August J Gloop

Well that would be cooler. More Twins to root for!

Kenta is not on the WBC roster. He's focused on being ready for MLB.

I have my doubts this dude will ever throw a pitch for the big club. I don't think his standing is too high or anything, I just get the bad luck vibe from him and his situation. This is the sort of vibe I hope I'm totally wrong about. He also reminds me of the jock character in a high school drama who antagonizes the lead until the third act reversal and becomes the best friend in the sequel.

I would think he'd go to NPB or KBO before he'd languish at AAA. It's a better return path to relevance.

My guess is Maeda won't let himself be an Archer style starter. He'll be up to 6 innings by the end of April. No way he wants to retire, so he needs to be a starter to get that last contract. Ober will also be in the rotation as it's unlikely that All 5 will be healthy at the end of ST. Unless of course he's the one who gets hurt.

They already have a good bullpen. Adding now is at the cost of existing players. I know, I know Pagan singlehandedly cost us the division. (I'm only kind of exaggerating.) They probably shouldn't have kept him, but the staff sees something there to build on (Great strikeout rates, an improving groundball rate). But he's legitimately the worst pitcher currently expected to be in the 'Pen. With the Sanchez signing, they have 9 AAA starters in the fold. There's no way that they're not thinking about Sands, Winder, Varland as possible + relievers for this year. Varland could be a high 90s 1 inning dude and have a great season. Sands and Winder could easily pitch in the mid 90s as well in relief roles. Headrick could be a strikeout machine ALA Johan's first couple seasons out of the pen.

The WBC is cool, but when they play it is dumb. I bet right after the season would be better. Although then you'd have free agents skipping it due to contract risk issues. It really could function as a sort of high end AFL. I assume that Team USA made up of top 100 prospects would do quite well. I root for team PR, but am glad to see Correa chillin rather than risking it.

There aren't any current 40-man spots for relievers. Considering the number of decent options still on the market, they're just waiting until they can 60-day Lewis and Paddack. If they then like where the price sits for Moore or Chafin, they'll get to signing. Ken Giles might be good choice vs Fulmer. He's apparently healthy now. We'll see.

2-8 in any 10 games is weird no matter who you play. HOU didn't go 6-0 against the Twins last year because they're a good team and the Twins were a bad one. It was just a fluke of baseball that they didn't wind up 2-4 in those 6 games. Two of the teams HOU had a losing record against were sub .500 teams. AND HOU went 11-10 in April on the way to 106 wins. And only one of those games even featured a starter from this year's rotation. That was Joe Ryan vs Verlander in JV's best start (maybe) of the year. While it's possible Winder will make a start or two, I doubt He's really being considered for a spot this year. The bigger point though is that April really isn't some unicorn month. Good teams can struggle in April and vice versa.

You are correct. They don't want to keep doing blackouts on MLBTV so Sinclair can turn around and do streaming. Some of the teams couldn't stop them due to contact language, but most of the Bally's RSNs have language in their MLB contracts that exempted them from being available for that. No doubt the teams would rather strangle Sinclair and take back their rights so they could just sell direct through MLB.tv. I bet something like $5 a month extra to get your team would be a game changer for them. I'm sure each market would have 250K subs a season minimum. If they could get to 1M subs in the Twins' market (might be hard since estimates show 14-20 Million subs for mlb.tv total) they'd cover that lost revenue. This is why I think they need to reconsider trying to get paid for the broadcast and think more about being paid by the broadcast. If they own it, all the ad revenue comes to them. They control the platform, so having live ticket agent links via QR code or in the chat would be do able. "Hey MLB, send me that Joe Ryan Jersey". Create more fans by inviting them to watch for free on their mobile devices, and they'll buy your gear and come to your games.

His trick might be not living in the broadcast area. Or maybe he VPNs his roku externally?

The only realistic trades I could see them making have to involve Winder or Sands (40 man and clearly passed on the depth charts) and whichever of Kepler, Larnach, Gordon, or Kiriloff they a) feel comfortable parting with and b) the other team has utility for. They clearly are at their limit of 40 man jettisons, otherwise we'd probably have seen a Fulmer or Matt Moore signing by now. Depending on the return, I can't see them being particularly reluctant to trade any of them outside maybe Kiriloff. On the other hand, they clearly are also comfortable rolling with the lot of them. That gives them strength in the negotiation. With the rotation depth as it is, Winder and Sands seem like great parts in a deal for pitching from the Rays or Bryan Reynolds. Call it the curse of Clint / Jackson Frazier (he was perpetually going to be traded for everyone's best player). But He's injured and the Yanks are over the Luxury Tax. Perhaps they might want to get out of the Montas biz and into the more fiscally responsible Kepler biz.

The Twins will not be available on the Bally sports streaming app unless you also have a pay tv provider that carries BSN. Bally thought they'd have it worked out but so far, no dice.

Do you mean mlb network? I doubt youtubeTV would be trying to add an OTT blackout to MLB games on networks they still carry.

Everything about how Dob got to the show is a great story. The Injury has been a real puzzler, but if he's pitching well, everyone should be so happy.

There's overvalue and there's value them worth half of a limited and possibly injured reliever. Bailey Ober last year with his injuries provided as much value as any two Trevor May bullpen seasons combined. Trev put up 2.5 wins in 2015, primarily because he made 16 starts. Ober can start and be effective reliably.

I agree that PIT should be forced to trade Bednar. But I dunno they should be punished for ever meeting him.

Because shortstop prospects are like having an everything prospect. They can play D just about anywhere on the diamond if they can hit. You'd make your whole rookie league team up of shortstops from D1 colleges if you could.

I still think there is a legit shot at another high impact starter either in the Rotation or LF. We recently heard that Josh Winder on his own was enough to tempt the Royals to send over 1.9 Win MATaylor. What about a Package that starts with Winder, Kepler and Kiriloff for Bryan Reynolds. I assume the Twins would need to put more in, but Kiriloff might have more value to a rebuilding Pirates team since he's a local kid. Reynolds is arb eligible through 26 so the Twins should be comfortable giving up prospect value. Winder and Kep would be flips for them, with one or both hopefully playing well enough to be turned into prospects of their own at the 23 deadline. I know the Pirates aren't that motivated to move Reynolds, but they should be easy enough to get there, since he's made it clear he'd like to get out and without trading all their other prospects, the Bucs aren't getting to competence before Reynold's walk year anyway. As to the starter I am still really digging the idea of pushing a bunch of prospect chips in on Shane McClanahan. He's got big time team control, so why would the Rays move him? Because they missed the Rays window of savings. He's gonna get paid in arbitration and clearly has said no thank you to the Rays MO of team friendly prearb contracts. This would be instead of the Reynolds deal, so you'd probably see Winder, Kiriloff or Larnach, Gordon and one top prospect (Or Max and two prospects instead of K/L/G. As to why people are not fans of the May for two prospects? They could have signed may for just money and instead let Oakland do it only to send players of any value for him? Plus I'm guessing Cleveland would probably trade Clase straight up for Ober. He's a projectable MLB starting pitcher. No way a relief bust like May is getting Ober.

Those batting helmets are magic. LOVEx3. I don't like large white sections on hats (grimy), but I could totally see a version of the home cap that has a red bucket, blue bill and some white blue TC. The M is a little strange, but I wonder if the big issue is that the star is red. If instead the M were red and the star were white it might seem more like the north star it's representing. The actual typography work on the M is pretty cool and not really at all like the Marlins M. Maybe they should have figured out a way to put the M inside the star in some way. or in front of it? I guess I'm not as diametrically opposed to it as others. I bet it also looks better in 3D. But considering the M is the only thing that's getting much traction against the rebrand, they did a good job.

Thinking more about it, the Wolves, Wild and Loons could hop in with the Twins to launch some sort of Midwest Sports Channel (so original) that can carry their games. They can use the bankruptcy proceedings to get out of their contract. Then they can offer that as some sort of streaming package. They could run more high school stuff and keep the Due Norths of the world going. From a team standpoint they see revenue from broadcast. For the combined teams are there 2.5 million people in the greater midwest who would pay 10 bucks a month to have such a streaming service? That's roughly speaking where they would have to sit to get the same cash back. These MLB teams should just use this opportunity to rethink what broadcasting their games actually is. It's not revenue. It's advertising the live products. The Game is a product. The Jerseys are products. If they built the relationships with the fans, they'd sell out every game because people would want to be there. Right now it's actively hard and expensive and wasteful to watch the team. The message to most casual fans is: if you don't commit you should get out. You can imagine what most of those folks do. If instead, they considered the free transmission of the game as a standard practice with basic monetization of the traditional ad segments to cover production, they'd be selling so many more tickets, they'd get that 40 Million back. Currently TF sits half full. filling it back up every night at a reduced ticket price gets them there easily. And considering they'd be free on youtube and MLB's platform, they'd get tons of eyeballs, and likely actually be making money on those ads within a couple seasons. Heck 8 Million people watch celebrities eat spicy wings every week. I'm guessing free major league baseball would have no problem building a loyal audience.

AppleTV+ (or another streamer) would be the best spot for RSNs. I like Apple because of the high quality streaming. They could upgrade the broadcasts to match the gorgeous ATV games. Apple could use the RSN thing as a regional subscriber keep. (Folks are less likely to cancel when there's consistently new programming even when it's not specifically of interest to them.) It would 'free' to get your RSN with an ATV+ plus sub. They could then target new fans on the sub with short vids and other fun things, which would create more folks who just stay subscribed to watch this thing they like more than they used to cuz Jose Miranda is so funny (for example). Hulu or just plain Youtube probably make a lot of sense, too.

But every blown save against the Guardians last year lead to a loss. All the projection models I've seen have Twins and Guards basically even. right at 83.xx wins. That means the division will likely come down to the head to head stuff. My gut tells me the projections are quite simply wrong, though. Considering they have the Twins as having less of an offence than CLE (doubt it) but a better pitching staff (say what now?). All that to say that you aren't being overly optimistic. It's very likely they will do quite well in the division. And they actually have ability (and the motivation of Correa's contract) to keep going in at the deadline. Unlike Cleveland who is literally bumping their head on their payroll ceiling by adding Josh Bell.

Odds are it's cuz he wants too much money and most of the teams he'd want to play for don't have a lot of spots. He'll sign up soon with the twins for a little less or the Pirates for a little more and the expectation of being flipped again.

But he (probably? hopefully?) is a much better hitter. And he's still a positive value defender, so he's got bigger upside than Max at this point.