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diehardtwinsfan

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Everything posted by diehardtwinsfan

  1. diehardtwinsfan
    Well, if you pay me $50, I'll take them off your hands. Do I need to go to the game?
  2. diehardtwinsfan
    I think North deserves the right to defend himself.
  3. diehardtwinsfan
    He probably thought it was funny too.
  4. diehardtwinsfan
    Color me very skeptical on that statement. If the guy doesn't have the mental makeup to handle not getting promoted on a slightly faster timeline, he's not going to have the mental makeup to make it in MLB at all. If this were the case, then I'd be really curious why it is that Berrios, May, and Meyer all struggled once they reached the bigs. Not to mention that there's likely a bit of revisionist history here as none of these guys (minus Meyer who wasn't effective at all last year) have spent extraordinarily long periods of time at the same level.
  5. diehardtwinsfan
    Probably a larger sample. Granted he's been good, but were are still in SSS territory. He'll be up soon enough.
  6. diehardtwinsfan
    I'd say that's a pretty decent player. I think if he can cut down the Ks though, he can be better than that to be very honest.
  7. diehardtwinsfan
    I really don't get the Gonsalves consternation (on both sides). SSS was saying promote him, and now he's had a couple not so good starts. Overall, he's been fine and will probably see a promotion within the next month baring a complete collapse or injury. I have no problems waiting beyond a small sample for a promotion. Anyone can be hot for a month, nothing wrong with making sure that it isn't simply that.
  8. diehardtwinsfan
    Walker has struck out in 50% of his at bats right now in Rochester. Slow down and read that again... 50% I like the fact that his walk rate is rising, but he still has to get that K rate under control. He's on the 40 man, so giving him a 15 day stint once or twice this season might be nice, but I still think we need to temper those expectations a bit. He needs time in Rochester, and he needs to bring that K rate down. Hopefully, this is the start of something clicking with him and we will see some better numbers (at least in terms of Ks) over the next few months.
  9. diehardtwinsfan
    Makes me rethink my dislike for the Hunter signing last year. Like it or not, he was that guy. The problem is that there's no way to quantify that type of an impact.
  10. diehardtwinsfan
    I think it's more common than we realize. The average age at Etown is around 20. You won't get that number with HS/international players. Lots of teams have college players there, enough to bring that average age up to 20. Rookie leagues are there more for transition purposes just as much as they are for development. These guys are going from full time school/part time baseball to full time baseball. They are transitioning from metal bats to wooden. They are transitioning from being the big man on campus to one fish in the pond, and they are now being tossed in an environment where they need to be real careful about what types of friends the make. I don't think the issue is an extra month or two in the low minors. But based on what you posted earlier, it's clear that guys are being pulled out of the high minors far too quick. I'd also say that I don't think the Twins are putting enough emphasis on reducing those strike out rates. Conventional baseball wisdom used to be that an out was an out. While I don't think one K is necessarily bad, a high K rate is indicative of a pattern of behavior that leads to giving away far too many at bats, and it's a pattern that can exploited quite easily at the major league level, as teams value pitchers who can get the K. It's why I'm perfectly fine leaving a guy like Walker where he's at, and it's why I'd have been perfectly fine letting Buxton start this season (and spend most of it) in AAA. Just because a guy can post a sexy stat line doesn't mean he's ready to move up.
  11. diehardtwinsfan
    I need to bookmark this for the next time I hear someone say the Twins promote too slow. Honestly, I see impatience here as the root cause, though in a few cases, need and a potential option on the 40 man certain plays in. A cup of coffee is one thing though. Handing a job to Buxton when he's clearly not ready is a whole different thing. 2015 was a breath of fresh air after a really bad four year stretch, but I think this reinforces (for me at least) that most of these guys still need(ed) more seasoning in the high minors.
  12. diehardtwinsfan
    Chargois will be up at some point. I'm guessing the others will likely be moved some time next month.
  13. diehardtwinsfan
    No, not unreasonable. I'm more referring to some of our own suggestions of what we would do. I'm pretty convinced that if the collective here ran the Twins, we'd have nothing but 90 loss season in our future too. We get tunnel vision b/c we don't really pay attention to how other orgs are run and hold the Twins to a standard that no MLB team could reasonably reach. I don't have a problem complaining when they things wrong (the chief of which was not having a good CF backup plan, and lesser issues was not addressing the SP log jam by trading Milone this offseason when he might have netted a scratch off ticket). I'm not sure the average fan has a good understanding of baseball economics much less what it actually takes to develop and acquire talent (and I'm not claiming that I do either). Lots of folks on the board seem to think that struggles are nothing more than a player getting unlucky and that free agents can be picked up and discarded in the same manner that they are in the NFL. Others would trade away the farm for vets on the wrong side of 30 (see Shields, James whose name comes up here frequently or even better, go look up all the threads saying we should get Nolasco/Santana prior to them being a Twin) while others would waste service time calling up guys who have no business playing in the majors with the idea that they should just be able to succeed. Others expect results after a dozen games and if they aren't there simply write the guy off as a bust. I realize that these are all different people with all different manners of view, but I suspect that just about everyone of us would end up unemployed in a short manner if we got to move from armchair GM to real GM. I'm not saying we shouldn't criticize the front office because quite frankly, they deserve it at some times, but I am saying that we should probably approach it with just a little bit of humility, because I think we all suffer from that tunnel vision in one way or another.
  14. diehardtwinsfan
    I won't argue that there are some on this board that will criticize no matter what, but we did all have different opinions of what should be done. I'd have rolled with Sweeney or signed a stop gap CF on a 1 year contract. I'd have also traded Milone. I probably would have kept Plouffe based on what Todd Frasier netted in his trade, and as such, Sano would have been in RF. I agree that no one saw this collapse, and that makes me wonder if they will regress a bit positively, but I think my bigger concern right now is the decision to go young when your manager refuses to play young talent. Something has to give there. I was pretty happy with Molitor last season, but if Molitor has Gardy level distaste for young talent, then quite frankly this was an awful hire. I could care less about shifts and stats (OK, maybe not), but truthfully, the most important aspect of Gardy's replacement was the ability to develop talent. I'd think that could be flushed out pretty easily in an interview.
  15. diehardtwinsfan
    Or perhaps we at TD have a bit of tunnel vision with respect to how difficult it is to both identify and develop talent Honestly, it's probably a bit of all 3. The Twins aren't perfect as an org, neither is everyone MLB wide, and quite frankly, we do put some pretty unreasonable expectations on our front office as well.
  16. diehardtwinsfan
    Buxton wasn't that good his first month, nor his second. He had plenty of time to learn on the job and didn't improve. That's what happens when you're overmatched, and it is why he needed to go back down. I wouldn't fault the Twins for sending him down. He's not ready. I would fault them for not having (or using if you count Sweeney) a viable option in the first place.
  17. diehardtwinsfan
    Agreed, and if everyone thinks said guy is the BPA, then I suspect the Twins would draft him. When the disagreements happen, I'm guessing things like need suddenly factor in a whole heck of a lot more... and they should... If you have 6 players that everyone likes equally or close to equal, I'd draft the catcher or the pitcher in that group.
  18. diehardtwinsfan
    Like it or not, it is good in a way. We may not like Maestro up on the major league team, but Buxton and Rosario certainly haven't cut it. They pretty clearly needed more time in the minors as they are both clearly overmatched at the moment. Kepler isn't really a CF, and truthfully he's finally starting to come around in AAA (he was pretty bad in what little PT he's had thus far). Walker hasn't been very good in AAA either. It's bad from the standpoint that there was no real backup plan for CF, and this is a scenario where you go out and get that 1 year stop gap/make good type contract. Perhaps that was supposed to be Sweeney, but Buxton hardly earned the job out of spring training and yet Sweeney was cut despite out performing him. The problem with going with the kids so to speak is that you have scenarios like Rosario and Buxton. This is hardly unique to the Twins, and it's fairly common when you think about it. It's the big debate between win now and win later. You go with the kids, you're choosing win later, which isn't going to go over well with some fans, and you may have to make adjustments like Maestro because they didn't cut it. That's baseball. It sucks, but that's how it is. You go spend a lot of money, you choose win now, but as soon as that age curve hits, whatever money you still owe is still owed. This isn't the NFL, and you don't get to just cut them. It's why we are still cursing the Nolasco contract and why no one likes the Mauer contract at the moment.
  19. diehardtwinsfan
    I suspect he'll get his shot, though given that he started in AA, I don't think it's unfair to start bashing management on this one. He did his job there and is now getting a tougher assignment in AAA. He'll be up soon enough.
  20. diehardtwinsfan
    This goes back to why I say BPA is ridiculously subjective. Trout slid into the 20s. Pujols got passed on by every team multiple times. BPA is easier to tell in hindsight, but the reality is that with foresight, there's really no such thing. Drafts fall into tiers. As Jeremy noted, there's a clear top tier ahead of the Twins. None of those guys will be available when we draft, yet some will mostly likely fail. Their failure rates will be lower than those in the tier below them, but some guys who go lower will be better than some of the guys drafted above them... and then there's the whole debate as to what constitutes a BPA. I doubt you could get TD to agree, much less a half dozen scouts in a war room. You have factors such as position (up the middle vs. corner, pitcher vs. hitter), ceiling, floor, the likeliness of hitting either, not to mention the much harder to quantify intangibles such as mental makeup, attitude, work ethic, and how exactly an 18-22 year old kid is going to handle life as a professional athlete or how they will handle the signing bonus if drafted high enough. I'm commenting more on the idea that some posted saying the Twins didn't draft BPA except in 2012. It's easy to say in hindsight when without question they got the best of what was available at their pick (though even now I'd hardly call that a sure thing given that neither Buxton nor Berrios are stars at this point). In foresight, however, there's no such thing. There's no magic formulas that are completely objective that you can use to quantify who the best players. You cannot objectively quantify a kid's mental makeup, attitude, leadership skills, etc. You can only guess on how they will physically develop (though at least this one can have some objective criteria). You can watch them hit a High School curve ball, but that means absolutely nothing about their ability to eventually hit a major league curve ball. You can only project, and there's no universally objective way of doing that. My point, after all the rambling, is that I absolutely hate the way we use the term BPA around here as though it's a sure thing that's easily quantifiable. It's only obvious in hindsight, and the only thing you can really try and do is learn from the mistakes as to why Albert Pujols got drafted in the 13th round, or why Mike Trout slide to the late first round. BPA pre-draft is like the replacement player we use to calculate WAR. It's a myth. They are easy to find once the dust has settled, but don't really exist until well after the fact.
  21. diehardtwinsfan
    I figured Dean would get a shot before Berrios (not on the 40 man at the time) and maybe Meyer (though Meyer to be honest earned his shot), but yeah, there's been lots of change... I'd really like to be a fly on the wall in a conversation between TR and PM. Really curious why guys like Polanco and Kepler just sit the bench. That's fine for a couple days, but at one point, you have to just play them. I'd rather they have added Beresford to the 40 man and let him sit the bench than to do that with Polanco. The same with Dean and Meyer. Polanco and Meyer have talent to have an ML future. Dean and Beresford are on the fringes. If you're going to just put the guy on the bench, I'd have brought up those two.
  22. diehardtwinsfan
    The reason why Trout slid was that he had question marks. The same could be said for Berrios to be fair. This is my problem with BPA. It's much easier to tell in hindsight, but not so obvious with high school or college players. When you look at the tiers that develop every year, there will be players in said tier that fail, and some that succeed.
  23. diehardtwinsfan
    He's 18.... Perhaps he found daddy's secret liquor stash. I hear that dehydrates you too, but I'm not speaking from experience as I've apparently never had a hangover in my life (and not for lack of trying), and I'm sure daddy is keeping it well stocked given the product presently on the field that he's forced to watch.
  24. diehardtwinsfan
    I'm actually more interested in their second round picks. There are two catchers that look to have a decent ceiling that will likely be there at that point. I'm hoping they walk away with one of them.
  25. diehardtwinsfan
    Herrman could never really hit, so I suspect his current OPS is more in the SSS category. If he had, he'd still be in MN.
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