Taildragger8791

The problem with your comparison is that first month stat line for Lindor is better than any single month that Buxton has yet compiled in the majors. And after that first month Lindor went on to crush it whereas Buxton has done nothing but flounder. He has shown almost no sustained improvement over ~180 plate appearances. He's still very young and flew through the minors with a lost year in 2014. Let him go work things out with a lower pressure environment for a while. I have no problem with lettings the struggling young players work things out at AAA away from the spotlight of the big club. That has to be a pretty toxic atmosphere up there right now. Meyer is a guy I really want to see put in the rotation to sink or swim, but that's more based on his age and service time at AAA already. If he bombs then move him to the bullpen until he either figures it out or plays his way out of the league. Polanco should be playing every day as well since he seems to be ready, but if he's just going to sit on the bench then I'd rather he keep playing at AAA instead of stagnating his development.

I don't get the unwritten rule part of it. I know the Twins are pretty wretched but I still don't expect my team to give up and quit trying only down 4 in the 7th inning. That is pretty far from being out of the game considering there were four separate 4-run innings in this series alone. As for the bonehead aspect, it looked like a pretty sure steal with that aggressive shift on. Players should always try to take advantage and hold opponents accountable for those defensive alignments. Why let them have their way with you? That's silly. The aggression and awareness is the best part of Rosario's game. Also, we may have had our "best" hitter up but Mauer is far from a sure thing right now. For the year he's hitting .250 with runners on base, slugging .313. Overall in May he's "hitting" .182/.262/.255. I'm fine with Rosario taking the initiative to improve the scoring opportunity via weak hit or wild pitch. That said, he still needed to go to AAA to work on his approach at the plate. I really dislike everyone getting their panties in a knot over one of the only players that seems to give a damn actually trying to win.

The money side of his contract isn't really the problem to me, although an extra $10-$15 million to play with might be nice. The problem is he's entrenched at 1B for years with a bat the seriously underperforms that position. That's one of the easiest positions to find a big bat, which we desperately need, and that option is off the table for the duration of his contract. Instead, we have to put our young offensive tackle in right field which is dragging down the overall defense and may be affecting Sano's offense as well. Even if Mauer's contract were $10 million/yr he'd probably still be entrenched at 1B with a full no-trade clause and that, to me, is the biggest hindrance.

I didn't say the player has to be perfect to advance. None of these players are close to Trout, not even Buxton (so far). Trout is a pretty extreme exception and I'll bet that if you analyze him you'll find that his strikeouts aren't because he's guessing, wildly hacking, or regularly missing in the zone. He has elite skills, recognizes pitches, and is disciplined enough in his swing zone to succeed. He was also gold glove caliber defense on day 1. On the flip side we have young players coming up that can't recognize or hit certain pitches, can't control the zone or draw a walk to save their life, can't get a bunt down, can't play the defensive position they exclusively trained in, and make mental errors on the bases and in the field. They often feasted on inferior talent and got away with bad habits and discipline because they got results. Big difference. Clearly there is an issue with how the players were being developed or allowed to progress so I have no issue with taking a step back and trying something different. Pushing guys even faster sounds like doubling down on the past mistakes.

I think we've all seen how rushing guys to the majors has worked out over the last few years. And I think everyone would agree it hasn't worked out swimmingly for a single player that was rushed up at this point. I'm of the mind now to just slow down and let guys develop. If they're being held down I'm sure there is an adequate reason for it that doesn't show up in a box score. Pushing a guy up based purely on results without regard to command of his fundamentals is a recipe to get blown up and exposed eventually.

Since the Twins won't have anyone voted in I could see the all star manager selecting Abad or something if he continues his run of success. Unless Mauer or Park gets pretty heated up over the next month.

With revenue sharing, tv deals, and favorable stadium deals some owners can make a lot of money off of bad teams. Especially if the roster is cheap enough or the fans are still filling up the seats. That's why Loria in Miami is so reviled in Miami for his multiple firesales where he drove the team salary down to $30-$40 million and raked in the profit sharing money. If a team can float around 75-85 wins most years they can sell enough hope to sell tickets and TV deals while keeping the payroll profitable and fans placated. I don't think Pohlad's goal is to wring every penny out of the franchise like Loria. But I also don't think he particularly gives a damn about the team as long as they're earning a consistent profit. If this team were still floating in the 75-85 win category and getting stomped in the playoffs like the mid 2000s you'd never hear from him, because that's enough to keep fans engaged and money rolling in. But even he knows that a product this wretched won't be profitable for long, which is why he felt the need to say something I guess. He knows it's approaching the threshold where it'll be difficult to get people back into the stadium we bought him to buy his $10 beers. Hopefully it won't take getting to that point to step out of his comfort zone and make a move.

Berrios has been a little off this entire season which probably led to the shorter leash on his call-up. He had a fantastic year last year, but this year he had issues throwing strikes in spring training and that carried over to the regular season as well. His first two minor league starts were 5 innings with 4 and 3 walks each, before he had one good start and got the call up. Then he walked 10 guys over 11 innings in 3 short starts in the majors which was putting a significant load on his teammates. I hoped he'd get a little more time but if they likely saw something in him that needs to get worked on, which I'm confident he will. He'll be back before long and be fine.

I've said earlier in this thread I'm all for getting Polanco playing time and even getting Sano to 3B. I don't see Dozier and Plouffe getting moved off their spot anytime soon though, so I don't know what you do. He's blocked until management or front office do something. I'm fine with Kepler getting time but obliviously they think he isn't ready, so I trust that playing at AAA is the right thing for him. I also think Meyer needs an extended opportunity given his age, but first he needs to get healthy and get on a roll at AAA. If he craters then throw him in the bullpen. Berrios has earned an extended opportunity, but you can't allow too many 1-3 inning outings. That puts a huge load on the rest of the team. He didn't start well this year and needs to get straightened out. I'd give him that chance before sending him down to work it out. He'll be fine.

I don't understand the heartburn over letting unprepared rookies work out their flaws in the minors. Nobody is saying Beresford, Mastroianni, or any of the underperforming vets are the answer to winning baseball. Throw that stupid strawman out the window and light it the f--- on fire. The proposal is to pull back the reigns on the prospects who are either 1) uncompetitive or overmatched at the big league level, thus stagnating or hindering their development; or 2) simply not improving on glaring flaws (ex: Rosario's plate discipline). Put them back at a level where they are still being challenged but aren't so overmatched that they can't improve. Put the Bad News Bears on the 25-man if you need to field a team, it literally doesn't matter. Developing the prospects the right way matters. 2016 and probably 2017 is going to stink, so just accept it. We've seen too many guys come up and look flat-out helpless, whether immediately or after the first trip around the league. Considering all the complaints about guys lacking fundamentals and well-rounded games I'd have thought this was be a more popular idea. Edit: Of course there will be rookie struggles and adjustments, that's expected and they should be allowed to work through it. But after a large enough sample size you have to enforce a threshold of competence or see improvements being made. Considering most of these players we're talking about have maybe a half-season of AAA experience it doesn't seem unreasonable to let them work it out down there for a while and see if it helps. The other approach wasn't working.

It's good for Buxton, which by extension is good for the Twins. He wasn't improving at the major league level. It's one thing to challenge a guy, but it's another to be completely overmatched. You can't learn that way, which is the point of sending him down to where he can have some success while working on the holes in his game. For Rosario, I think it's necessary for a different reason. He needs a reality check that his approach won't keep him on a major league roster forever. He gets away with it now while the twins are non-competitive, but you can't drag that swing-for-everything-walk-for-noone approach onto a playoff team. His plate discipline hasn't improved at all, and if he won't commit to improving that in the majors then maybe he'll find some motivation on the bus in Rochester.

I think most fans wanted every prospect that was close to ready to be in the majors ASAP and start getting those adjustments out of the way. We've seen the results of that and it's clear that few of the guys coming up were actually at that level of readiness. My thoughts: Sano is the only one that looks like he needs to stay. I suppose he can stay in RF until someone needs to come up, then move him to 3B and put Plouffe wherever. The bench, trade, doesn't matter. He's an alright piece but not the future, so we shouldn't mortgage the future for the sake of veteran-ness or whatever. Personally, I think playing out there is affecting his hitting but he should be talented enough to work through it. Berrios should get a couple more turns to work through things. If he doesn't, I'm confident he'll figure it out at AAA soon enough and be back up in no time. Polanco should stay but he's blocked at 2B and 3B until that toilet unclogs, so send him to AAA until the creative spark hits our manager and he figures out how to weave him into the lineup regularly. Hopefully before 2018. Rosario and the rest stay in AAA until they force their way up again. I wouldn't hold August 1st firm for everyone but I'd certainly hope they all force their way back onto the MLB roster by then. Anyone who hasn't simply wasn't ready anyways, or maybe wasn't as good as we thought. At this point the team's earliest timeline to compete is 2018 or 2019, so there's no sense in rushing the first few prospects out of the oven only half-baked just to watch them flail. It's depressing seeing hyped rookies come up with missing fundamentals, glaring issues, non-competitive performances, and then fail to improve. Not everybody is a Puckett or Mauer that learns at the big league level, some guys need that development time and the carrot of a promotion to iron out their flaws. We just need to have patience, bring them up as they're ready, ride out the unmovable veteran contracts, and find another use for that ticket money until then.

I have a feeling Gonsalves will struggle initially in AA with the better and more patient hitters. If you're just looking at hits, Ks, and ERA he looks pretty fantastic. But I see a fair number of walks and the inability to go beyond 6 innings per start, which indicates to me that he's throwing too many pitches. It's possible he's nibbling around the zone and being helped along by inexperienced hitters. Regardless, he's getting away with it now and it would be good to see him tested against better hitting to see if he can adjust.

Unless they can also pitch, catch, and play SS they're going to need to be awfully herculean to lift this team on their shoulders.

Using the BB codes for tables, table headers, and table rows. But I'm too lazy to type that all out so I cheated and used an HTML table generator and just used a text editor find/replace to swap all the "<" and ">" with "[" and "]". This was the table generator I used: http://www.tablesgenerator.com/html_tables Make sure you click the checkbox for "Do not generate CSS".

Finally figured out the tables. Sorry for the 100 edits if anyone was seeing some weird formatting.

With Harrison, you mention that his slugging percentage is 50 points higher but his overall average is 57 points higher. That means he's punching a few extra singles through but actually demonstrating less power. If that's luck-driven, as spycake alludes to with the elevated BABIP, then it doesn't appear like he's turned any sort of corner. Maybe he's hitting more line drives and will sustain a fraction of that increase in average, but he's trading off 2Bs, 3Bs, and K/BB rate right now. If he maintained this pace here's what his numbers would look like in the same number of at-bats as he had last year: [table] YEARAB1B2B3BHRAVGSLG 2015396632345.240.356 2016396911817.295.399 [/table] You can shift those hit types a little but this is enough to get the idea. Those would be pretty underwhelming full-season stats from a 23-year old 3B at AA.

Lately, Meyer is like that person at the office who just seems to float around until everybody loses track of what they're working on. Eventually people realize that nobody is sure what that person does around here, and at this point they are too afraid to ask. Meanwhile, they keep collecting a check while chugging away on their cat blogs (probably).

How do I 'unfollow' this game thread before my coworkers break my buzzing phone over my head?

The rain didn't show up, so Hughes took care of that on his own.

That doesn't sound like an accurate representation of Meyer. My impression was that Meyer has a great fastball & curveball, but an underwhelming changeup and issues with control/consistency on the latter two. The only problem I've heard about his fastball is when he gets wild then focuses too hard on throwing a strike, and ends up grooving it right down the middle.

Hopefully that helps him make better contact, but that would only be half the equation with Buxton. His primary hurdle to another call-up is still going to be pitch recognition and handling breaking balls. K-rate and BB-rate are the key metrics for him to demonstrate MLB readiness. But it's fun to see him hitting again, that's for sure.

Is there any concern around Gonsalves' walk rate? He's around 3.3/9 for his career but it's climbed to nearly 4.0/9 in High-A. He had a good start this season but it's been climbing again the last few games. I wonder if his promotion will be held off on the worries that it could get a lot worse at AA? Burdi/Reed and others have shown how tough that jump is for pitchers who aren't consistent strike-throwers.

This isn't how the internet works, fellas. I'm going to need you to pick up your standard-issue weapons of ad-hominem & strawman attacks and resume your fight to the death of your dignity.

I don't know why anyone thinks Nolasco has trade value. He has a $12 million salary through next year and has two career seasons with a sub-4.50 ERA (2008 and 2013). The shine from his first 4 appearances this year is already wearing off after his last 2 starts. Nobody is going to be fooled by a few weeks of performance. We're stuck with him unless the Twins want to eat his contract in a trade or dump. Considering Ryan's track record of trades the last several years, I don't think I want him doing any dealings anyways. I'd be happy if he lost or sat on his phone until he retires.