diehardtwinsfan

BG816, I do hope you are right in that they will go hard after Tanaka. I'm probably one of the more conservative people on this board in terms of how the Twins should operate, and like you I think this is the smart choice. I'm not as optimistic in them doing so. Puck, Here's the real problem with FA. 3 big moves won't make this team go from a 90 loss team to a 90 win team. It might make the 96 loss team drop to an 85-80 loss team depending on how things play out, and while that will be more beneficial to watch (and that's assuming they make the right 3 moves, which we all know isn't a given), I don't see how it makes sense unless the big moves are going to be around (and not blocking) the next wave. I like Tanaka from the standpoint of his age, as he's going to be playing out his contract in his 20s as opposed to his 30s. That said, if the Twins commit 100M to a guy, how much more are they going to spend? And how much more should they? I just don't see them handing out multiple huge contracts, and for good reason. They will need some flexibility as the next wave arrives. It's been said numerous times that no one knows which prospects will succeed and which will fail. That's all true, and it's all the more reason why you have money available so that you can plug the inevitable hole once the team is good again. Getting Tanaka (or Abreau as a consolation prize), and doing little else other than trading away some bullpen players for prospects would be an excellent offseason in my opinion.

I don't have a problem going after him, but I don't see why the Twins would trade a top 100 prospect and another prospect for a guy who is going to be around up until the point when the next wave gets good.. and in so doing they weaken the next wave. This makes sense for a contending team, not for the Twins.

Presley and Welker are better than Hernandez and Escobar... that's for sure. I guess I still don't get the consternation here. I doubt we get more. I don't think the return is that bad in that Welker can likely be a decent reliever for some time and Presley is at worst a 4th OF with some pop, and could possibly "click" and suddenly be worth dealing for something. Getting that for 2 months of Morneau is quite fine by me.

The problem is that they don't have jack squat to trade. Unless they think they can flip Castellanos for a stud P or SS prospect to flip to us for Perk... Their farm system sucks.

And if you are like the pastors I know, Sunday morning is probably one of the smaller parts of your job too.

There's probably room to keep him, but he doesn't exactly excite me in terms of potential.

You did quite well.

Sickles has his MN 2014 discussion here. It might be a good idea for us to chat about it. My take is that I have Meyer, May, Rosario, Hicks, and Sano all starting in AAA next year. All will be rotated in as positions open or as they earn it. Plouffe and Parmelee get one more shot and we get to see if Dozier is for real as well. Gibson starts in MLB for certain.

I'm not quite sure why people seem to think that the best player available and best pitcher available are mutually exclusive. Given the impact pitching has on games, the BPA is going to be a pitcher more often than not.

Well, a half dozen Asian names are in every other post. My guess is some bot logic is seeing that and thinking there's something Asian about the site.

Plouffe won't get you a thing. Half of this board wants him DFAd for good reason. I think he gets one more shot. With Sano knocking on the door, Plouffe needs to get off to a good start and show that he's mastered this level. If he doesn't, it's to the bench and a non-tender next season. If he does, he might get traded at the deadline or in the offseason.

Even this is a terrible deal. The Rays would jump on this so fast your head would spin. Way too much to give up. Price won't transform this team from 90 losses to 90 wins. Those four guys have a far better chance of doing that.

And where exactly are these number 2s? I doubt Garza is returning. Kazmir might sign here, and Johnson is quite the health risk himself. I'd rather get the 24 year old with less milage then spending big money on older question marks.

The trick to winning this one is winning the posting fee. After that, only the winner can negotiate with Tanaka, and the contract will typically run 5/6 years for an amount fairly similar to the posting fee. This is a bit different than competing with the big boys, their initial offer simply has to be the highest. If they want him, throwing 50-60M at the posting fee will likely get it done. If we are serious about him, I like our odds here much better than I do going after a Hughes, Kazmir, or Johnson, not to mention he fits in with the coming youth movement. Traiditional FAs can go back and forth until they get the contract they want and other teams stop bidding.

Kepler, Polanco, Salcedo, Vargas, Wimmers, Ibarra, Darnell, Achter, Beresford, Bigley, Morales

We will be better off when the American people send both parties packing. Not until then.

Inflation is one of the system costs that we rarely discuss, or understand. It's the reason why people do not save. Their purchasing power is reduced. Inflation is just another tax, and while it may make loans easier to repay down the road, that only works if your income keeps up or exceeds it. The problem is that for the last decade income has been stagnant, and adjusted for inflation, incomes are dropping. Inflation is one of the big things destroying this economy and at one point, your dollar won't be worth the paper it's printed on.

I agree with your premise that capitalism needs to be regulated, but the ironic thing is that what we have going with the affordable health care act does nothing to actually regulate it. As a matter of fact, the regulation that exists is setup in such a way as to make it more expensive and allow for certain individuals to pillage the system. Regulation has stopped being about right and wrong and is instituted in a way to make people rich at the expense of others. Neither party is regulating it in a healthy way. As for your second premise, Jesus went out of his way to avoid political issues. His enemies tried on more than one occasion to trap him there. His only advice on politics was to pay Caesar what is Caesar's and to pay God what is God's.

I missed the part where Jesus weighed in on health insurance. If you want to know what the Bible says, it calls us to care for the needy within our family first and for the church to handle those who have no family to take care of them. I Timothy 5 provides a good example of this, as Paul makes it clear that it's my responsibility to take care of the needy in my family and the church's responsibility to take care of those who have no family to take care of them. I'm not a tea-party guy, and truth be told, most of them probably have insurance, recognize that economic system is setup in this country to destroy the middle class, and just want to keep what little they have left. I agree that I shouldn't ask you to pay for my healthcare if I can afford it. I'll take it a step further, I should not be asking you to pay my medical bills at all. I know it sounds uncaring, cold, or even inhumane, but healthcare is not a right. The rich have always been able to get better healthcare than the poor, and if I cannot afford to pay for the options on the table, then I need to look into less expensive options. The ones who will be arguing with St. Peter at the gates of heaven are going to be the ones that did nothing while expecting the almighty government to do everything. Again, I've read Luke 16 many many times. This is a personal call. A call for me to give, to do so sacrificially, and make a difference. It has nothing to with affordable healthcare. When the Bible discusses subjects such as the future, worry, etc. it says something along the lines of "do not worry about what tomorrow will bring". Read Matthew 6 when you have a chance. Jesus commands his listeners not to worry about food and clothing etc. as God will take care of them. When it discusses things like sickness, it commands us to pray, lay hands, and anoint with oil (see James 5). It does not call me to force you to pay my medical bills. Almost every civilized foreign country has no military obligations and lets the US do it for them. It's pretty easy to have free healthcare when someone else is spending more than a trillion dollars a year keeping you safe. It isn't just the lobbyists, though they are a huge problem. The system itself is broken. It starts with the idea of having a 3rd payer, but that is hardly the only problem. That right there eliminates the concept of personal responsibility for healthcare. It takes it to a convenience. We don't sit down and look at healthcare in terms of what we can afford, or not afford. We don't even look at it as true insurance. There was a time when insurance policies were for catastrophic events. That has long passed and now they cover everything, and make me responsible for nothing. Costs were a lot lower back then, and ironically, if you couldn't afford to pay, people still managed to find a way to work things out. Likewise, there's no competition. Because of this, providers can charge what they want for their services. They don't have to publish their rates, so the same procedure can cost a vastly different amount of money from one provider to the next. A few years back, when I was my own employer, I had only a major medical plan with an HSA. My son had a sore throat and was going to need a throat culture. I called a provider to find out what they charged for the procedure. They refused to tell me (even though I was going to pay cash for it)... Refused. I was told that the rate "depends". In most other industries, this practice would be blatantly illegal and borderline fraudulent. There's large barriers to entry all over medicine as well, and these are also created to keep the supply of doctors low so as to increase the price. It also keeps the cost of pharmaceuticals high as well, not to mention the conflicts of interest that exist there too. Most medical doctors I've met are quite well off... far better off than I am, and I am doing quite well for myself. I don't think they are being squeezed. The ones being squeezed are the rank and file support people. My brother in law is an MRI tech. People like him get crapped on all the time. He doesn't make a lot of money, and his employer restricts his hours to 32 hours a week so they don't have to pay him benefits. His employer is a hospital that is one of the largest publicly traded hospital systems in the country, bringing in billions a year in revenue. There's one expansion project after another where he works. And the Affordable Care Act isn't going to fix that.

As a Christian, the first thing I need to clearly state is that your understanding and use of Scripture is incredibly poor. Proper exegesis always takes the passages in question within their appropriate context. Jesus's commands to Christians to take care of the poor do not obligate Christians, non-Christians, or otherwise to forcibly remove wealth from the people to redistribute it to others. These passages are not a call for a government sponsored healthcare or anything of the sort... as a matter of fact, they have nothing to do with government at all. They are a personal call to sacrifice. Likewise, the call here says nothing of forcing everyone to make sacrifices. As a believer, I give a large portion of my income to various Christian charities, so much so that it hurts, which I do in large part because of the passages above. This does not obligate you to do the same, nor does it obligate me to support the government's attempt at doing this. I get the need for social justice, and I will not argue if you were to state that the church has been lacking in this area for some time, but to conclude that because Jesus says we should give means that we should support a deeply flawed program that does nothing to address the actual causes of this mess (and greed plays a real big one here as the health system has been engineered in such a way to allow for several groups of people to create and take advantage of cash cows) is beyond silly. Nothing is free. The first problem I have is what is being assumed here and in a few of your other posts. We do not have a right to healthcare. We have a right to exist, and in our nation, we have a right to liberty (at least that's what our propaganda says, reality is a bit different)... Liberties, I'd add, that are being stepped on both by the Affordable Care Act, and walking into emergency rooms and demanding free care. What's not being said here is that there's a cost problem. Costs have spiraled out of control, and no one is looking into why it is that this is the case. There was a day, not all that long ago, where people paid for a doctor just as they paid for a plumber. You didn't have a 3rd party payer, and if you couldn't pay, you typically worked something out with the doctor. Medicine wasn't all that expensive. Something has changed. Having worked in the pharmaceutical industry personally, and having family members involved in various parts of the medical industry, I can tell you for certain that this is a system that is in desperate need of reform from the inside out. There are large groups of people benefiting from it in ways that make them very rich and have done so on the backs of everyone else. They can do that because they've created conflicts of interest, barriers to entry, unnecessary regulation, etc. in order to increase their profits... and they've been able to act unchecked. They are all socialistic, and personally I'm against all of them. Of course I'm neither a Republican or a Democrat.

So rumor has it he's heading to MN. What do you guys think, and is he the franchise QB we need? He's 25, so someone who could be around for a while. that said, I think our Defense is in pretty rough shape. Not sure how much a franchise QB will mean this season.

This isn't the time to trade prospects. There is a time for that, when you know what you have and you are a piece or two short, but when you need to acquire 10 to 15 pieces, trading off the guys who could be future pieces for some help now is kind of silly. It's a guaranteed way to have lots more 90 loss seasons. Unfortunately, the Twins are in a position right now where the only thing they can do is wait for the guys coming up and perhaps go out and get a few pieces that they know they will need.

Again, I really don't know what we were expecting to get for Justin. 2 guys who look like they can contribute at the ML level, and might actually have a small amount of upside isn't bad at all for a couple months rental. The Pirates were bidding against themselves, so they didn't exactly have competition.

Pretty much this... That and the fact that the Pirates haven't been there in quite some time.

If Nathan was a Yankee, he'd be a first balloter. Since he's not, it will take him a few years, but I think he gets in... and he should. Hopefully, he's enshrined as a Twin.