Kobs

I know I advocated strongly for making the move, and may have suggested it in the admin forum before the offer was made. My interest level was certainly waning for various reasons, and BYTO was dying the slow death that most forums endure; we were too lazy to create content to drive new traffic, and the entrenched user base scared off the few new folks we were getting. Most threads devolved into a tired argument between the same two or three people. I had fun creating some of the content that everyone is nostalgic about, and I'm glad that a lot of the discussion was able to move somewhere more sustainable. I don't have a lot of BYTO stuff stored, but I do have all the rank photos:

http://i.imgur.com/jfhleVxl.jpg

It warms my heart that folks still think that they know better than Joe Mauer when it comes to hitting, and it's a good idea for major league players to attempt to "change their approach" depending on where they are in the lineup.

Terry Ryan has been a poor general manager since the early 2000s. He knew how to operate in the old baseball world, but once people started putting in effort to gain a better understanding of the game, he's been awful. When Ryan came back, I basically gave up having any interest in the team. It was like a floundering company banning email and installing a bunch of fax machines. I couldn't put effort into supporting an organization so divergent from what I saw as the forward thinking path. Hopefully those days are over, and I can slowly come back to following the team.

I don't want the players back.

Despite only having numbers from 2007, I can pretty confidently say that Garden hire is one of the ten highest paid managers in baseball. If one is going to argue that managers don't impact the game, how silly is it to be allocating what is likely the highest percentage of your payroll to that role in the league?

The Vikings need to worry about coaching more than anything else. Two huge blunders that can't be put on anyone but the coach. Pass protection was garbage too.

Adrian Peterson takes up 10% of the Vikings cap space.

There is no such thing as the "Twins Way." There was Tom Kelly's way. He retired. Now the Twins are a stodgy old franchise that doesn't even attempt to innovate in order to overcome their self imposed financial shortcomings.

If you believe that, then I assume you want the Vikings to cut Adrian Peterson as soon as possible.

So you thought what, the Vikings were going to have a great passing attack this season? To be the team they expect to be, they have to run when the other team knows they will run. Again, this is silly. The loss is not on Ponder. If you expect Ponder to carry the offense, and get upset when he doesn't, your expectations make no sense. To sum up. Yes, not having better players impacts the team. Not being able to count on your supposed strengths impacts it more. The Vikings are paying for a running team with a good defense. If they can't run the ball, and they can't stop anyone, they will lose many games this season.

The Twins need their bad players to be bad. Trevor Plouffee going off and hitting five homers in a week will set the team back another year at one position.

Talking Ponder after that game? Ponder is not Peyton Manning. Get over it. The defense and special teams were awful in that game, and they couldn't run the ball at all. You might as well blame a Twins loss on Pedro Florimon not hitting three home runs. Something like 6 of the 8 times the Vikings ran the ball on first down, they got less than three yards. They can't win with that.

The Twins do not have pieces to trade to bring in legitimate young starters at any position that they can realistically part with.

2015 is a pipe dream. They'd need the pitching to go from 0 to 60 in one season. 2016, doubtful, but you can't rule it out yet.

Go look at some September lineups from two years ago.

Good lord.

The Twins have been waiting all season to get this important piece off the DL, will it be enough? The Twins will certainly go on a huge tear the rest of the way, but can they overcome the 17.5 game deficit for the last wild card spot? Probably. The real question is, will they catch Detroit?

I have a hard time believing that major league hitting coaches have a significant impact. The best thing they can do is stay out of the way.

Mauer should, assuming that the Twins do not have great options at both corner outfield positions, 1B, and DH, be playing catcher just enough to be ready to catch every game in a playoff series. The Twins should ramp up his time behind the plate as they approach the end of the season if in contention, as well.

You've never bought into a nonsensical reframing of an issue that you formulated yourself? Interesting.

He should have stabbed him. Perhaps the entire opposing roster. See if anyone tries to go through a Miracle catcher ever again. If I were a Miracle player, I would be pretty scared out there knowing that all my manager will do if I were in danger is attack the oldest guy on the field and then get manhandled.

I would not make a judgement that there isn't a lot of interest in this guy. Nishioka's posting fee was nothing for a guy with the "gold glove SS/batting champion" pedigree he was carrying. Unlike this Cuban fella, no one was going to be scared off Nishioka at that price point. Nobody wanted him at any price.

Nishioka was hardly an aggressive move. In fact, his relatively low posting fee was a red flag from the jump. The rest of the league wasn't interested in him.

Those numbers are irrelevant. The Twins philosophy is to throw strikes, strikes, and more strikes (The Twins being 9th in walk rate is actually pretty damning, since that is the one thing they are trying to outdo the rest of the league in). The fact that the Twins' pitchers are trying to hit the strike zone, and do, most of the time, doesn't mean that they have good control. Most teams don't want to throw as many strikes as the Twins. Logically, this is dependent on how often the ball is delivered away from where the catcher set up. That's even what all of the examples of "bad framing" are in these blog posts.