ben

Are any of these guys close to being exposed in the rule 5 draft?

Why limit internal options to minor league bullpen pitchers?

Looks like the tickets are sold out. Will there be another batch released? Any idea when? I'm looking for 6

When there's a blog or comment like that, you can click the Report Post button.

To be fair to the beat writers on the access thing, how many blog posts rely on the work of beat writers? The NBC blog, for example, is mostly commenting on stories written by journalists. The Gleeman & the Geek podcasts use information from beat writers' work quite a bit. A lot of what is written here comes from information gathered by the beat writers. So from their perspective, I can see where it would get frustrating when people denigrate their work and praise the work that bloggers can do thanks to their lack of access. On the other hand, Mackey invited this on himself, and he was pretty hypocritical with the whole thing.

I bet the list of players who left and had less success is longer, and there's a pretty good list of players who have come to the organization and thrived. Maybe there's a problem with hitting/pitching philosophy, but I'm not going to be convinced based on anecdotes. Vavra has been pretty transparent with his hitting philosophy this offseason. Why not address specifically what he says rather than generalize from a really small sample size (which is further muddied by injury in the case of Ortiz and Hardy)?

You're right, that is being nice. In 2002 the Twins won the division with 94 wins.

The only thing I can think of that all those center fielders have in common is that they cover a lot of ground, but my understanding is that Benson also covers a lot of ground and is just a bit slower than Revere. Or were you making another point?

4 catchers!!!

If Benson, Dozier, or Parmalee were rule 5 picks, they would have a much better chance of making the team. If Doyle had options, he would probably receive less consideration for making the team.

Last year was 2011, not 2010.

If I recall correctly, heading into 2010 spring training several twins were better suited to a career pumping gas at the Super America - Liriano among them.

Just curious, if you haven't seen him pitch, you don't know what he throws, and you don't know his stats, why would it kill you if Doyle or Swarzak made the team over him?

Hughes? He's not a shortstop though, and barely a second baseman.

PMKI = pretty much killing it. It's a twitter thing

That's probably a good reason not to "take an aggressive step" with a trade for relief pitchers, at least for a team in the Twins' position.

Decided to ditch the glove this year, you guys. Gonna just strike 'em all out. Bold move that lets 'em know you're a real man. Told the other guys about it to pump them up. They looked kind of confused, but you could tell they were impressed.

Collisions at home don't really make sense to me. Why is a collision at home allowed, but not at 1st, 2nd, or 3rd? Other than, "it's part of the game", I can't think of an argument.

I wouldn't say unprescedented. Looking at the Diamondbacks, they went from 65 wins in 1998 to 100 in 1999, 51 to 77 in '05, and 65 to 94 last year. Seems like the best chance for a huge turn-around would be a team like this team where you have multiple impact players who were injured or played poorly the year before. If healthy (I know, big if), I think this team is closer to the 2010 version of the Twins than the 2011 version. They're still underdogs, but I think it will be fun to watch the season play out.

Do moderators have the power to close comment sections? Maybe when a blog is promoted to an article, you could close the comments in the blog version. I like the idea of this site too. I do see potential for it becoming overwhelming to keep up with though. I like that there are icons that indicate which threads have unread comments, but there are two issues that I'm hoping have easy work-arounds. First, the icon on a thread doesn't change from "Unread" to "Read" when you click the back button - you must click the What's new button to refresh, which means scrolling back up through the page of comments. I discovered the Top button to circumvent the scrolling, and that helps, but if there's an even better solution, that would be cool. Second, it would be great if I could ignore a thread or at least mark it as read if I can tell by the title that I'm not interested in the discussion.