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Al Avila was not hard to deal with.

To Oblong's point, it works.

If it was really only about losing money, wouldn’t they have axed him immediately, instead of continuing to lose money for another nine months?

Yes, I did forget to mention the Diamondbacks. Well, if “crap happens”, you know whom to blame.

I’m sure Harris growing into someone who’s easy to deal with would please the several other GMs. My question is, is that something we really need?

And with Isaac Paredes, Willi Castro, Daz Cameron, Christin Stewart, and Parker Meadows anchoring our lineup, Al Avila has positioned us for a slew of pennants!

If they make it that far and productively, in ten years, those four might cost something close to $200 million a season just by themselves.

It occurs to me that when a team acquires talent because it is “proven”, they are by definition looking backward and not forward. They are paying for past performance and not future results, and as we know from investing caveats, the former is not indicative of the latter. I’m glad the GM/PBO of the team I follow most does not invest based mainly on past performance.

Do you think Harris is likely to keep Kahnle to save face even if we have better options in-house?

Both Fangraphs and Reference say we are middle of the pack at third base. What are you seeing that says different?

As much as I agree with all of this, I would like to have gotten a swing-and-miss strikeout guy at the back of the pen, which we don’t have now. Brock Stewart for Akil Baddoo might have worked, since Akil has more upside than James Outman (I would think?). Maybe Paul Seward will come back next month and be that guy, I don’t know. But it looks like Harris identified a bunch of guys in volume, all of whom do something really well and we think we can patch up the other things they lack in enough to get two-plus months of good to great performance from them. And we kept all of our top prospects, which I think is a very good thing considering, as you say, we are way way ahead in the division and practically assured of a tournament run. If the division were close, especially with the Guards, we might have seen some more aggressive moves. It could be argued that we are prospect hoarding the way the Orioles did last year, and they came into the season as a favorite for the pennant (on par with the Tigers), and look how that’s gone. So it remains to be seen how that will transpire over the next year or two. In the end, I think this is about building a sustainable winner, our lack of progress toward this being something a lot of us (especially me) had been whining about during the last several years of the Avila Reign of Error. There will always be All-In Guys among us and we’re going to hear from them, and you know what? That’s great. That’s entertaining. Philosophical conformity is boring. So let’s argue about this some more. 😁

Some insight from Harris.

Wow, I didn’t realize the Twins were eating so much money on the Correa deal. Well … not as much as Avila ate on the Verlander deal …

But I want to be concerned about that. Very concerned. Very, very, very concerned.

I think if there’s anything a player will admit, it’s that they don’t like to sit!

Who cares? That guy can go pound sand. 😁

This is just the kind of thing I went to look up. Morton has pitched at least five innings in 10 of his last 11 games, and has given up more than three runs in only two of those games. Pitcher wins don’t mean anything, of course, but for what it’s worth, he is 7–1 during that stretch with a 3.88 ERA and almost exactly 9 K/9. I’m pretty sure we got him to start and not for anything like long relief. If anyone is a odd man out, it’s probably going to be Melton, at least until Morton shows he doesn’t have it anymore. And now I want to know what Morton’s Statcast card looks like during that stretch, versus the season-long card we see on the Savant site.

Sure they would say in public that they want a monster ballplayer to help them win a pennant. Who wouldn’t say they want that? And I’m sure they’ll now say in public that they know they have the horses they need to win the pennant and a ring. Who wouldn’t say they know that?

Our rotation as it stands looks like it might be Skubal, Flaherty, Mize, Paddack, Morton, Melton. A temporary six-man rotation gives us a little breathing room if one of the guys goes down with an injury, plus it gives everyone an extra day to recharge as we go through the dog days of August and September and into the playoffs. If they go this route, I’d bet it would get pared down to a five man rotation by end of month.

Start him? That’s one less pitching chaos game every five days.

And herrrrre we goooo … 😉😂

Lemonade out of lemons? Scott Harris has just communicated to this group of guys that he believes they are good enough as is to take us deep into October and maybe even November, and don’t need help from high-priced trade targets that cost us anyone from the top of our system. That kind of thing means a lot to extreme competitors as major-league players are, especially on a team on which most of them all came up together and are growing as major leaguers together. Take that for what it’s worth.

Harold Reynolds seems to remember that Charlie Morton was pretty good in the 5-to-10-year-ago range, so of course he predicts that Charlie Morton will start playoff games for us this year.

OK, well, looks like we have who we’re going to war with for the next two to three months. The big takeaway looks like, the guys we already had in house have to keep stepping up and lead us, with some help on the fringes from some of the new guys.