John Bonnes

Derek Wetmore tried to pin Derek Falvey down on how many people are battling for the starting rotation. He didn't get far... http://www.1500espn.com/twins-2/2017/02/wetmores-5-thoughts-jason-castros-first-day-neil-allen-coolio-el-gato-grande/ It's find to talk about competition, but I'll be shocked (provided they're all healthy) if four rotation spots aren't already taken by Santana, Hughes, Santiago and Gibson. The more "competition", the less likely it is that Berrios or May get that fifth spot.

Cloudy bad seasons are supposed to provide some trade deadline silver linings. Left-handed starting pitching prospect Adalberto Mejia is the shiniest bauble the Twins acquired at last year’s deadline, but that’s about the only time you’ll see the adjective shiny in a sentence about Mejia. His strength is that he’s very likely to contribute to a MLB organization, rather than dazzle with enticing upside. Cloudy bad seasons are supposed to provide some trade deadline silver linings. Left-handed starting pitching prospect Adalberto Mejia is the shiniest bauble the Twins acquired at last year’s deadline, but that’s about the only time you’ll see the adjective shiny in a sentence about Mejia. His strength is that he’s very likely to contribute to a MLB organization, rather than dazzle with enticing upside. Age: 23 (DOB: 6/20/93) 2016 Stats (AA/AAA): 132 IP, 3.00 ERA, 126/30 K/BB, 1.12 WHIP ETA: 2017 2016 Ranking: N/A National Top 100 Rankings BA: NR | MLB: NR | ESPN: NR | BP: NR The Twins acquired Mejia last year when they traded Eduardo Nunez to the San Francisco Giants. Mejia signed with the Giants in 2011 out of the Dominican Republic, was in Low-A ball by 2012 and has basically climbed a level per year. The exception was a repeat of AA in 2015, which was likely the result of a 50-game suspension for using a banned stimulant. He’s had decent overall success – his career ERA in the minors is 3.70 – and was well-regarded but the southpaw with the low to mid 90s fastball never posted eye-popping numbers. That changed a bit last year for the 23-year-old as his strikeout rate in AAA climbed to more than one per inning and his walk rate plummeted to 1.9 BB/9. The prevailing theory was that the hefty Mejia’s improvement was at least partly due to losing some weight and gaining some conditioning in 2016. What’s To Like He checks a lot of boxes. He’s left-handed. He’s had success and been fairly durable. He’s just 23 years old. Last year he had an awfully good strikeout and walk rate despite moving up to AAA. He has a decent fastball and a slider that he can use effectively versus left-handers (who had just a .548 OPS against him last year) and a changeup for right-handers (.694 OPS against). Finally, he’s very close to major-league ready right now, if he’s not already there. What’s Left To Work On What you see is what you get. There isn’t a lot of upside here; Mejia's fastball isn’t likely to get any faster and the other pitches, while good, aren’t great. There will always be concerns about his conditioning. His walk rate and strikeout rate in AA in 2014 and 2015 were both pretty pedestrian, so it's essential he carry 2016 forward. His stuff suggests he’s unlikely to make an immediate positive impact in the majors; there are probably going to be some additional growing pains. What’s Next Mejia has an outside chance to break camp with the Twins, but he’s arguably eighth in the pecking order for the rotation’s five spots. Instead, it is far more likely that he’ll return to Rochester as a starting pitcher and compete for a chance to fill in a rotation spot when it becomes available. I’ll be surprised if Twins fans don’t see him at some point this year. There really is no hurry here. Mejia is just 23 years old and he has two option years left. Development is still the priority for Mejia, unless the Twins end up with a far more competitive team than we expect. Long-term, his upside is that of a durable and effective mid-rotation left-handed starting pitcher, which would have enormous value for the Twins. At the very least, a career as an effective left-handed reliever appears within reach, especially if he can pump up that fastball a bit in shorter stints. View full article

http://www.1500espn.com/twins-video/2017/02/video-jason-castros-first-day-batting-practice-twins/ Not much to say here, but if you want to see BP on day 1 of spring training, Derek Wetmore has some video for you. I doubt Castro was too proud of this one.

In today's update from Fort Myers, ESPN 1500's Derek Wetmore says that pitching coach Neil Allen is adding a new rule to bullpen sessions for the staff specifically to work on fastball command: A few quick thoughts to kick off discussion: 1. It's not exactly huge news that a Twins team is emphasizing "control" to their pitching staff. A quick look at last year's team stats show that the Twins had league average control last year. Is that really the issue? 2. Do the Twins think they took it a little too easy in spring training the last few years, given their regular season starts? Phil Hughes seems to think this is about making sure everyone is focusing: 3. Ultimately, I suppose this rule is up to the bullpen catchers to implement; and I suspect they are pretty forgiving, so I can't imagine it will really impact anyone's ability to work on their secondary pitches much. 4. I found it interesting that there wasn't any discussion with Neil Allen about this in the story. Just with Hughes.

Correct. I'm just looking for something more regular, or using the front page to focus the community on itself, or to help people become more involved.

I'm going to feel my way through this question a bit as I only have a vague idea about what I want to say here. I feel like the biggest thing holding back TD right now is that we need to do a better job of managing the community that we have. That mostly falls on me, but I'm not a very good manager, and the time it takes is onerous. But there is enough interest in helping such that a good manager could do some remarkable things. For instance: - It drives me crazy that we still don't do a great job of developing new writers, which is at the core of what the site is supposed to be doing. WE could do so much more in encouraging people to write and helping them develop and discovering new voices. Kevin has really helped with a lot of that, but that's an everyday job for someone. - We do a fair job of keeping up with news in our forum, but I would love if just about every story about the Twins, both locally and nationally, had a thread in the forums. The discussions about the topic or the writing or the viewpoint would really be interesting, and it would help people curate all the content out there. - Similarly, I'd love a daily "Twins Daily Links" story everyday that links to threads or stories or the previously mentioned threads about stories that casual fans can use to see more than just the front page. - I'd love more regular stories, maybe a couple per week, about Twins Daily or the community and how people can get more involved. Simple stuff about how to do your own blog or how to stay in touch with Twins Daily via email or twitter or the comment policy or our next event or something like that. - Events that we throw have been great, but I know there are more opportunities and each is an absolute time drain. A gifted event person could really do some great things for the community. These things aren't hard, and I'm fairly sure we have people or groups of people that would do them, but someone has to manage those groups of people, and evidence suggests that person cannot be me.

I’m sure we all remember May 23rd, 2009 as the debut of Twins pitcher Anthony Swarzak. But there was something exciting brewing up in the stands, too. Watching Swarzak (who threw seven scoreless innings) from the Home Run Porch was a collection of Twins bloggers, brought together by Parker. We met before the game at Huberts, but afterwards we split several pitchers at Dan Kelley’s and commiserated about the dead-end that blogging had become. We didn’t settle on the idea of writing together that night, but we walked away with the idea of seeing if we could, as a team, figure out a way to make blogging more worthwhile. We traded some ideas and at another Twins game in June decided to try to publish some content as a PDF file. That resulted in the Trade Deadline Primer, which had a foreword written by Phil Mackey. It sold only 87 copies, but that was about $800 more than we had ever made before. Plus, it was so much fun to write that we followed it up with the Offseason Handbook, which sold even better. That project convinced Maple Street Press to give us a try at writing a 128-page Minnesota Twins Annual going into the inaugural season of Target Field. And that convinced StarTribune.com to hand us a blog on their site. This is Part 2 of a series of articles celebrating Twins Daily’s fifth anniversary. Each of the Twins Daily owners will share their thoughts on the site's first five years and what it has meant to him. You can find Part 1, by Seth, here.There were failures, too. Our attempt to do a national Trade Deadline Primer was a disaster and Maple Street Press went bankrupt after our second annual. But we enjoyed working together, and it was often more rewarding than working alone. Still, none of us suggested combining sites and I’m not sure it even occurred to any of us. That had to come from an outsider. In the fall of 2011, someone from Fox Sports, who owned Scout.com, approached us about taking over their Minnesota Twins Scout.com site. The offer was tempting, but it meant turning our sites into one subscription site. While researching the feasibility of this, I met with the owner of GopherHole.com, which is not a subscription site, and he schooled me in the economics of his site. It sounded like we could do something similar. The tricky part would be building the site. We agreed to sink any money we made from the Handbook into trying to launch the site. Fortunately there was a software package which had most of what we wanted and which was customizable enough that I could handle the lightweight programming. We kicked around designs and names and worked on the site into January. I’m often asked if Aaron Gleeman and I talked about him joining Twins Daily. He and I had started our podcast that August, just before we were approached by Fox Sports, so after just about every podcast we would talk about the project. Shortly before we went live, we talked in theory about him joining our group, but he couldn’t due to the contract he had with NBC Sports, where he was working full time. I remember the moment we KNEW we had something. Parker, Nick, Seth and I were on a phone call and I think we were reviewing the site. Nick blurted out “Why the hell didn’t we do this five years ago?” We did some testing with friends, which finished in February. We planned on launching on Opening Day but decided we couldn’t wait, and launched on February 19th, when pitchers and catchers reported. On Day 1, the traffic was immediately five times what we expected. More surprising was that it didn’t drop much on Day 2. Within a month the site was passing the half million page view mark and we were swooning. That led to some growing pains. First, there was an odd attack – and even more odd, it was by Phil Mackey who had written the Foreword on our very first publication - on how bloggers had “no accountability” and “their platforms are too large in 2012.” Our response felt like a coming-of-age for the site. We also faced technical concerns that required lots of attention and Nick reached out to Brock. Brock may not know this, but that almost didn’t work out. Brock misunderstood our offer and I became a petulant, pouty ass. Nick gets the credit for straightening things out. Fortunately, it worked out because adding Brock to our team in June was perfect; he filled every need while also being a hell of a good guy. He also brought over the BYTO (Battle Your Tail Off) forums to the community. Another godsend happened about six months into the site. I started becoming so disgusted with the level of discourse in the forums that I was personally ready to shut them down if things didn’t change. We established a fairly clear set of guidelines but what really turned things was glunn, who took the forums over and established a strong culture of tempering passion with civility. It is one of the things that makes me happiest about Twins Daily and I am forever in debt to him and the moderating team which he assembled. The events have become popular and have their own history, and Parker gets most of the credit for kicking them off. It was his idea, I believe, to buy a keg at Huberts, across the street from Twins Fest in January of 2013. We wrote that we would just stand behind the bar and serve beers to anyone who wanted to stop by – and over one hundred people showed up. Our first Pub Crawl was actually a #GrandDrunkRailroad where we took the metro transit rail line toward the game and stopped at unsuspecting bars. I still remember the look on the face of The Cardinal’s bartender when 80 of us in red t-shirts just kept walking through the door. In 2014, we decided that I would step back from writing to work on trying to find ways to financially support the community and its writers. We have had a little luck with that, and I’m happy to say that if you write on our blogs and are promoted to the front page, you can make every cent we get for that story. On the other hand, we also tried to launch similar communities for the Wild and Vikings and those didn’t go as well. I learned a lot from those struggles, and among them is how fortunate and blessed we were that our members rallied around Twins Daily the way they did. Building this site is a lot of work, but it’s also a lot of luck, and I think we all feel very fortunate to have found it. That work and luck have created something that I would like to continue to see grow in depth and breadth, and I hope you’ll join in as we tackle some opportunities over the next five years. The new goal for Twins Daily shouldn’t be to look forward five years, but to look forward fifty years, at which point I’ll be very lucky if I’m able to visit the site as a 99-year-old. To thrive that long, Twins Daily is going to need to continue to rely on the people that provide so much of their free time to keep the community on track. Indeed, it feels like the focus will need to shift even more to the community than the founders, which was always the intention. We’ll explore that future together. Five years ago, the day after we launched, the future of Twins Daily felt limitless. To me, it still does. I’m profoundly grateful. OK. Now ask any questions you have. I promise I’ll be as candid as I can. I’ll also try my best to faithfully remember all I can, although I’ll admit that this story emphasized to me just how bad my memory really is. If gmail didn’t have an excellent search function, I would have messed up about half of this story. Fire away! View full article

I looked up the emails as part of my post tomorrow. I think we started talking to you in April and we all agree to things in June. And you may not know this, but the misunderstanding about our offer to you had me acting like a petulant ass behind the scenes. (To be fair, I was pretty burned out.) Nick gets the credit for understanding that we hadn't made clear what our offer was and getting it resolved.

Between several courses as the Iron Door Pub, Aaron and John debate just how far out of favor Byung-Ho Park has fallen, welcome Matt Belisle and discuss where he fits into the Twins 2017 bullpen, debate the contract status and pronunciation of Ehire Adrianza, cover Aaron's new condo news and whether it means he'll need a new Casper mattress, review the departure and return of Craig Breslow and recall Aaron's first concert experience. You can listen by downloading us from iTunes, Stitcher or find it at GleemanAndTheGeek.com. Or just click this link http://traffic.libsyn.com/gleemangeek/Episode_296.mp3?dest-id=74590 View full article

Aaron and John preview the Twins rotation battles, evaluate available free agent starting pitchers, recap the overwhelming response to the Winter Meltdown, evaluate the trade the Dodgers DID make and recap Aaron's successful battle with telephobia. You can listen by downloading us from iTunes, Stitcher or find it at GleemanAndTheGeek.com. Or just click this link. http://traffic.libsyn.com/gleemangeek/Episode_295_2017-02-02.mp3 View full article

I've met a lot of people that have worked at Target Field, and most of them have liked it. We got a press release that Delaware North, the Twins food & beverage partner, is having a bunch of job fairs this month, and I thought people might be interested in that. If you'll recall last year, the Twins were bussing people up from Chicago to work some of the April weekend games, and now they're doing all these job fairs, so it feels like it's a real opportunity. Here's the press release: Delaware North Sportservice to host job fairs for Target Field 300 seasonal, part-time positions available for upcoming Minnesota Twins season BUFFALO, N.Y. and MINNEAPOLIS (January XX, 2017) – Delaware North Sportservice, the food and beverage partner of Major League Baseball’s Minnesota Twins, today announced it will host a series of job fairs for part-time seasonal positions at Target Field. Delaware North is looking to fill approximately 300 positions for the Twins’ upcoming 2017 season. The job fairs will be held at Target Field and at the Sabathani Community Center in the coming weeks, a full schedule is below. Open positions include cashiers, cashier leads, supervisors, bartenders, warehouse porters and stockers, retail cashiers and sales clerks, servers and food prep workers. Candidates must be highly motivated, and customer-oriented. Applicants must be available to work evenings and weekends— all positions are event-driven. Successful candidates will earn competitive pay, free uniforms and meals and will receive paid training. Those unable to attend the job fairs can apply online at www.careers.delawarenorth.com. Job Fairs: Mon., Feb. 6 Sabathani Community Center 9 a.m. – 2 p.m. Tues., Feb. 7 Target Field 4 p.m. – 8 p.m. Thurs., Feb. 9 Target Field 4 p.m. – 8 p.m. Fri., Feb. 10 Target Field 4 p.m. – 8 p.m. Tues., Feb. 14 Target Field 4 p.m. – 8 p.m. Wed., Feb. 15 Sabathani Community Center 11 a.m. – 1 p.m. Thurs., Feb. 16 Target Field 4 p.m. – 8 p.m. Fri., Feb. 17 Target Field 4 p.m. – 8 p.m. Tues., Feb. 21 Summit Academy 2 p.m. – 6 p.m. Thurs., Feb. 23 Summit Academy 2 p.m. – 6 p.m. Wed., March 8 Sabathani Community Center 11 a.m. – 1 p.m. Wed., March 15 Sabathani Community Center 11 a.m. – 1 p.m. Wed., March 22 Sabathani Community Center 11 a.m. – 1 p.m. Locations: Target Field: 1 Twins Way, Minneapolis, MN 55403 Sabathani Community Center: 310 E 38th Street Room 120, Minneapolis, MN 55409 Summit Academy: 935 Olson Memorial Highway, Minneapolis, MN 55405 About Delaware North Delaware North is one of the largest privately held hospitality and food service companies in the world. Founded in 1915 and owned by the Jacobs family for 100 years, Delaware North has global operations at high-profile places such as sports and entertainment venues, national and state parks, destination resorts and restaurants, airports, and regional casinos. Our 60,000 employee associates are dedicated to creating special experiences one guest at a time in serving more than a half-billion guests annually. Delaware North operates in the sports, travel hospitality, restaurant and catering, parks, resorts, gaming, and specialty retail industries and has annual revenue of about $3 billion. “Delaware North” is a reference to Delaware North Companies Inc. and its affiliates and subsidiaries, including location-specific operating entities. Learn more about Delaware North, a global leader in hospitality and food service, at www.DelawareNorth.com. # # #

Seth's quote about "equal parts inspirational and intimidating" rings true. My gawd, what an event. I'll remember that one for a long time. THANK YOU everyone who helped and showed up.

Aaron and John are at Twins Daily's Winter Meltdown with Twins Special Assistant LaTroy Hawkins and Director of Baseball Research Jack Goin as well as the Twins Daily crew and emcee David Sitrick. You can listen by downloading us from iTunes, Stitcher or find it at GleemanAndTheGeek.com. Or just click this link. PLAY THE EPISODE View full article

[blinking lights] LAST CALL!

Thanks goulik. I'll reach out to your hotmail email address.

[blinking lights] LAST CALL! I have a few free tickets (and pint glasses and beers) set aside and I need a few volunteers to help out at the Meltdown. You might help people check-in, maybe help them take their pictures, collect questions for the Q&A panel or organize raffle gifts. But mostly you'll have fun meeting people who love to talk Twins. You'll also receive a ton of gratitude, because with 300 people coming this year, we could really use the help. If you're interested, please comment below and I'll reach out to you individually. THANK YOU, John

Aaron and John talk through their projections for the hitters on the Twins 25-man roster and learn from Tin Whiskers owner Jeff Moriarty about how craft beer relates to NASA. You can listen by downloading us from iTunes, Stitcher or find it at GleemanAndTheGeek.com. Or just click the Play button below. http://traffic.libsyn.com/gleemangeek/Episode_293.mp3 View full article

I didn't like the extension when it happened and said as much. But I can sympathize a little bit for thinking they had found lighting in a bottle. Hughes was a #1 prospect, and ace who never developed in NY, and he was 27(?) and had just shown that he was on the verge of being a #1 guy. At the time, the narrative was that the move from Yankee Stadium to Target Field had greatly helped him because of the dimensions of the two ballparks (and maybe whispered that the pressures inherent to the organizations might have helped, too.) One could argue that what screwed it up seems to be an injury as much as anything. Those are hard to predict.