ALessKosherScott

Always listen. But don't be surprised if you're nonplused by the offers for a 1B/DH coming off a 104 OPS+ season.

Rooker had one season in college where he had anything resembling plate discipline. More often than not, he was a free swinger, including a 37-5 K/BB ratio in the Cape Cod League. Larnach has somewhat consistently drawn walks and Jeffers has more walks than strikeouts the last two seasons and a run in a summer league where his K/BB was 29/26.

The inner-SABR nerd in me likes that they're going after hitters that control the strike zone.

Pretty safe pick. I'm not a fan of banking on left-handed power in Target Field, and probably would've gone McClanahan. But this is the good kind of risk averse pick.

I'm pretty sure that game took five years off my life. But, wooo, playoffs.

I'm choosing to look at the bright side of things. Per 538, there's an 80% chance we break our streak of missing the playoffs...and a 20% chance we get to keep our first-round draft pick.

I think your one advantage in a series with the Warriors if your the Wolves is that they don't have that piece who can match up with Towns, who can eat up Draymond, Durant or Bell inside or take Zaza and West outside. With that said, having a long point guard like Dunn or Rubio to affect Curry's shooting is more an advantage, which is why last year's team gave Golden State more fits than this year's one with even a healthy Butler. This year has been interesting for the Wolves. But the real question to me is still what's next year's evolution of this team? And I think Thibs is kind of a mixed bag. His emphasis on defense is always going to lead to a pretty good team. But the question is does he understand how the game is evolving into being about passing and three pointers?

It's not the 2006 rotation with Santana, Liriano and even Bonser. But it's not the bad years where we have a bunch of Radke clones either. You have an army of decent threes with hopes that Berrios and even Odorizzi could evolve into good twos.

Palacios might be good. He might even be the best shortstop down the road between all the guys in the system. But at the end of the day, it's kind of worth trading the prospect of that happening for the prospect of not wanting to stab our eyes out looking at our pitching staff this year.

A right-handed extreme flyball pitcher who limits batting average seems like a good piece for Target Field.

I think the argument dates back a decade ago when the Twins were trying to build a rotation of Brad Radke clones. Which is fine if you're trying to beat the White Sox in August. But when you're in a one-game, do-or-die matchup against the best lineup in baseball, it should make you a little nervous. And assume you then get by the Yankees, Santana then has to be the guy who matches up with Kluber. Or Kershaw. Or Chris Sale. So you're always wondering when your luck is going to run out. I get why you go for Lynn and Cobb. But the problem with aiming at building David is that Goliarh usually wins.

The hard part of building a community of writers is that sitting down and writing an article, coming up with an idea, then forming it into something worth reading, well, that's not an easy task. Back in the BYTO days, I tried, and the process of writing one interesting article a week was like a full-time job in addition to my full-time job. And the reality was the community didn't need me to write for it to flourish. When othese people tried to write, they seemed to discover the same thing. And they petered out too. It's an admirable goal to want more people to write. But there has to be a realization how hard that is.

Sure. But I'm grabbing Santana from August 19, 2007 and beating you.

I think with Santana though there are numerous different pitcher clauses you could rename it to. The Koufax Clause? The Dean Clause? The Rube Waddell Clause? The Amos Rusie Clause? There are about six similar pitchers to Santana in history who were the best pitcher in baseball for a couple of years before arm troubles and all of them are Hall of Famers. And the problem with WAR/7, JAWS and other monitors is we've tried to turn an emotional decision into a rational one. Tom Glavine is a Hall of Famer, and anyone who was as good as he was for as long as he was. But rhetorically, if you had a time machine and had to win one baseball game, which pitcher are you traveling back in time to get-- 1991-1996 Glavine or 2003-2008 Santana?

Stieb falls into your Saberhagen trap of not really accumulating a lot of black ink either. Mussina is kind of the Don Sutton of the early part of the 21st century. Plenty of gray ink. Not a lot of black ink. Even Glavine doesn't earn as much black ink as Santana. The black ink debate is important because it shows Santana's statistical dominance over a brief career. In the black ink test, Santana sits 37th all-time, tied with Curt Schilling. Of the guys ahead of him, all are in the Hall of Fame minus Kershaw, Verlander and Halladay, whom all should be in when they're eligible and Clemens, whom the press is holding a grudge against. WAR/7 is kind of a weird way to measure a guy like Santana and even Mauer, when he comes around. If you use the Keltner test, both of them are easy Hall of Famers.