bighat

Marwin plays right. Kepler moves to center.

Are you kidding? Rats.

How crazy is that that Eddie Rosario hit 30+ HR and drove in 100 RBI and he's 13th on this list....and that's exactly where he should be. How depressing is it that this is the best Twins team, possibly ever, and they are going to miss getting a shot at a memorable season due to a once-in-a-lifetime world pandemic?

"The best bullpen in baseball?" - uh, no. "A serviceable bullpen that might be decent if nobody regresses?" - more like it. How about Nick Gordon on that list? The guy was supposed to be the Next Big Thing and just can't seem to make it past that last step. Is development stalled? Will he ever be an MLB regular?

Good question. Mixed messages and thoughts so far from various owners/teams: AZ Diamondbacks: “My expectation and our expectation is we are going to be playing our games this year without fans in the ballpark,” he said on Arizona Sports’ Burns & Gambo Wednesday. Chicago Cubs: “There was always a path to bring fans back into Wrigley — obviously a smaller group than would normally attend games,” Kenney said. “We do see that happening this year.” Houston Astros: "The intent at some point is to get the fans into the ballpark,” Crane said. St. Louis Cards: “I don’t know if fans will be able to go a baseball game in this abbreviated season. It seems unlikely today,” said St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson.

Good: wow what a break against Cleveland, 7 home games vs just 3 away. Bad: Six against the Brewers, arguably the best team in the NL Central. Thoughts: How much does home field matter when there are no fans? Surely it will still make a difference, but not as much this year?

Someone on the Twins facebook batting practice feed said Sano was the other positive Twin. Just passing it on, total speculation.

Get well soon, Willians.

Thanks for this series! Great stuff.

It's never happened in the history of mankind.

I posted something like this on a thread a month ago and have been thinking the same thing all season. The Twins can't just "reload", they do have to rebuild. Is there any team getting shafted more than the Minnesota Twins during this stoppage? This is like the '94 Expos. Twins were lucky to pick up Nelson Cruz's option, grabbed that backup catcher, this was supposed to be THE YEAR. Poof, those guys are both gone, we get nothing. Pineda, get nothing. Odorizzi? Bye-bye. Plus we lose a year of production from Josh Donaldson. 2020 was supposed to be the year we got the most out of his contract, by the time 2023 rolls around he's going to be Albert Pujols and that's not what we paid for. Devastating, could be another 20 years before we see a Twins team like this.

One of my favorite Twins, he was always a tough out and played stellar defense. An above average MLB career, did well everywhere he played. Sad to see a player like him leave the game.

THANK YOU! Not thrilled. In the first round the Twins take a first baseman who can't play another position? Means his glove is very suspect. I saw some projections saying he's a future DH - which is fine I guess.....but in the first round? This guy is going to have to be a 30-40 HR player to stay up at the MLB level. Twins must have thought he was the best player available. Very strange pick IMO. Not a fan.

Baseball will always be my favorite sport and I do want to see it in 2020 - although if it's just going to be a shell of a season with players wearing hazmat suits, I'm not sure I would be interested....but I digress. Overall I'm utterly embarrassed for the game right now, especially in light of what all the other sports are doing. Take, for example, what's going to happen with football. This NFL season will draw more at-home viewers than ever. From a marketing perspective, they're going to get creative as heck: more mic'ed up players, online interaction, all sorts of "virtual experiences" and whatnot. It's going to be revolutionary and it's going to be such a hot topic.... Meanwhile, baseball had the chance to do it first. And they're too busy arguing! Owners look greedy and players look like awful cry-babies (just look at their tweets). The players, in particular, look bad here because they're the names we KNOW. Quick: who owns the Oakland A's? The Kansas City Royals? Most fans don't have a clue and they don't care. But we do know the players, and we listen to what they say, and all we're hearing from them is "NO". Even worse, baseball isn't a contact sport! So football, the most contacty-of-contact-sports is gonna put their product out there, meanwhile these guys in MLB won't budge an inch. And it's all surrounded by "union discussions", the mere mention of which bores the public to tears and makes people lose interest in the process. All in all the whole situation is a witches' brew of bad optics for baseball. Again, the best word for what's going on: EMBARRASSING.

I am with you. A 50 game season is the new idea they're trotting out there. 50 games? Seriously? And you're trying to tell baseball fans that this is a "baseball season"? That's a slap in the face. If they are really going to give us a 50 game season, I'd rather they just play a week-long exhibition tournament in Orlando or something, so it gets over with quickly and we don't have to watch for too long. Because 50 games is an absolute joke. 114? Not ideal but I'll take it. Less than 100? Joke city. Several leagues, including European soccer, the NBA and the NHL are all getting back to playing and are getting out there. The NFL is without a doubt going to play. For baseball to be the only sport (a non-contact sport!) to somehow fail to put a real product on the field is just embarrassing. Shame on all of them.

I feel uneasy discussing "what 2020 baseball will look like" because I'm still not certain we're going to see any baseball. Counting my chickens before they are hatched makes me nervous!

Duffy is vastly overrated by way too many people on this forum, at least in my opinion. Sure, he was solid last year. Solid. Not amazing. He was 5-1 with a 2.50 ERA. That's pretty much what you want from a middle reliever. So whoop-dee-do, he didn't suck - that doesn't mean he's Ryan Pressley all of a sudden. And let's not forget, the Twins were putting him in very low-leverage situations quite often last season because of his terrible past. Remember that? It was only in 2018 when he pitched to the tune of a 7.20 ERA. And before 2018 he was also, frankly, terrible. Duffey has shown he can be awful and has a few seasons to prove it. He's shown he can be solid, but he's only done that once. Nothing tells me he's elite or even in the conversation of elite relievers. Rogers is far and away the best bullpen arm we have and should get the ball in the 9th when the pressure's on. Not even a question.

So when I was fresh out of college, I got my first sports writing gig as the Sports Editor at a small, local weekly paper in the horsey suburbs of Orlando, Florida. It was 1999, I was 24 years old and I thought I'd hit the big time. It just so happened that my first week on the job, there was a big MLB dust-up regarding the umpire strike. I was young, watched ESPN all the time, and I figured it would be great for me to write a full-page opinion piece for the paper about this topic. After all, I was a big time sports writer now! I wanted my voice to be heard alongside the big name reporters and networks. As you can probably guess, absolutely nobody who read the local newspaper gave a rat's behind about my opinion. And my publisher chewed me out. Why? Because that was a national story and I was supposed to be reporting on hyper-local topics, like the local swim meets and park board meetings. If our readers wanted to read national news stories, they'd buy the USA Today and turn on the network news. I think you get where I'm going here, Nick: there are a million places we can go online to fight/squabble/preach/complain about the situation going on in Minneapolis and around the country. I'm not saying you don't have a right to voice your opinions here - it's your site, your choice, and in some ways the whole point of this topic is to make yourself heard. That said, we can find other places to go down this wormhole. Most of us come here to talk Twins, to talk baseball. And we are very loyal to this site because we LOVE the Twins discussion topics here. We have a very diverse set of political opinions here, but the cool thing is that we don't get into that on TD. We can all be on the same team - when we fight, it's about Eddie Rosario and where he should hit in the batting order, rather than about political stuff, which can run deep and hit some toxic levels on all sides. Just some food for thought.

I know we need to be safe. Players need to be safe. The public needs to be safe. I get it....but jeez. Players sitting 6 feet away from each other, in the stands, with no high-fives, no touching....that's unrealistic and frankly just plain stupid. Sounds good on paper, but just picture it in your head for a minute. How are the players going to get up to the stands? Gonna build steps above the dugout? Or are they all going to sit behind the plate? How long will it take for a guy to get back up to the stands after a ground out? And with all those measures in place, they completely go out the window the second the pitcher touches the baseball. Because the catcher will also touch the baseball, the shortstop will touch the baseball, the first baseman will touch the baseball, and the ump will touch the baseball. They're going to be touching the same surfaces. So why do all that BS above? Just to somehow signal to the public that you're "doing the right thing?" I'm 100% for having baseball this year, if it can resemble the game we know. I was feeling hopeful a few weeks ago, but with the owner/player clash and these awful new rules...ugh. I never thought I'd say this, but I'm beginning to side with the folks who say they'd prefer to have no season.

My main issue is that NL pitchers' stats get inflated. They're guaranteed easy outs and more strikeouts. When you replace a guy like Nelson Cruz at the plate with a weak-hitting guy who bats .046 at the plate 3 times per game, just think about the advantages. Let's say a pitcher gets 20 starts and gets to face, on average, weak-hitting pitchers 2.5 times per game. That's a total of 50 easy outs that his AL counterpart isn't getting. That's 17 innings worth! Meanwhile, it's not like his AL counterpart is getting to face average hitters - instead, he's facing THE BEST hitter on the opposing team. So he's getting 17 innings against very, very difficult hitters like Nelson Cruz or JD Martinez. I'd just prefer if both leagues did the same thing, for continuity purposes. Then again, at this point I'd just be happy with regular old baseball without any changes! Here's hoping they play ball this summer.

That would be interesting. If there's a runner on 2nd with less than 2 outs, they could play multi-screen broadcasts like they do on RedZone. MLB TV used to have that option (and I think they still might) where you can stream 4 games at a time, quad-view, but you have to pick and choose the games yourself and kinda weed through it. I really like that feature, especially if you play fantasy. It would be even better if you could enter your fantasy lineup and whenever your player was pitching or batting, that game would automatically pop-up in your viewer.

His arm is fine IMO: That entire video shows some great defensive plays. Is he Ozzie Smith? No....but shouldn't we be okay with that? We should keep our expectations reasonable. As others have commented, with his age and talent and contract he's going to be the team's shortstop for a while. There are plenty of things to worry about, Polanco's defense isn't one of them.

As long as he hits .300 and continues to spark this team with the bat, the Twins only offensive All-Star in 2019 can play anywhere he wants. Polanco's a special player. I've always felt that people who pick on his defense haven't watched him play shortstop. It's the most difficult defensive position in baseball and errors are gonna happen. He gets to a lot of baseballs and is very athletic. He's made some huge defensive gems late in ballgames that have saved games for this team.

Luke Hughes, the Aussie.

Paul Sorrento, anyone?