nicksaviking

And then I hope they don't send them down again every time they give up an earned run.

These bats are getting exciting. More hard hitting corner guys than you could shake a stick at. Hopefully they all finish the season strong so as their value is elevated if the Twins happen to be looking to make some trades this off season.

Most 35-year-olds don't. Nothing anyone could do about Mauer, he couldn't be traded even if another club wanted him. All cutting him does is give more at bats to Morrison and Grossman. Yawn. He won't be a Twin next year unless he's wearing a tie and sitting behind a desk.

They could have gotten a dirty diaper in return for Lynn. This hopefully opens up a rotation spot for Romero or Gonsalves for the rest of the season. Addition by subtraction.

Yawn. Let's do another one! Yeah De Jong looks like an easy DFA. I see he does have a slider though. Maybe he gets moved to the pen, drops everything but the FB and slider, gains a couple MPH and figures it out. In today's game there's no room for a guy who can't miss bats even in AA.

I could see a scenario where the offer for Dozier is so pitiful that the Twins keep him and cross their fingers that he turns things around and is quasi-worth a QO. Unfortunately if that happens, the fans almost surely will not know the internal decision making process of that one. A Dozier/Duke pairing or something similar might help hide the low worth of the team's former best player.

Out of five prospects where three or so are organizational top 30 guys? I'd expect one to turn into a decent contributor, two of them to make it to the show. If none of them pan out it is on the front office, they picked these players themselves. I won't criticize them for making the decision to trade, but yeah, it's on them. And I fully supported them for doing it. It's just part of the job, Molitor has to make a decision whether to use Addison Reed for the third day in a row and Berrios has to decide if he trusts his curveball on a 3-2 count.

Either way, if Dozier is still a Twins once the deadline passes, TD is really going to need the front office to differentiate between whether they couldn't or wouldn't trade Dozier. It'll get ugly around here with people making their preferred assumptions.

8% was only the odds of winning the division. Winning the AL Central doesn't mean you're good and it doesn't mean you're a contender. I'd resent it if they skipped out on a chance to win the WS, not on the chance to get their teeth kicked in in the playoffs.

But the odds that Escobar was going to contribute on a good team this year was already next to zero. Well until he got traded anyway.

I don't care about winning the division. They can take all of their division crowns from early this century and trade them to the Royals or the White Sox for their World Series trophy. I'm not at all saying you're disingenuous, but we clearly want different things from this team. If they keep Escobar, sure their odds of winning a division are minimal but still better than without him. However, their odds of winning the World Series goes from what, .5% to .2%? By making these unpopular moves now, it may give them a better shot in the coming years, and that's what I want, a shot at taking the big prize. And yes, I think these five (and counting) prospects have a better chance of turning into a good player, or more likely, being traded for a good player than Escobar and Pressly did of winning the division for the Twins.

Houston, Boston, New York, Cleveland, Seattle and Oakland are all between us and our goal.

My assumption is they will unless no one wants them. I can't see anyone wanting Morrison, Rodney and Lynn are probably borderline and might need the Twins to eat their salary; possibly August trade guys. But Dozier and Duke should be moved by tomorrow at the very least to avoid fence straddling.

But I don't think they are re-blowing it up. Cashing out your rental players in a losing season is what all teams do. Pressly is a bit of a different story, but the Twins are looking at about $80M in available free agent money with Kimbrel, Familia, Herrera, Britton, Allen and Matt Belisle available on the free agent market. The players they got back are lotto tickets, they can keep them and see if the multitude of them produce some good players in the future, or they might use them to go get JT Realmuto in the off season. Or a starting pitcher. Or a shortstop. They're just giving themselves so many more avenues to make the team better in the next couple of years. And for what it's worth, La Velle has reported that the Twins tried to extend Escobar prior to trading him.

This team has been doing things wrong for so long they've put themselves behind the 8 ball. Most of these poor decisions were made by men who were trying to get every futile win they could despite having terrible teams, and they almost surely did it because they thought if they could get 75 wins instead of 65 wins they might keep their jobs. This organization's ceiling has been ALDS runner up, not WS champion because the goal has only been to simply make the playoffs. The team's odds of making the playoffs are crap and the energy coming off of 80% of the players and the manager are crap. They have tons of expiring contracts and they are going to have more payroll flexibility than even most of the big market teams next year. I know it sucks, another season of watching losing baseball, which likely wasn't going to change with or without Escobar. However, there is a real chance to stock the system like the best clubs have been doing and then go crush it in free agency or via trades to fill the holes over the next couple of years. This really only sucks because they should have done this in 2011 and/or again in 2014-15 but they didn't, they wasted damn near a decade because they were too afraid to rip off the band aid.

'This team needs to get to the point where four game winning streaks are the norm, not the high point of the season before they'll be a real contender.

***Moderator Note*** I've hid a couple of off topic posts that were getting personal. Winning or losing, the trade deadline always brings out strong emotions but let's try to keep them from boiling over.

If the players are mad, they should be mad at each other, they were the ones who put themselves in this position with their terrible play. I'm sure the Twins will go on another winning streak. Then another streak where they bottom out. Good teams don't play this inconsistently as we've seen them do since Molitor took over.

Judging by the last two days the prospects are valuable trading piec s. I'm not sure if the outfielders will develop power, but I've long advocated for the Twins to be trend setters, not followers. If a team is going to break the current fad if HR/K exclusivity, it's going to be to continually load the bases with high OBP guys.

Looks like three intriguing players; even the guy who's not "ranked" is putting up pretty nice numbers. His lack of ranking likely has more to do with his draft position. Good move but it's bittersweet, Escobar was one of my favorites. Here's to the DBacks winning it all and getting him a ring and here's another hoping the Twins see room for a reunion with him this off season.

I thought Michael Helman was going going to be the new Brian Dozier but maybe it will be Davis! Fourth year college senior middle infielders from major conferences do seem to have a higher than usual rate of becoming mid-round steals.

It's probably hard to be selective when you're crushing everything. I'd hope we'd find out more if he can be selective once teams start pitching around him. Though I wouldn't complain too much if he has that Vlad Guerrero/Eddie Rosario gene where he can somehow barrel up any pitch anywhere.

Poor Aguilera. I'm not on Twitter, but are any of the Twins beat reporters getting any kind of useful information? With so many moves over the last couple of days it's hard to believe one of them can't get something along the lines of "The Twins were talking to such and such about so and so until such and such traded for whatshisname instead".

With so many of the contenders already making moves, mostly in the bullpen area, I'm starting to get concerned.

But that's assuming you want the player for multiple years and that you want him for as many years as what's being offered on the open market. Not that I'm necessarily against a couple more years of Escobar but the front office doesn't appear to like longer term deals. You might find yourself in the offseason wanting one year, maybe two, bidding against teams that will offer three with an option for a fourth.