diehardtwinsfan

I cannot emphasize this enough. I hate it when people say "only draft a hitter" or something like that. It's a very risk averse approach that doesn't take reward into account. And given that we like to slam the FO for being risk averse, I the idea that we should follow the Cubs model rather odd.

It was way too early to call Jay a failure. He pitched quite well in FTM. Yes, he struggled in AA, but that isn't unusual and he had the added problem of getting used to a starters workload along with full season ball. Even with Stewart I wouldn't be ready to call him a failure. No question his road ahead is looking less promising, but given his background, I'm not ready to write that off, especially with a FO overhauling the development side of things... but when KLAW is saying the Twins are doing fine here, I'm not too worried.

I'm curious about where he would have been drafted pre-injury. I personally love some of those later round injured guy picks that would have gone higher had they not gotten hurt.

yeah, I'm in the Green camp, but Faedo could make this a really easy decision if he goes all Strasburg on college ball this year... Here's to hoping!!!

he needs to stay healthy. 2 seasons not advancing beyond AA and spending too much time on the DL

By that definition, Santiago is the mythical replacement level player... or slightly above.

I understand this... I think. But when I read your posts in particular, it really comes across that way. That could very well be me, but I'm seeing a lot of disappointment on what was done (or not done) without a whole lot of lip service to what could actually have been done. It sure looks like making moves for the sake of making moves, because when you look at what moves were there to be made, there really weren't much. They went out and got a catcher. I'm not a huge fan of Castro, but he was needed and could actually work out quite well given the natural platoon with Murphy or Garver. They tried to trade Dozier. We all agreed (and they did too) that Dozier should be traded for SP help, and from the looks of it, that would have been JDL and not much else. There were no SP FAs worth getting, though moving May back into that role is the right answer. I agree they could (and may still) get help in the pen, though keep in mind that each reliever signed is going to block one of Chargois, Melotakis, or Hildenberger (and by later this year possibly Burdi and Reed too). I don't think it would be smart to go north with 3 rookies in the pen, but making sure you have the space for some of them is (like it or not) a good idea. The reality is that the core is there now on the offense. Yes, defense needs improving, no arguments there, but that is something you're going to have to live with if you want to roll with Buxton, Kepler, Rosario, Polanco, and Sano. None of these guys are realistically going anywhere, and all need to play. But at least we won't see Sano in RF on any sort of consistent basis.

yeah, you could cut more. The furloughs already showed us it was possible. We have a running joke in the federal circles about people whose sole existence is to collect a pay check. That's a reality for government jobs at federal, state, and local levels. There's a number of reasons for it, and yeah, it's not simple by any means, but that means people may have to be held accountable for non-performance, or that we might have to actually modernize the government and reduce the headcounts accordingly. That doesn't happen presently. I've personally witnessed projects being rolled back because they were too effective and it would have meant that people would be laid off. My first government job, it took them a month just to get me a laptop and user account. A month. This has been true, I might add, in just about every Federal org I've walked into. We aren't talking saving an hour or too here and there. We are asking a 1000 pound human being to get their weight down. The problem is that neither party has the guts to do it. It's not a Republican or Democrat specific problem. They both ultimately grow the government. The only difference is what they choose to grow.

When the Dept of Ed was formed, our kids were first world wide across the board. Where are they now? BTW, I live in the least funded district in the state of Indiana. I don't know every state, but our test scores and grad rates are one of the best in the state. It's not all about the funding. Simply throwing money at it will not fix it. That's my issue with any kind of government spending. Money gets thrown at a problem with no accountability and no thought for what the root cause is and whether or not money can actually fix it.

yeah, I disagree with the GOP there. Defense should not be exempt. There's plenty of waste there, and I've seen that first hand. Honestly, you could mandate 20% cuts across the entire federal space and likely not affect their deliverables (and probably still have room to cut). It's horribly bloated. There's plenty of places to reduce costs in healthcare without affecting the quality of service. It really isn't that simple. You're assuming that everything is reasonably efficient. It's not.

So because it happened in the early 1900s is proof that it will just happen again? That, I think, is a very unreasonable assumption and conclusion. Society has changed greatly since that time. Likewise, there's plenty of far more efficient and cost effective ways to prevent your fears that do not involve the creation of a massive federal bureaucracy.

I think this criticism makes a bit more sense as disabilities tend to be a bit more difficult to fund, not just in education either. The problem again as I see it though is that the money is there if someone wanted to make it a priority, but governments would much rather spend money on other things. You can get this by re-prioritizing spending, but at some point, we need to take an honest look on everything we are spending money on.

No, we really don't know that at all.

Underfunding is an issue b/c governments as a whole take your tax dollars and spend them on crap they shouldn't be spending it on. This is true whether it is federal, state, or local. I can certainly see the issues with funding, but I've yet to step foot in any government run organization and not see countless examples of waste (and I've worked with plenty of them). That includes schools I might add, but even if they are underfunded after cutting waste within the schools, there's still plenty of places that can be cut at the state level which would allow for more funds into education. Governments as a whole love to cry poor about this kind of stuff as it is easier to say "raise taxes" than it is to cut waste and hold people accountable. In the case of federal funding, we are spending billions of dollars on an org that is in charge of handing out billions of dollars. Kind of counterintuitive, is it not? Wouldn't the money spent on the Dept of Education be better spent on Education as opposed to funding a massive bureaucracy?

It was never a horse race between Obama and Romney. Sorry, won't grant you that one. I was laughing at my Rep friends that thought Romney had a chance. He was/is an empty bag of wind, much like John Kerry when he ran against GWB. A decent candidate wanting to affect some real change would have likely defeated Obama. I'll agree to an extent on the distribution, except that those polls got that distribution wrong in all the key swing states. They correctly had Ohio leaning Rep, but beyond the toss up calls in FL, they missed them all.

You can tell yourself that all day long. It doesn't make it true. Sans Fox News, there was a pretty clear media bias in Clinton's favor. I say this as someone who hated both candidates and voted for neither. It's really hard to say with a straight face that a bias didn't exist. It clearly existed. That, I might add, is a big reason why she lost. Everyone was reporting that she had it in the bag. She didn't.

The problem as I see it was that there was little to do on the position player side. Catcher was the only place where there was a clear need where FA had a clear upgrade. Everywhere else is manned by people that need repetition. Like it or not, that's what it is. On the SP side, where the need was clearest, there were no clear upgrades in FA. Again, that's what it is... these guys have to take some steps forward. I don't like the odds, but Nick is right that a ton of things went wrong last year. You cannot discount that.

I understand that. The problem is that he clearly wasn't ready when he got the call. Perhaps his issues were mental, in which case he probably needs to be in MLB, but I'm guessing Berrios, like many others before him, was succeeding purely on talent and not necessarily on what was needed to get MLB hitters out.... working on some of those things would be beneficial. I'd add that most pitchers his age aren't even in AAA yet, so I wouldn't put too much stock in the number of innings thrown there. He needs to work on some things. That said, I'd prefer him in the rotation to Santiago any day of the week, but I think right now that Berrios is probably the first guy to get called up when someone gets hurt.

I don't blame her. Public education has failed people in this country. I realize there's a lot more to it than that, but US student's place in comparison to the rest of the world has declined significantly since the Dept of Ed was formed. The question at hand is can she fix it? I doubt that. Personally though, I'd hand it back to the states. I've got to think they would do a better job than what has come out of the Dept of Education of late. That, to me, is a big problem with centralizing power. One state screws up, 49 others know what not to do. One state does something well, 49 others are curious what they did. 1 Federal government screws up... and we're screwed. The converse is obvious as well, but thus far, the Dept of Ed. hasn't done much well.

Honestly, both parties have been doing this for a while. It's a big reason why I've been voting independent the last few elections. The constitution is valuable to each side when it's convenient. It's toilet paper when it gets in the way of the agenda at hand.

They haven't said much internally to be honest, but I'm not surprised at all. I've made it clear where I stand on the issue (if I haven't, to be clear, I don't side with Trump here). Edit: Ironically, some stuff came out today. I'm at a low bandwidth site, so I cannot see Nadella's statement.

Fair I suppose. My point though is that the same system that does approval ratings missed the fact that Trump was doing a lot better than they thought. Yeah, I don't expect him to have high ratings, but the people that put him in wanted him to fix a lot of broken things. It's no secret that Trump delivering on those promises won't make him popular. My point is that I'm not sure how much I'd trust those approval ratings. It's not a secret that the media was clearly in HRCs camp, and all of those polls they released during the election said the nation was too... but it wasn't. I'm not sure why it is that these approval ratings are suddenly more accurate than the failed polls from only 3 months prior.

If I was President, the litmus test would be the 10th amendment to the constitution... so there's my stance. But that said, I'm not sure the difference between stripping your freedoms away in small chunks vs. larger ones. At one point, that just gets silly. If that's the compromise worth accepting, then we are in big trouble.

Truthfully, I don't think Trump cares, and he may be approaching this from a one and done standpoint to 'fix' all that he sees wrong with the country. The flip side is that I wonder how much of this crap is simply the left falling for Trump's antics over and over and over again. The News media hasn't quite figured out just how little respect they have, and these approval ratings are without question tied to the same questionable practices that missed Trump getting elected in the first place. Here's some fun reading. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/op-ed-left-falling-trumps-173600932.html This kind of ties back into Drjim's article on post modernity, but telling none the less. Trump is going to end up with evidence of voter fraud. Millions of votes? Who knows. But that's all he's going to need to show he was on to something, and this doesn't take into account some of the questionable issues found during Jill Stein's recount, with pictures of broken tamper seals on voting machines found in heavy Clinton districts. Falling all over this crap is going to give the left a black eye and give Trump even more go-ahead as right now it just looks like a bunch of cry-babies screaming (much like the Reps during a lot of the Obama admin I might add). Trump is pretty good at tossing out some distraction bombs to keep the left off balance. He's smarter than we all give him credit for... which is kind of scary.

If you were truly worried about that, you would have rejected Bush, Obama, and Hillary as well.