105 thoughts on “5/15, 2012: Out of My Brain on a Train”
The other day I won a trivia contest on another baseball card blog, and...well, check it out for yourself. Mr. Shlabotnik designed a couple nice ones.
Who does the CoC header refer to?
Yes.
Not that I can picture.
It was so hard not to correct that sentence to "To Whom does the CoC Header refer?", which totally ruins the joke.
I hope that my grammar teachers are proud.
According to JoePos:
Albert Pujols in the month of May .160/.176/.220.
Me: And that's including 5 games against Twins pitching!!
It's hard to believe how bad the Angels suck considering how terrible the Twins played against them.
socal pointed that out too. I just hope the kid hasn't screwed his future up too badly.
I don't know if that's the kind of thing that goes away. I had two casual acquaintances in college who ended up being jailed for rape, and even though our group knew the guys fairly well, it immediately became the only identifying characteristic of their beings. They've probably changed, but I don't ever want to know them again and find out.
And the victim, right?
Yeah, to hell with the kid. Seriously.
I woke up at 3:30 this morning and realized our power was out. It still was out when I left for work at just after 6. The whole neighborhood was out, but the signal light about a half-mile away was on. My boys got a hard lesson on just how many things they use that use electricity.
I can't find a clip, but Dave Mordal had a standup bit about the power going out that'd be worth checking out if you can somehow find it somewhere.
Huh. We just had a four-hour power outage here a few days ago during a dust storm. It was the longest outage I can remember being affected by, though we certainly went through tons of them when I was a kid.
The guy from the Brooklyn Park day care murder has been caught.
Thank goodness. This was one that just haunted me.
Holy crap, if that guy did all the things that he is accused of, what a complete waste of flesh and oxygen.
Yeah, that story just kept getting worse. I felt too sick about it to comment on it initially.
With a story like that, I always ask: what life was the perpetrator protecting by attempting to murder a 15-year-old he'd raped in the first place? How does one even assume he's got the right to be free, let alone leave a trail of murder just to keep his worthless ass out of prison?
Fantastic ethics all around, guys. Well done ignoring essentially all of the company's stated core values.
Do as I say, not as I do!
The really crazy thing is that "the board decided to award Dunn a severance package worth more than $4 million."
that's enough to make anyone seriously question their ethics
If I leave the WGOM, how much will you guys pay me?
The analogy doesn't quite fit you. Me, on the other hand...
Profit!
Says the only guy to get a golden parachute when he closed his basement as an all-hours tavern for his friends.
We can pay you to leave?
😉
So. Many. Forbidden. Things. To. Say.
Knowing the company as I do, I unfortunately found that part so unsurprising that I didn't even commit it to memory.
It's kind of depressing that this dude screwed up, lost his job, and was awarded more than I'll likely make in my entire career. Frown.
SOP. I've never seen a board of directors that wasn't full of CEOs and CFOs from other companies. There's a whole lot of back scratching goes on in boardrooms.
Advice Sought: I know several here have dealt with similar problems or are computer whizzes.
My Dell PC of 4-ish years, running Windows Vista, appears to have had a Disk Error.
It self-restarted and went BIOS (or something like that dealing with temperature and fan speed) and when I exited that, into DSKCHK.
It’s on stage 3 of 3, stuck at 37%, but constantly yet very slowly moving. It is almost at 400,000 of 568,000 security descriptors verified. But within the first hour it was at 360,000, and it’s been two days to get to 400,000. Which projects to more than a week to go before it’s done, and what to do if we get a power outage or circuit break?
The restart happened on Friday during the day. I let it run overnight. Then I got frustrated Saturday afternoon, did a hard reboot (power-off button), bypassed CHKDSK, and got a scary bluescreen. Nothing seemed to be happening, so I hard rebooted again and went along with DSKCHK. Then Stage 1 of 3 started finding things that had not been found before. That scared me more: was it deleting files? Thought I’d try the hard reboot one more time and once in CHKDSK it performed exactly as it had the day before, but it started slowly at the same place it had been slow before in Stage 3 of 3, and now I’m another 40,000 security descriptors along.
This hard drive has so much of our personal data, almost none of which was backed up. Photos, homeschool records, my wife’s emails, a lot of personal spreadsheets that I’ve made to organize my thoughts, my wife’s music files (not the songs she paid money to get professionally recorded, but the demos), a good portion of my music files (iTunes playlists, anything I paid for or imported, but nothing I stole), and basically anything else that a person could have on their hard drive.
I would very much like to save all of this data. I’m less concerned about the computer itself, it had been starting to lag (which might have been a precursor to the problem for all I know), and there are new and fun versions of Windows and Office available, so we were probably looking to upgrade within a year anyways.
Here are the questions I have, I’d appreciate any thoughts you have on them:
1. Do I let Chkdsk keep running for a fortnight straight and hope it can resolve the problem?
2. Do I disconnect the power as-is and bring it somewhere? If so, where? Best Buy? Somewhere else?
3. How much hope should I have to save all of my family photos?
If it might change your thoughts can get details about warning messages of the blue screen as well as Chkdsk tonight when I get home: I took photos.
AMR, since your main concern is to save your data, you could try pulling the hard drive out and putting into an external case, then checking to see if you can access the drive from another computer. If you can get to the data, then copy everything over to a new hard drive. Your problem could be a hard drive issue, but it could also be another hardware problem like a mainboard issue causing the blue screens, etc. I know some Dell laptops from several years back had issues with micro-cracks developing over time that eventually blue screened the systems. You might also have corrupted Windows files that are causing this, but I'm thinking it's more likely hardware. I have an external USB hard drive case you can borrow if you want, and I'd be happy to help with diagnosis and data transfer is you like. I know we don't live that far apart, so just let me know.
My thought exactly. Pull the HD and set it up as a slave/external on another PC and see if it at least can't be read from there.
My comment from the non-expert peanut gallery: This.
Pulling the hard drive and slaving it in another machine is pretty easy to do, particularly with your typical mini-tower Dell. Easy access, lots of room to work.
If you have access to another computer you can download ubuntu and make a boot disk on a flash drive or CD. Then you can boot from that with your unhappy computer and you may be able to access the hard drive from there.
I ran my laptop off of an Ubuntu CD for almost a month around Christmas. I didn't try any data retrieval off of the HD, but the boot CD option is insanely easy.
Using a flash drive is almost as easy, except you then have it hanging off your computer. I've only tried to retrieve data once using this method, but I had pretty good luck. Basically, I was able to get everything off except the actual corrupted sectors without taking the computer apart. Removing the hard drive and using it as an external drive should work fine, too, though.
1) Hire Keanu Reeves to take your data into his brain.
2) Have him run very quickly to a safe house to lay low, until you can get a new PC on which to transfer the data.
3) Avoid White Rabbits, Yakuzas, and Dolph.
Speaking as a relative expert, I can say that this is the best way to get your data back.
At this point, I would bet on the Twins losing closer to 116 games than 100. It's the pitching.
Since the schedule went to 162 games in 1961, only ten teams have lost as many as 109 games. Four of those were the first four seasons of the New York Mets.
At 10-26, the Twins have to play at a 68-win pace the rest of the way to avoid 100 losses.
Yeah, that's a bet I would take. Where does Howard want us to line up?
Any bets on how long he's on the 25 man roster? I'm saying 30 days.
I'm taking the over on that. Irrational optimism, but I'm gonna call that he stays on the active roster through the A-S Break at least.
Does this cover if he's playing on another team's 25 man roster?
And why do I have mag's gravatar?
I'm expecting this to happen sooner or later, but I'd be a bit heartbroken about it happening.
I guess this depends on what the Twins think will be best for Parmelee. With the team going nowhere, I'd have no problem with sticking with him at first base a while longer. On the other hand, if the Twins think that, long-term, it's best for him to go back to AAA for a while, I don't have a big problem with that, either.
i don't believe he's played at all in AAA, has he?
No. Again, it's all about what's best for Parmelee's development. While I don't have supreme confidence in the Twins' organization on that point, I have to assume they know more about it than I do.
Okay, who do you think will be the next person removed from the 25 man roster, either through demotion, release, DFA, DL, trade, or however?
My pick is Darin Mastroianni. I know it should be a pitcher, but I'm not seeing it.
I'd agree with Mastroianni, but to be honest I have close to 15 players I'd be fine with removing from the 25 man roster at this point.
Jason Marquis
Spooky, and spooky, too: I had a dream last night that my sister was in a car accident, and my mom just called me to tell me my sister was in a car accident last night. I was surprised to learn it wasn't her fault, having ridden in her car before; some dolt rear-ended her as she was turning off the main road and into her place of work. She's fine, but for the third time in her life, laid up with injuries sustained in a car accident. I know they happen all the time, but I've never been in any that approached her worst ones, and she's only been on the road for six years.
Good to hear that she's doing fine. Spooky and spooky indeed.
Anyone else watching the tigers sox tilt? Dancie blew up the ninth, but the tigs hold on.
Lowe said that 115 of his 127 pitches today were sinkers. He threw some change ups to Mauer but otherwise everyone saw the same pitch all day long. No runs.
Oh, mama. The twins suck.
Obviously he threw the change-ups to Mauer because it's not his best pitch and he wanted to give the malingerer a fighting chance.
there was a pitcher either last year or two years ago that did the same thing, but it was something like 102 pitches 100 sinkers. I want to say it was Fausto Carmona.
One might, at this benighted point in print-journalism history, ask what difference the cover of a magazine actually makes. They’re not a huge economic force: Newsweek’s year-end publisher’s statement this past December gave an average of 40,342 single-copy sales per issue, down from 96,334 in 2007. But they still occupy a nice piece of cultural real estate. An article in a newsweekly has as much chance of becoming the focus of cultural conversation as a photo of a falling bear or a review of an Olive Garden in a North Dakota newspaper, but an arresting cover is an assertion that while print magazines’ power may have receded, they’re far from toothless.
Tom Powers:
I'm not sure of the approach Rochester will take with him, but I would hope Bruno tells him to pick out a good one and take a rip. Parmelee, in my book, is a good young power hitter who went downhill since being exposed to "The Twins Way" of hitting. They should declare left field off limits to him in Rochester and tell him to concentrate on pulling the ball. Hard.
...
It strikes me as odd that newcomers Josh Willingham, Ryan Doumit and Jamey Carroll have drawn praise for their play. Call-ups Brian Dozier and Scott Diamond also have performed very well. See a pattern there? The newcomers or, to put it another way, the most recent non-Twins, have been the better players. Apparently, veteran Twins have failure ingrained in them.
I don't know about that ingrained losing stuff.
Yeah, that Mauer guy stinks.
My theory is those who were around last year have not been able to wash off the stench of Nishi.
the Twins were shut out for the 4th time this year. They are not even close to the Angels who have been shut out 8 times.
Its weird that the franchise whit 2 of the longer tenured managers are struggling.
Each team also has a $20+ million pansy.
which player would you rather have?
I'd rather have Mauer's contract, for sure.
I find it kind of surprising how high on those "top 10 worst contracts in MLB" lists Mauer's contract is. I saw one from Bob Nightengale who said only Alfonso Soriano's is worse. Pujols' contract was frightening before he fell off a cliff. A-Rod? Vernon Wells?
The Prince Fielder contract is mortifying. $24M/9yr for a guy with huge injury potential and who basically has "old player skills" which makes him a good candidate to fall off a cliff at some random time in the future. Mo Vaughn anyone?
Mauer's contract wouldn't get as much attention if the Twins were getting contributions from other positions. Would you rather pay $23M for Mauer or $23M for Pavano, Liriano, Blackburn, and Capps? The team actually has quite a bit of money sunk into a terrible, terrible rotation. Sure, those contracts aren't forever, but at least Mauer adds something to the team.
I can't believe I forgot about that one. I'm guessing it's because I'm eagerly anticipating watching that contract bite the Tigers in the ass in like 3 or 4 years.
Vernon Wells or Mauer?
Are you guys ready for the mlb rule IV draft?!?!?! Keith Law put up his first mock today, insider req'd. He has the Twins, with the 2nd pick, taking Bryan Buxton, a high school CF. The first paragraph from Law's report is below:
Buxton is by far the best upside prospect in this year's draft, as his body and off-the-charts athleticism have earned him comparisons to players from the Uptons to Matt Kemp to Eric Davis to Willie Mays. If you want raw tools, this is about as good as it gets. Buxton is an 80 runner (on the 20-80 scouting scale) with a 70 arm and a chance to be a 70 defender in center; he's not just fast, but runs easily and effortlessly and is even faster underway than he is in short spurts like home to first. His future is at the plate but he has hit 97 mph off the mound, hitting 93 the night I saw him, and his speed translates to plus range in center right now, with his defense likely to improve with more work reading the ball off the bat.
I will leave others to comment here.
I think the Twins can use quality players everywhere, and this kid does sound good, but at the same time, I'm really hoping they draft a top of the rotation pitcher. But hey, if that guy is there 1-1 next year, so be it.
Willie Mays!
I love the jump from Eric Davis to Willie Mays. That's hilarious, and I really liked Eric Davis.
No one doubts his talent.
take out " players from the Uptons to Matt Kemp to Eric Davis to Willie Mays." and insert "Darryl Strawberry" and it sounds like the writeup for Aaron Hicks.
Should we be concerned that the whole writeup is about his speed and defense?
Well, at least they aren't slagging his hitting the way that everyone mentioned that Revere wouldn't hit for power. The blurb also says "his future is at the plate," while implying that he could potentially make it as a pitcher if a team wanted to put him on the mound.
The blurb also says "his future is at the plate,"
but enough about Capps.
Another toolsy outfielder!
/ubesbait.
Honestly, I don't mind who they draft provided it's up the middle talent that won't take forever.
I feel like there's a good market for top prospects these days. Teams see the value in, say, a 20-year-old who is blowing everyone's socks off in AA. So I'm not as worried about whether the guy will be big-league-ready in two years or six. If the rest of the team is coming together, they should be able to move him for someone of similar value.
ok, can I whine a little bit here? WTF is the deal with a "20-80 scouting scale"?? Can't scouts count to 100? Alternately, why not 0-60 instead?
In programming, I remember when we went from octal to hex back in the 80s. Mind-blowage.
It's like Mel Kiper's A to B- scale.
My theory is they like to have a middle number so that is why the odd range of numbers and 50 sounds like a great number for being average. Scouts do not like to rate at extremes, so if they went 0 to 100, 0 and 100 would never be used anyways, so those got chopped off. Why not 10 to 90? Who knows.
There's probably a decent story there somewhere. I kind of like it, though, to be honest.
Coming into today:
Player A: .276/.395/.374 - .769
Player B: .278/.349/.421 - .770
Player C: .230/.313/.459 - .773
Player D: .294/.408/.606 - 1.013
Player E: .197/.235/.275 - .510
Player F: .252/.316/.447 - .763
A: Mauer; B: Prince Fielder; C: Morneau; D: Willingham; E: Albert Pujols; F: Doumit. Pujols' struggles have been made well known. What I didn't realize is how poorly Prince has played so far. Morneau has been just as good while fighting off rust and recovery from various surgeries. Mauer is having a down year so far, but his numbers look a lot better when you consider the contracts of B and E and that Mauer is at least a part-time catcher. When you consider how he started, Doumit's numbers really look nice.
Of course, Mauer and Willingham are smoking the rest of that field in OBP. It'd be nice to see Mauer's power come around. A month with 5 HR would probably make his numbers look a lot better.
Also, looking at that list, I'm encouraged by Morneau's walk rate--it's right up there with Mauer and Willingham.
Pujols' line is an unmitigated disaster. No power, no walks, no average.
Doumit sort of has a Torii-Hunter-like line. Not much contact, some walks but not many, and good power (roughly a .200 ISOp).
You know, I would almost go out on a limb and assert that Pujols is injured. It's the easiest way to explain how bad that line is. He's got the big new contract and doesn't want to look like a pansy coming to his new team so he's pulling a Punto and playing through the pain.
I agree with you. Injury seems a whole lot more likely than that he somehow suddenly forgot how to hit.
Looking at Twins' hitting numbers, they have the second-best K rate and are above average in walk rate. No surprise then that they put the ball on the ground more than anybody. Despite this, they still have the second-worst HR/fly ball ratio. Not sure if that is luck or just lack of power. Probably a combination. When the Twins' hitters pull the ball, the results are right in line with the rest of the AL, however, they are just awful when they hit it up the middle or to the opposite field. Isn't this supposed to be their specialty? Maybe it indicates opponents are consistently pitching them inside more to combat this. That would seem to indicate the Twins aren't adjusting to that. Twins also have worst line drive percentage.
For hitters, HR/FB is definitely an indicator of power, at least over a large enough sample. (The reason this tends to be random for pitchers is that overall they tend to face the same quality of hitters.)
The low LD% really mitigates the benefit of having a good SO%.
I'm somewhat inclined to believe your theory about pitchers consistently pitching them inside with the Twins not adjusting to that approach. It's hard to make that a good theory for the whole team, though, since it could just by that the pull hitters are the better hitters on the team. (Without checking the numbers, Mauer's the only hitter I'd definitely expect to be good to the opposite field. Maybe Span.)
I like what you're saying here, about the Twins not adjusting to the way they're being approached. I'd agree, largely based on what I feel I'm seeing every time I watch them. Sliders down in the zone to Valencia and Doumit, bust the speed guys inside, etc. In fact, from what I've seen, I'd say Doumit is the only player on the team who seems to be making any adjustments to the way he's being pitched. I dunno... nothing real insightful here, just that I feel like I'm witnessing this phenomena, and it's nice to see the numbers there too.
The other day I won a trivia contest on another baseball card blog, and...well, check it out for yourself. Mr. Shlabotnik designed a couple nice ones.
Who does the CoC header refer to?
Yes.
Not that I can picture.
It was so hard not to correct that sentence to "To Whom does the CoC Header refer?", which totally ruins the joke.
I hope that my grammar teachers are proud.
According to JoePos:
Albert Pujols in the month of May .160/.176/.220.
Me: And that's including 5 games against Twins pitching!!
It's hard to believe how bad the Angels suck considering how terrible the Twins played against them.
Sigh.
2012 Angels = 2011 Twins?
Trending Worse?
2013 Yankees = 2012 Angels = 2011 Twins? ::fingers crossed::
What does he have to do with this?
Torii Hunter's son arrested in connection with sexual assault of another student.
socal pointed that out too. I just hope the kid hasn't screwed his future up too badly.
I don't know if that's the kind of thing that goes away. I had two casual acquaintances in college who ended up being jailed for rape, and even though our group knew the guys fairly well, it immediately became the only identifying characteristic of their beings. They've probably changed, but I don't ever want to know them again and find out.
And the victim, right?
Yeah, to hell with the kid. Seriously.
I woke up at 3:30 this morning and realized our power was out. It still was out when I left for work at just after 6. The whole neighborhood was out, but the signal light about a half-mile away was on. My boys got a hard lesson on just how many things they use that use electricity.
I can't find a clip, but Dave Mordal had a standup bit about the power going out that'd be worth checking out if you can somehow find it somewhere.
Huh. We just had a four-hour power outage here a few days ago during a dust storm. It was the longest outage I can remember being affected by, though we certainly went through tons of them when I was a kid.
The guy from the Brooklyn Park day care murder has been caught.
Thank goodness. This was one that just haunted me.
Holy crap, if that guy did all the things that he is accused of, what a complete waste of flesh and oxygen.
Yeah, that story just kept getting worse. I felt too sick about it to comment on it initially.
With a story like that, I always ask: what life was the perpetrator protecting by attempting to murder a 15-year-old he'd raped in the first place? How does one even assume he's got the right to be free, let alone leave a trail of murder just to keep his worthless ass out of prison?
The founder of my company quits amid the scandal involving the CEO.
Fantastic ethics all around, guys. Well done ignoring essentially all of the company's stated core values.
Do as I say, not as I do!
The really crazy thing is that "the board decided to award Dunn a severance package worth more than $4 million."
that's enough to make anyone seriously question their ethics
If I leave the WGOM, how much will you guys pay me?
The analogy doesn't quite fit you. Me, on the other hand...
Profit!
Says the only guy to get a golden parachute when he closed his basement as an all-hours tavern for his friends.
We can pay you to leave?
😉
So. Many. Forbidden. Things. To. Say.
Knowing the company as I do, I unfortunately found that part so unsurprising that I didn't even commit it to memory.
It's kind of depressing that this dude screwed up, lost his job, and was awarded more than I'll likely make in my entire career. Frown.
SOP. I've never seen a board of directors that wasn't full of CEOs and CFOs from other companies. There's a whole lot of back scratching goes on in boardrooms.
Advice Sought: I know several here have dealt with similar problems or are computer whizzes.
My Dell PC of 4-ish years, running Windows Vista, appears to have had a Disk Error.
It self-restarted and went BIOS (or something like that dealing with temperature and fan speed) and when I exited that, into DSKCHK.
It’s on stage 3 of 3, stuck at 37%, but constantly yet very slowly moving. It is almost at 400,000 of 568,000 security descriptors verified. But within the first hour it was at 360,000, and it’s been two days to get to 400,000. Which projects to more than a week to go before it’s done, and what to do if we get a power outage or circuit break?
The restart happened on Friday during the day. I let it run overnight. Then I got frustrated Saturday afternoon, did a hard reboot (power-off button), bypassed CHKDSK, and got a scary bluescreen. Nothing seemed to be happening, so I hard rebooted again and went along with DSKCHK. Then Stage 1 of 3 started finding things that had not been found before. That scared me more: was it deleting files? Thought I’d try the hard reboot one more time and once in CHKDSK it performed exactly as it had the day before, but it started slowly at the same place it had been slow before in Stage 3 of 3, and now I’m another 40,000 security descriptors along.
This hard drive has so much of our personal data, almost none of which was backed up. Photos, homeschool records, my wife’s emails, a lot of personal spreadsheets that I’ve made to organize my thoughts, my wife’s music files (not the songs she paid money to get professionally recorded, but the demos), a good portion of my music files (iTunes playlists, anything I paid for or imported, but nothing I stole), and basically anything else that a person could have on their hard drive.
I would very much like to save all of this data. I’m less concerned about the computer itself, it had been starting to lag (which might have been a precursor to the problem for all I know), and there are new and fun versions of Windows and Office available, so we were probably looking to upgrade within a year anyways.
Here are the questions I have, I’d appreciate any thoughts you have on them:
1. Do I let Chkdsk keep running for a fortnight straight and hope it can resolve the problem?
2. Do I disconnect the power as-is and bring it somewhere? If so, where? Best Buy? Somewhere else?
3. How much hope should I have to save all of my family photos?
If it might change your thoughts can get details about warning messages of the blue screen as well as Chkdsk tonight when I get home: I took photos.
AMR, since your main concern is to save your data, you could try pulling the hard drive out and putting into an external case, then checking to see if you can access the drive from another computer. If you can get to the data, then copy everything over to a new hard drive. Your problem could be a hard drive issue, but it could also be another hardware problem like a mainboard issue causing the blue screens, etc. I know some Dell laptops from several years back had issues with micro-cracks developing over time that eventually blue screened the systems. You might also have corrupted Windows files that are causing this, but I'm thinking it's more likely hardware. I have an external USB hard drive case you can borrow if you want, and I'd be happy to help with diagnosis and data transfer is you like. I know we don't live that far apart, so just let me know.
My thought exactly. Pull the HD and set it up as a slave/external on another PC and see if it at least can't be read from there.
My comment from the non-expert peanut gallery: This.
Pulling the hard drive and slaving it in another machine is pretty easy to do, particularly with your typical mini-tower Dell. Easy access, lots of room to work.
If you have access to another computer you can download ubuntu and make a boot disk on a flash drive or CD. Then you can boot from that with your unhappy computer and you may be able to access the hard drive from there.
I ran my laptop off of an Ubuntu CD for almost a month around Christmas. I didn't try any data retrieval off of the HD, but the boot CD option is insanely easy.
Using a flash drive is almost as easy, except you then have it hanging off your computer. I've only tried to retrieve data once using this method, but I had pretty good luck. Basically, I was able to get everything off except the actual corrupted sectors without taking the computer apart. Removing the hard drive and using it as an external drive should work fine, too, though.
1) Hire Keanu Reeves to take your data into his brain.
2) Have him run very quickly to a safe house to lay low, until you can get a new PC on which to transfer the data.
3) Avoid White Rabbits, Yakuzas, and Dolph.
Speaking as a relative expert, I can say that this is the best way to get your data back.
Howard Sinker:
Since the schedule went to 162 games in 1961, only ten teams have lost as many as 109 games. Four of those were the first four seasons of the New York Mets.
At 10-26, the Twins have to play at a 68-win pace the rest of the way to avoid 100 losses.
Yeah, that's a bet I would take. Where does Howard want us to line up?
morneau back, parmalee down.
Any bets on how long he's on the 25 man roster? I'm saying 30 days.
I'm taking the over on that. Irrational optimism, but I'm gonna call that he stays on the active roster through the A-S Break at least.
Does this cover if he's playing on another team's 25 man roster?
And why do I have mag's gravatar?
I'm expecting this to happen sooner or later, but I'd be a bit heartbroken about it happening.
I guess this depends on what the Twins think will be best for Parmelee. With the team going nowhere, I'd have no problem with sticking with him at first base a while longer. On the other hand, if the Twins think that, long-term, it's best for him to go back to AAA for a while, I don't have a big problem with that, either.
i don't believe he's played at all in AAA, has he?
No. Again, it's all about what's best for Parmelee's development. While I don't have supreme confidence in the Twins' organization on that point, I have to assume they know more about it than I do.
Okay, who do you think will be the next person removed from the 25 man roster, either through demotion, release, DFA, DL, trade, or however?
My pick is Darin Mastroianni. I know it should be a pitcher, but I'm not seeing it.
I'd agree with Mastroianni, but to be honest I have close to 15 players I'd be fine with removing from the 25 man roster at this point.
Jason Marquis
Spooky, and spooky, too: I had a dream last night that my sister was in a car accident, and my mom just called me to tell me my sister was in a car accident last night. I was surprised to learn it wasn't her fault, having ridden in her car before; some dolt rear-ended her as she was turning off the main road and into her place of work. She's fine, but for the third time in her life, laid up with injuries sustained in a car accident. I know they happen all the time, but I've never been in any that approached her worst ones, and she's only been on the road for six years.
Good to hear that she's doing fine. Spooky and spooky indeed.
Anyone else watching the tigers sox tilt? Dancie blew up the ninth, but the tigs hold on.
Lowe said that 115 of his 127 pitches today were sinkers. He threw some change ups to Mauer but otherwise everyone saw the same pitch all day long. No runs.
Oh, mama. The twins suck.
Obviously he threw the change-ups to Mauer because it's not his best pitch and he wanted to give the malingerer a fighting chance.
He also threw basically every pitch in the same location.
Absolutely pathetic.
hmm, adjust much, twins?
there was a pitcher either last year or two years ago that did the same thing, but it was something like 102 pitches 100 sinkers. I want to say it was Fausto Carmona.
Justin Masterson. 104 pitches, 103 fastballs.
thank you
Three walks, no Ks. If it was a Twins pitcher, we would be saying how lucky he was.
His xFIP for the game was 4.6 runs.
shared not for the political content, but for the NoDak content, from a story about Newsweek's Obama "gaylo" cover story:
Tom Powers:
I don't know about that ingrained losing stuff.
Yeah, that Mauer guy stinks.
My theory is those who were around last year have not been able to wash off the stench of Nishi.
the Twins were shut out for the 4th time this year. They are not even close to the Angels who have been shut out 8 times.
Its weird that the franchise whit 2 of the longer tenured managers are struggling.
Each team also has a $20+ million pansy.
which player would you rather have?
I'd rather have Mauer's contract, for sure.
I find it kind of surprising how high on those "top 10 worst contracts in MLB" lists Mauer's contract is. I saw one from Bob Nightengale who said only Alfonso Soriano's is worse. Pujols' contract was frightening before he fell off a cliff. A-Rod? Vernon Wells?
The Prince Fielder contract is mortifying. $24M/9yr for a guy with huge injury potential and who basically has "old player skills" which makes him a good candidate to fall off a cliff at some random time in the future. Mo Vaughn anyone?
Mauer's contract wouldn't get as much attention if the Twins were getting contributions from other positions. Would you rather pay $23M for Mauer or $23M for Pavano, Liriano, Blackburn, and Capps? The team actually has quite a bit of money sunk into a terrible, terrible rotation. Sure, those contracts aren't forever, but at least Mauer adds something to the team.
I can't believe I forgot about that one. I'm guessing it's because I'm eagerly anticipating watching that contract bite the Tigers in the ass in like 3 or 4 years.
Vernon Wells or Mauer?
Are you guys ready for the mlb rule IV draft?!?!?! Keith Law put up his first mock today, insider req'd. He has the Twins, with the 2nd pick, taking Bryan Buxton, a high school CF. The first paragraph from Law's report is below:
I will leave others to comment here.
I think the Twins can use quality players everywhere, and this kid does sound good, but at the same time, I'm really hoping they draft a top of the rotation pitcher. But hey, if that guy is there 1-1 next year, so be it.
Willie Mays!
I love the jump from Eric Davis to Willie Mays. That's hilarious, and I really liked Eric Davis.
No one doubts his talent.
take out " players from the Uptons to Matt Kemp to Eric Davis to Willie Mays." and insert "Darryl Strawberry" and it sounds like the writeup for Aaron Hicks.
Should we be concerned that the whole writeup is about his speed and defense?
Well, at least they aren't slagging his hitting the way that everyone mentioned that Revere wouldn't hit for power. The blurb also says "his future is at the plate," while implying that he could potentially make it as a pitcher if a team wanted to put him on the mound.
The blurb also says "his future is at the plate,"
but enough about Capps.
Another toolsy outfielder!
/ubesbait.
Honestly, I don't mind who they draft provided it's up the middle talent that won't take forever.
I feel like there's a good market for top prospects these days. Teams see the value in, say, a 20-year-old who is blowing everyone's socks off in AA. So I'm not as worried about whether the guy will be big-league-ready in two years or six. If the rest of the team is coming together, they should be able to move him for someone of similar value.
ok, can I whine a little bit here? WTF is the deal with a "20-80 scouting scale"?? Can't scouts count to 100? Alternately, why not 0-60 instead?
In programming, I remember when we went from octal to hex back in the 80s. Mind-blowage.
It's like Mel Kiper's A to B- scale.
My theory is they like to have a middle number so that is why the odd range of numbers and 50 sounds like a great number for being average. Scouts do not like to rate at extremes, so if they went 0 to 100, 0 and 100 would never be used anyways, so those got chopped off. Why not 10 to 90? Who knows.
There's probably a decent story there somewhere. I kind of like it, though, to be honest.
Coming into today:
Player A: .276/.395/.374 - .769
Player B: .278/.349/.421 - .770
Player C: .230/.313/.459 - .773
Player D: .294/.408/.606 - 1.013
Player E: .197/.235/.275 - .510
Player F: .252/.316/.447 - .763
I agree with you. Injury seems a whole lot more likely than that he somehow suddenly forgot how to hit.
Looking at Twins' hitting numbers, they have the second-best K rate and are above average in walk rate. No surprise then that they put the ball on the ground more than anybody. Despite this, they still have the second-worst HR/fly ball ratio. Not sure if that is luck or just lack of power. Probably a combination. When the Twins' hitters pull the ball, the results are right in line with the rest of the AL, however, they are just awful when they hit it up the middle or to the opposite field. Isn't this supposed to be their specialty? Maybe it indicates opponents are consistently pitching them inside more to combat this. That would seem to indicate the Twins aren't adjusting to that. Twins also have worst line drive percentage.
For hitters, HR/FB is definitely an indicator of power, at least over a large enough sample. (The reason this tends to be random for pitchers is that overall they tend to face the same quality of hitters.)
The low LD% really mitigates the benefit of having a good SO%.
I'm somewhat inclined to believe your theory about pitchers consistently pitching them inside with the Twins not adjusting to that approach. It's hard to make that a good theory for the whole team, though, since it could just by that the pull hitters are the better hitters on the team. (Without checking the numbers, Mauer's the only hitter I'd definitely expect to be good to the opposite field. Maybe Span.)
I like what you're saying here, about the Twins not adjusting to the way they're being approached. I'd agree, largely based on what I feel I'm seeing every time I watch them. Sliders down in the zone to Valencia and Doumit, bust the speed guys inside, etc. In fact, from what I've seen, I'd say Doumit is the only player on the team who seems to be making any adjustments to the way he's being pitched. I dunno... nothing real insightful here, just that I feel like I'm witnessing this phenomena, and it's nice to see the numbers there too.