a late inning guy. The Hughes extension is maybe the worst decision I've seen an executive make in these parts, and I've lived through the Joe Smith deal and David Kahn, so that's saying a lot.

How well would he have to hit to climb higher than 6th in a bad lineup?

In what way is Park not ready to bat 4th?

Well 860 isn't always enough. Some players take longer than others to figure it out. Hicks was a nearly league average hitter last year. And, has roughly the same OPS+ as Torii had through 860 ab's. He showed last year that he can be a good 4th ofer/fringe starter (1.2 WAR), and may not be done developing.

Sorry Nick, the odds of this many players on the same team "slumping" being unrelated are astronomical. It leaves only two possibilities. Either these guys were never actually that talented, or there is something in the water, so to speak. Personally, I think it's a little of both. I think the Twins vastly over estimated JR Murphy's talent level. There were questions about babip and his Yankee Stadium numbers. Also, and admittedly it's a SSS, but I hope he had some nerves on defense, caused by his hitting slump, because his defense was awful. Eddie Rosario is not a major league hitter, and likely never will be. You can't swing at everything and succeed long term in mlb. Fangraphs projections knew this, many of us knew it, somehow the Twins did not. By the way, Fangraphs also predicted a severe defensive decline, which was criticized here but has been spot on. Eduardo Escobar is another guy Fangraphs also correctly pegged for serious regression. I'll admit, I was skeptical of Fangraphs on this one, but I will say that he's such a butcher in the field that any offensive slump at all is going to cause him to be a severe detriment. I also think the Twins underestimated how uncomfortable Sano would be in RF. It's clearly affecting his hitting, IMO. On the pitching side, it amazes me that such supposedly smart baseball people could look at Phil Hughes' 2014 season, and not see it as clearly an outlier compared to his career. Kyle Gibson should have been considered an obvious regression candidate with that awful k rate. It's extremely rare that anyone can succeed long term without missing any bats. This club decided to roll into the season with arguably their three best starting pitchers either in AAA or the bullpen (May, Berrios, and Duffey). Duffey earned a spot last year, in actual games. For him to lose that spot for what he did in pretend games was a joke. When will this team realize spring training numbers mean absolutely nothing? I suppose if they don't after this year, they never will. Then you have the bullpen. They admit it's the top priority, then do nothing. They say because they are counting on young prospects to step up. Ok, I'm fine with that, but only because I'm in favor of a complete rebuild. To pretend they could compete with "hope" as their bullpen plan is laughable. And while yes, Dozier and Plouffe are slumping, that's evened out by Mauer and Park far exceeding expectations. All of this is also not helped by bizarre on the field decisions like constantly having guys who can't get on base in the leadoff spot. Or bunting early in games. Or wasting May in blowouts. Or refusing to pinch hit for your sub .100 catcher. I'd say there has been some bad luck. They won't lose at this clip all year. But mostly they are reaping what they've sewn with decisions that were completely predicted to be mistakes.

Sano has an OPS of 1.021 in his career with RISP. On what planet is that not good??? He has a career OPS+ of 137. He started the season slow, sure, but he's been fine since, and is one of the best young hitters in all of baseball. Sano more than belongs in mlb, not AAA.

It's much to early to declare a winner in this trade.

When you say "each time he starts", you mean the exactly ONE time that he has made a start in mlb, right?

Yes, Span is a quiet guy. And a prototypical leadoff hitter and solid defensive center fielder. We've traded Gomez, Span, Revere and Hicks for: 1 year of JJ Hardy, a few terrifying innings of Jim Hoey, 7 bad innings from Alex Meyer, some hilarious excuses from Vanimal, a good but miscast Trevor May, and a catcher who can't catch, or hit. It really is amazing.

Personally, I don't separate AAA from AA much. I dont think it's really a jump. AAA is watered down with a bunch of AAAA talent, and minor league lifers with no shot, like Toby Gardenhire.

I agree with some of that, but in what way was Dozier rushed? He was 25 years old and had more than 1600 milb plate appearances as a 4 year college guy.

Yes, May's first few starts were bad. His debut might have been the most painfully bad I've ever seen.

Why July? If you think that the mlb club should always try to win, on principle, why should they stop in July? And if you think it's okay for an mlb team to play for the future, once it's obvious that it's not a playoff team, then why wait until July?

Well, both times in my lifetime that the Twins have pulled themselves out of oblivion, the mid 80's, which led to 2 WS titles, and the early 2000's, which led to several division titles, they did so by taking their lumps with young players probably didn't "deserve" to be in the majors. I guess we have a fundamental disagreement, in that I don't believe it's possible to rebuild in the way you suggest. It's my opinion that a few intermittent .500 seasons are their ceiling until they embrace a full youth movement.

And when is that backlog of starters going to go away? It's not. Hughes, Santana and Nolasco have multiple years. Gibson is under control for years to come. Berrios and Duffey appear to be ahead of him on the depth chart. That is 6 ahead of him, not counting Milone, who still can be team controlled if they wish, or Meyer, who is technically ahead of May on the SP depth chart at the moment, but unlikely to be a long term fixture. By the time a couple of those guys leave, you'll have guys like Gonsalves, Stewart, Thorpe, etc. ready. There are always going to be "too many" starting pitchers.

If a team plays every game with only winning that game in mind, with no thought towards the future, how will they ever develop players for the future? Well, there is one way. They could go out and spend 250 million per year building a team completely through free agency, but that is never going to happen here. You can only learn so much at AAA, and for 99 percent of prospects, no amount of minor league development is going to make them better than the guy they are replacing on day 1. So, how would any of our prospects ever get mlb playing time?

If Molitor really believes that, then he needs to be fired, immediately. This team has ZERO chance to make the playoffs at this point. They'd need to play way over their talent level, with no hiccups, the rest of the way, just to get back to .500. To make the playoffs, after this start, they'd likely have to be the best team in baseball from this point forward. It's time to start playing for next year. Throwing away next year too, in the name of false hope this year, would be the worst thing they can do at this point.

7 mlb innings. If we are using his milb stats then your argument makes even less sense, as they are pretty damn good, yes even including last year.

Chief, he cruised through 2 innings, then ran into some trouble in the third, in part at least, due to some awful umpiring and defense. This was his first career start! He hasn't been given even close to enough opportunity to "show" anything, good or bad. The guy has 7 mlb innings pitched. Seven innings. Chief, how would you say Meyer and Berrios compared in their respective first career starts? How about May's first career start? I don't know where this idea comes from that you can call a guy a bust after 7 innings.

My first job was newspaper route as well. I was 12 years old, St Cloud times, delivered with my bike. Took about 90 minutes Monday through Saturday and twice that on Sunday's. My problem was that most of my customers were elderly and while their intentions were good, when it came to tipping I'm not sure that they realized what year it was.

Does it really matter? The Twins were never going to contend for anything during Suzukis tenure here. If you could have gotten some potential pieces for him that might contribute to the next playoff team you do it and worry about who plays catcher later. This one foot in, one foot out rebuild drives me crazy. Perkins absolutely should have been traded at peak value, as should have Willingham, Suzuki, Hughes and probably Dozier.

If the plan was to replace Milone he could have stayed in AAA another week, or piggybacked off Milones 4 inning start.

I would agree with Thrylos on that appearance. A relievers job isn't always fair but that's the life of a reliever.