gunnarthor

Hey Everybody, look! Conan O'Brien can sing! (and now let's calm down a bit)

Urias is a pretty big talent but his numbers are boosted a bit by his home park. He was basically on pace for a 2 WAR season - which is fantastic for a 19 year old kid, of course. But, even ignoring the injury risk I think it's a pretty fair question that he'd be better than Sano, although that might depend on how you view/measure defense.

I'm not old enough but the late 60s/early70s were pretty divisive with the war and Watergate. That's probably the most recent period - and there were a lot of radical bombings in this time which, if they happened now, would destroy the internet and absolutely lead to Boston Bomber style policing in every major city.. If you go back to the period right after WWI there was a similar economic divide and immigrant blaming which lead to the Palmer raids and other major events.

I think the Dodgers would probably take that because of the inherently high risk of pitching injuries. I think the Twins would reject that for the same reason.

There is certainly some resentment toward where they feel government dollars go - they think that the govt will rebuild inner cities (i.e. urban) but don't give the same care to rural Americans. They also are told that we give lots of money/benefits to refugees or immigrants who can take their jobs. Those aren't true - or are far more nuanced than that so for all intents and purposes they aren't true - but I don't think it's quite fair to label them as racists as we liberals typically imagine that word and ignore their concerns. Our side is told to think certain ways as well - how many of your liberal friends think Trump is committing treason? It's a ridiculous accusation but many on the left believe it. On my facebook, most of the Trump supporters I know post stuff about the economy and guns. Lots and lots of stuff about guns. I think I've only seen one really vile racist post and that was posted by some ******* I didn't know but my friend did.

This isn't really who's voting for Trump, though. This article was pretty good even if it was on a humor site. We liberals aren't helping ourselves by painting Trump supporters as racist whites and therefore we can ignore their issues. They are mostly poor and rural who have been abandoned (or feel abandoned) by our society. Rural areas have not recovered from the economic downturn that Wall St caused but see that neither party is rushing to punish Wall St. Why shouldn't they support a crazy outsider? http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/

Trump won't win. Clinton will win but the House will continue to be held by the GOP who will make the next four years worse than the last four years as we deal with multiple House investigations of the Clinton Foundation, the email scandal and the Obama justice department. We'll also continue to see minorities treated as second class citizens and judges continue to protect the justice system that allows it. It'll suck.

Interesting article on the A's and revenue sharing. The A's, despite being in a big market, get revenue sharing because of their ballpark. They get a check for 34m but agents and other teams are a bit concerned that the A's might not being using that money as intended. "The current collective bargaining agreement, which ends Dec. 1, stipulates that revenue-sharing checks must go toward improving on-field performance and requires teams to detail the ways in which those monies were spent. In addition to big-league payroll, other expenditures that qualify include adding scouts or front-office staff, improving technology systems, and signing international players. “There is leeway to justify other expenditures,” a union official said. “But if a team shows no progress year after year and most of the revenue-sharing spending is on non-major-league salaries, red flags go up. There are clubs that other clubs look at and say, ‘What are they doing? Is this really the best use of our money?’” There are no indications that MLB or the union have found the A’s annual reports lacking. They continue to receive heftier revenue-sharing checks each year." http://www.sfchronicle.com/athletics/article/Baseball-s-labor-negotiations-could-be-costly-10426202.php

Nice piece, Seth. The Twins have been taking a few PR guys in most of their recent drafts too.

I think his AAV will be less than that but I do think some team would give him four or five years. He might get something in the the Garza/Nolasco/Santana/Jiminez/McCarthy 4yr/50mish type deal.

I think you might be ignoring the pitchers they signed in FA.

Hellickson isn't a guy I think the Twins should go after. He's never pitched 190 innings and left his last start of the year with a (mild) knee injury. Doesn't seem like a safe bet. The fact that either he or Ivan Nova are probably the best FA starters means we shouldn't really expect much help from free agency. And some team will over pay for those guys anyway.

Profar never played first in the minors. Ian Desmond played 8 innings in the OF in the minors before TX put him in CF this year. Teams do it all the time. Players move down the defensive spectrum. Puckett to right, Yount to the OF, Betts to CF, Napoli to first. As explained above, the Twins had a few options - cut Plouffe for nothing or play Sano in RF. Moving Sano down the defensive spectrum isn't that controversial. The reason it didn't work is probably not because Sano is too big but probably because Sano didn't work hard enough to make the change work.

One other thing to consider, teams generally trade with teams that they are comfortable with but with both a new GM and new VP of Baseball (or whatever his title is), we don't know what relationships Falvey and Levine bring with other teams. But maybe the first question would be is would Dozier be a fit in either Texas or Cleveland? I'm not sure.

Or, you know, two years ago with Betts to show that it's been a constant thing throughout baseball history but feel free to ignore the examples that you don't like.

Sure he is. Sano is a lot more athletic than many athletes from the 70s. Here's some video of the 1972 ALCS - Those guys are not at the level of athletes we see today. It's not even close. It's nice that Winfield got a scholarship for basketball but so did Flip Saunders.

Sure. He is also a better athlete than Noel Jenke, Mickey McCarty and Dave Logan. Murphy is right - the differences between players today and the 80s (and the 70s in Winfield's case) is stunning. Offensive linemen didn't weigh 270, now some of them push 400 and run speed drills under 5 seconds. Baseball players are getting bigger and stronger. Sano is among the top tier for that right now but he's not unique and other players will eventually be bigger than him.

Sano is probably a better athlete than Murphy and Winfield. The players today are so much bigger, faster, stronger and just better than those from even the 90s. Dale Murphy said this: "“I don’t think I could have played today,” he says. “Hey, I’d love to play now. But, you know what? These kids are better than us. They’re better players. We might not want to admit it, but we go back and look at old highlights of ourselves and compare it to these kids now: No comparison. Everybody throws 95 mph-plus. Their swings are so much more fine tuned. They’re in so much better condition. And they make plays — I watch them and I say, ‘Wow.’ Athletically, I don’t think I could compete today.”" They could have moved Sano to the OF in 2013. Sure. But I don't see why. He was still playing third and learning the game. You don't move players down the spectrum until you have to. They didn't have to and they didn't know he'd miss all of 2014 and be in the majors in July 2015.

Good grief. Moving players around at the ML level happens all the time through out baseball history. Dale Murphy was a catcher in the minors and played literally one inning in the OF before Atlanta made him their center fielder. Dave Winfield was drafted as a pitcher, played firstbase in college and never spent a day in the minors. He learned the OF at the ML level. Mookie Betts didn't play in the OF at all until he was pressed into service in Boston. Craig Biggio was a minor league catcher who was moved to CF and 2B in the majors. etc, etc. All of these guys - like Sano - had ML ready bats pretty fast. The argument against Sano is that he was too big but that's not much of an argument. We already see some pretty big OFers out there - Stanton, Trout, Hamilton all look like NFL linebackers out there. Players are rapidly changing and getting much bigger - 270 pound outfielders will happen. The days of 6', 180lb Jack Clark LFers are long gone. The Twins had two choices with Sano - play him at third or play him in right. If they played him at third, it would have meant dropping Plouffe for nothing - there was no market for him. No team is going to make a 22 year old kid the permanent DH without eliminating every other option, especially when they are concerned about his weight. So they put the better defender at third. It didn't work. There were a lot of reasons why it didn't work out - I think the chief one was how little Sano prepared for it. Despite what the Twins said, Twins reporters reported that he didn't do much before ST and didn't seem to be very enthused about the move. Heck, several TD posters noted his apathy in ST toward the move. But the idea that the Twins were wrong to try this because he didn't play it in the minors - esp when he missed a full year in the minors but still made the majors at 21 - is ridiculous.

Well, it's 12:15 on a tuesday morning and I'm still playing the damn thing. Good lord, I'm too old to stay up this late. Just one more turn ...

Frankly, there's going to be a lot of speculating - that's what happens during the off season.

Well, Keller/Kuhl is not even close to what I'd want back. Basically, that's Tommy Milone and maybe Stephen Gonsalves. I think the fit is right but the offers in the comment section were a lot of 'our crap for your gold' type. Someone like Cole, Glasnow or Taillon are what we should try and get back. If we can't get guys like that, then there probably isn't a good fit with Pitt.

The reason they didn't play him in the OF in the minors was because he missed the entire 2014 season and his bat was ML ready by mid-2015.

The new FO has to worry about things like attendance as well as how ownership looks. If they bench Mauer, a lot of casual fans won't be as interested and benching him suggests ownership wasted 40m+ dollars. I doubt the FO is going to make those kind of moves early in their run when they have other things to focus on. And, as bad as Mauer was, he wasn't a complete black hole and it's a pretty open question if Vargas would be better.

Ugh. It's like both sides are trying to depress voters. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/fbi-reopens-clinton-email-server-investigation-230454