Phil Watch: Fish In The Barrel

Gotta clean out the closet.

Here's a few nuggets from Phil's "Morning Phil" entries from the past week.

Let's get started.

1. Alfonso Soriano's contract is what it is -- a careless bit of flinging money at the wall. It's going to haunt the Cubs before it's over. But this might not be the year.

Soriano's performance in May (.362-6-16 in 20 games with a 1.160 OPS) suggests he may have a good season in him at the plate. The best thing about his totals is that he's put them up while getting frequent rests, and never once was he on one of those extended white-hot tears that helped carry the Cubs to the playoffs in 2007 and '08.

So..."extended white-hot tears" by definition here is 76 plate appearances in 20 games with six homers, 16 rbi and an 1.160 OPS.

Good? Good.

First 19 games and 91 plate appearances of 2009: .313/.396/.650 (1.046 OPS) with seven homers and 14 rbi.

12 games and 54 plate appearances at the end of July in 2009: .404/.462/.787 for a 1.249 OPS with five homers and 15 rbi. Cubs went 9-3 and gained 2.5 games on the Cards, leaving them 1/2 game back.

Much of May in 2008: 94 PAs - .356/.383/.759 for a 1.142 OPS, nine homers, 23 rbi. Team went 12-9.

Stretch run in 2008: 89 PAs - .325/.393/.650 for a 1.043 OPS, seven homers, 10 rbi. Team went 11-8.

And the famous June tear in '07: 105 PAs - .354/.400/.792 for a 1.192 OPS, 10 homers and 16 rbi. Team went 13-9.

I don't really get the reasoning here. "Never once was he on one of those extended hot tears that helped carry the Cubs to the playoffs in 2007 and 2008"? He's been on tears before. Soriano is a pretty good definition of a 'hot or cold' player. We've seen it firsthand here in Chicago. And the Cubs are 10-10 during Soriano's recent 'hot tear'. How is this tear any different than past tears? What's Phil's reasoning here? Why is this any different?

Hitting coach Rudy Jaramillo is doing a good job with Soriano, and his left knee has come all the way back after surgery.

OH! It was a reason to tell us for the 84,975th time that Rudy Jaramillo is a genius.

Is Jaramillo some sort of shaman that magically healed Soriano's knee or did Soriano's knee have some time to heal itself and that's led to a little more confidence in the knee?

Seems to me the knee healed itself as...well...any body part that gets some time to heal tend to strengthen over time and then good things are more apt to happen after that.

Soriano is chasing fewer of those breaking balls too far off the plate to hit, forcing pitchers to more often throw him strikes. He always has been a good hitter when he locked in on the strike zone, and Jaramillo has him there.

Pretty much wrong. We have data on this type of stuff. The only really dramatic difference between Soriano this year and the Soriano of past years is that he's swinging and making contact on pitches OUTSIDE the strike zone (66.2% compared to a career 50.9%) with a little help from pitchers not throwing him first-pitch strikes (50.9% this year compared to a career 59.7%). And this is too small of a sample size to make any real judgment given the bad teams (thereby bad pitchers) the Cubs have played this year (4th-easiest strength of schedule in all of baseball so far in 2010).

But yes, Doctor Jaramillo is the reason Soriano is better this year. But it's not his fault that Soto's hitting .179 in May. And Theriot is OPSing .527 in May. Or that the team overall has a 328 OBP in May, good for 19th in baseball.

Can't have it both times. If Jaramillo gets the credit for Soriano, he gets the blame for the craptastic stuff as well.

But in reality, all sane individuals in the world understand that the hitting coach does little for grown-ass adults trying to work through the season. It's another set of eyes and maybe a few tweaks here and there. Nothing more.

1. It didn't take long for Roy Oswalt's friendship with Jake Peavy to cause the White Sox to enter speculation about a new home for Oswalt. It was raised by former Astros manager Phil Garner in an interview with FOX Sports' J.P. Morosi, possibly proving that Garner isn't going to move into the front office any time soon.

What? Like the time Phil thought the Rays should sign Barry Bonds because it would be neat to see him play in New York and Boston? Like that?

Or maybe like the time Phil thought the team that signed the most veterans, no matter how terrible and/or old they are, while losing the least won the off-season? It was Phil-Math and it was wonderful. Like that?

Given the White Sox's all-veteran rotation and standing as the fifth puniest lineup in the big leagues -- not to mention the stronghold on the 2010 race by Minnesota and Detroit -- Oswalt makes zero sense for the White Sox. If anything, Peavy's 5.74 ERA has to cut down Ken Williams' interest in any National League pitcher and hurt Oswalt's value with 13 other AL clubs. If Peavy could get treated so rudely, couldn't Oswalt?

Oh, Holy Hell! They are two different pitchers!

Peavy was a fly-ball pitcher (career 38.7% FB rate) prone to the long ball, something that was suppressed by the canyon that is Petco. Minute Maid, by contrast, is a long ball haven and Oswalt found a way to work with it while being more of a groundball pitcher (career 47.6% GB rate). There's a 10% difference between Peavy and Oswalt's FB/GB rate for their careers and in three-year splits. That 10% is the difference between being an overall good pitcher and someone who might be prone to bad things happening in tighter environments.

But again. Yes. Because Peavy was in the National League before, that means Kenny (or any other AL GM!) would not be inclined to pick up another National League pitcher.

I had a couple more but I'm done. This is just a stupid waste of time.

Phil Watch: Ichiro Is Overrated Because Casey Kotchman is Bad

I don't know why I continue to fixate on such an inconsequential writer.

But here's another nugget.

Phil was asked to name the "Most Overrated" hitter in baseball for the Four Corners segment, a infinitely dippy feature from four guys in the Tribune family.

The other three players listed by other writers were Carl Crawford (wha?), Jose Reyes and J.D. Drew.

Phil offers...Ichiro.

Single out Ichiro

What's the definition of "most overrated?" You could look at it just in terms of hitting ability, but in my opinion major league baseball is always about the money, so l'm going to consider it in relation to a hitter's value to a team. That makes this an easy question, as Ichiro Suzuki -- who you can argue is the best pure hitter in the game -- is clearly the most overrated.

Yes...clearly. He's been paid $87.5 million by the Mariners before this season since 2002. And he's had a total WAR value of $141.3 million. JHC! So if you have a great player on a bad team, it's mostly the great player's fault they're bad? That's F'in NONSENSE!

What do his 200-plus hits every season -- heavily loaded with singles -- do for the Mariners? He had a majors-high 225 in 2009 and they scored the fewest runs in the AL.

It gets you Phil calling Ichiro an MVP candidate in July of 2009.

He's again leading the majors with 58 hits (including 48 singles), and Seattle is 14-26. Singles hitters, even those with speed, need to be in deep lineups to realize their value.

Pussy slap-hitter. Take your .352 average and .362 wOBA and go home. You're the problem with the Mariners. Not the .195 average from Figgins and GM Z thinking Jose Lopez, Casey Kotchman and Milton Bradley will be reliable sticks in the middle of the order. He took a high risk-reward shot on a lot of guys and it's flamed out so far. But yes, the leadoff hitter getting on at a .395 clip is the problem. And the fact that GM Z didn't create a deep lineup after Ichiro is clearly Ichiro's fault.

The drop in power numbers in recent years makes the guys who do regularly drive the ball to walls, and over walls, as valuable as they've ever been. A singles hitter in a bad lineup is a hood ornament on a beater. These days, that's Ichiro.

Holy Mother Of Crap! Somebody please make sense of that for me. Ichiro is a superlative singles hitter that gets on base four out of every ten times in front of guys whose job it is to drive him in. Ichiro does his job, the Casey Kotchmans of the world don't and that's Ichiro's fault?

Using Phil's logic, if you buy a beautiful piece of steak and cook it wrong, it's somehow the cow's fault.

A freaking great singles hitter is the most beautiful hood ornament you ever saw. Just because someone decided to put it on a beater doesn't take anything away from its inherent beauty. You just wonder why they put it on a Gremlin that is the rest of the Mariners' lineup.

Ichiro is overrated because he's not Albert Pujols. How dare he not be something he's not.

Easily the frontrunner for the dumbest thing Phil has written this year.

Phil Watch: Revising The Revised & Repeating The Repeated

I hate the feeling that I've told a story to someone before. I especially hate it when I realize it as soon as I start the story but I'm not 100% sure if I have, so I plow ahead just in case I'm wrong and then, right towards the end, I realize that, yes, I have.

It's an icky feeling when you have just repeated yourself and it's worse when the person hearing the story gives body clues early on that they've indeed heard it.. Nobody likes to be redundant.

Phil, apparently, doesn't mind such things.

I had a boss like this once. He also felt that if he said the same blather over and over again, it would someday come true and didn't care if anybody has heard it before.

Let's get started.

It's hard to find a silver lining in the cloud hovering over the White Sox.

Agreed. This is bad. It was a collection of guys put together that have had nice enough careers at fairly young ages that nonetheless collectively fell off the cliff.

Best-case scenario: You really have to use your imagination to get this Sox team to .500 given the way talent has drained away from the big-league club since 2008.

Um...okay. Just for the record, let's see who was on the 2008 team that could have helped this team, guys that are currently producing in 2010 that you could put on this roster over someone already there:

Orlando Cabrera: .265/.293/.364 for the Reds. Even the Twins found him annoying.

Joe Crede: Out of baseball

Nick Swisher: OPSing .915 for the Yankees. Bad return but Phil hated the original deal.

Jermaine Dye: No team in the majors thought he was an upgrade. Unsigned.

Jim Thome: Only DHing against righties on a good team.

Juan Uribe: Having himself a nice rejuvenation in San Francisco in a weaker league

Brian Anderson: Gave up hitting to become a pitcher

Ken Griffey: Ask Seattle fans about his current value

Javier Vazquez: Ask Yankee fans about his current value

Clayton Richard: Swapped for Peavy. Peavy wins.

Nick Masset: Brutal for the Reds in middle relief.

Jose Contreras: C'mon. I don't care if he's "closing" for the Phils.

So...I see Swisher and Uribe with a dash of Thome as possible contributors to this team. Swisher was an annoying clubhouse presence that needed to be shipped. He was a petulant child towards the end of '08 (terrible return, though). Uribe, after contributing for three seasons, fell off the cliff in 2007 and 2008 in terms of WAR. $2.3M total value in those years. Good for him. He found a home. The smart money said that wasn't going to happen. Thome? we've been over this.

The problem with this team, and it speaks to the larger point, was that Kenny finally gave Ozzie a National League-style team that Ozzie's been bitching about for years. Except that he didn't. Sure, they lead the league in stolen bases but there's a lot more to playing NL ball than stolen bases. There's hitting behind the runner. There's a crapload of hit-and-runs. There's putting stress on the defense by trying to take that extra base a lot. There's always trying to make things happen.

But even that's a myth now. Most good NL teams just bash their way to wins like their AL counterparts. The best teams doing it today are a few AL teams. The real question is why Kenny would concede to Ozzie and try to build such a team with The Cell being the definition of a bashing ballpark. It's a park that begs to build a team around homers. But yes, let's play small ball in a park where you play 81 games a year and gives you more homers than most any other place you play.

This season falls on Ozzie. If he's going to give "small ball" lip service, I'd like to at least see him fail trying. I'm not even seeing such stuff outside of stolen bases. When is the last time you saw Pierre swipe second and Pierzynski or Beckham try to hit it to the vacated second base spot? I don't recall it once. Heck, it seems that's stuff that can even help a guy get out of a slump. They certainly have shown an aptitude to ground out. Let's see if those potential ground outs can be productive.

The Sox have 27 games left against the Twins and Tigers, which isn't going to help. Those two American League Central opponents were playing .590 baseball through Tuesday, and it wasn't a fluke.

Um...we're going to see on that. The Twins have played the fourth-easiest schedule in baseball so far. The Tigers are in the lower half. The Twins are good. But it's Jon Rauch and Liriano is returning to Earth. He had a great three-start stint in April but has a 5.21 ERA in May and opponent are hitting .338 off him in that span. He's someone to watch (and hasn't given up a homer - change be a comin'). Justin Morneau is a career .280 hitter currently hitting .365. The Twins are a better team than the Sox. No doubt. I don't think they will catch the Twins. But top-to-bottom and given the players on each roster and their career arcs, I don't think they're 18 wins better like the early season projects out.

Worst-case scenario: The Sox were winning at a .421 pace through Tuesday. They shouldn't play worse but could continue at that pace, losing more than 90 games for the first time since 1989.

Agreed. That easily could happen. Watching this team is brutal. It's frustrating baseball. Everyone decided to be bad at once.

Gut read: Pitching wins championships but it doesn't carry a weak team. The White Sox are on pace to score 674 runs, 50 fewer than a year ago when it could point to Carlos Quentin's injury.

Agreed.

That team had Jermaine Dye and Jim Thome. The Sox replaced them with Alex Rios and Mark Kotsay, and swapped Scott Podsednik for Juan Pierre (the last guy most GMs would see as a winning player in the AL).

Rios is better than Dye in every facet right now. Thome hit .213 against lefties from 2007-2009. What do you do with that when he can't play the field? Scott Podsednik and Juan Pierre are the same player. Check the numbers.

Difference-makers: Quentin and Gordon Beckham. Quentin was locked in and killing the ball when the White Sox won in 2008. He has been anything but the last two seasons, battling plantar fasciitis and hitting a combined .227.

He's been awful. Agreed.

Beckham arrived with swagger last June, making a run at Rookie of the Year while learning to play third base. He should be more comfortable at second but is hitting .188.

He's also been awful. Agreed.

Blame game loser: General manager Ken Williams.

Um...what GM would have dumped those two? Seems at least partial blame rests on the two guys Phil just mentioned. They've been awful and that has led to less runs, also just mentioned. Throw in Pierzynski and Ramirez, a guy who hasn't seen a pitch he won't swing at and try to pull and poof! You have a team that can't score runs. That's where the blame lies, on guys that any GM would have put on the roster to play everyday that haven't produced.

Manager Ozzie Guillen, his coaches and players have been under almost daily review since the 4-9 start but those critiques ignore how the GM invested six pitchers, a promising infielder and a payroll commitment of $138 million over 15 player seasons to add Jake Peavy, Mark Teahen, Rios and Pierre since last July 31.

(Sigh) Certainly sounds like a big number. Decent amount of flexibility here. Check it out.

Just under $67 million committed for next year before arb raises. Only Danks should see a significant jump. Jenks will not be on this roster next year, Pierre might be swapped to someone looking for that last piece of the puzzle and, I hate to say it, but this might be the year that Buehrle goes to the Cardinals. They're looking beatable right now and one more pitcher might do it. If the Cardinals will take the salary (or at least a good chunk), Kenny might pull the trigger.

Williams, impatient with young talent and overly interested in putting a personal stamp on his team, sold Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf a 2010 team that came with a $106 million payroll, seventh in the majors.

This is Ozzie's team by every measure, Phil. Read your own paper.

The Sox have been below. 500 (256-269) since the start of '07. Williams has allowed a string of productive players to leave (bring back Juan Uribe!) and traded away inexpensive options from the farm system in Chris Young, Ryan Sweeney, Clayton Richard, Gio Gonzalez, John Ely, Chris Getz, Fautino de los Santos, Brandon Allen and Aaron Cunningham.

Here we go!

Chris Young: Phil feels like he can mention him again because he's off to a better start. Never mind that he put up a slash line of .235/.307/.438 in 1900 plate appearances before this in the majors. Oh, and struck out at a 26% clip...and had a TOTAL COMBINED WAR of 3.8 in four seasons before this year. Alex Rios put up a 4.7 in 2007 and a 5.4 in 2008 alone.

Ryan Sweeney: Light-hitting RF that fields well. Very well, actually. Who does he play in front of, Phil? Quentin? Rios? Maybe Pierre. I'll give Phil Pierre to an extent.

Clayton Richard: Good so far. He's pitching well in a monstrous ballpark in a weaker league and a weak-hitting division. Ahead of who on the White Sox? Garcia? Very big maybe and a "probably not". Richard has an entirely unsustainable HR/FB rate of 2.2% right now. That will change.

Gio Gonzalez: He's proven to be a fourth or fifth starter, Phil. We have a track record in the majors now. 5.22 BB/9 in 32 starts. He's just not that great. Cheap, sure. But the White Sox have some dough and he isn't better than anyone in the starting rotation. And if he was pitching for the Sox, the frustration meter would be through the roof.

I'm skipping Jon Ely. Four starts in the majors means anything and he would have no place in the rotation right now.

Getz? Really?

Ding! Ding! Ding! We have our first Fautino mention in a long time! Already had TJS. Started seven games in rookie ball last year and is now pitching out of the pen in A ball this year to the tune of three games and a 7.36 ERA. Hell yeah! He's an option for this year or anytime in the near future!

Brandon Allen: .216 at Triple A right now. Came up late last year and struck out 40 in 104 at-bats.

Aaron Cunningham: So good he can't crack the A's lineup. OPSing .645 in Triple-A right now.

I chastise Phil for repeating himself. Yet I'm doing the same thing. The difference might be, though, that I'm giving you actual numbers instead of saying the Chris freakin' Getz could help this team.

The Sox won in '05 because Williams struck gold with Jose Contreras, A.J. Pierzynski, Uribe, Bobby Jenks and Dye but lightning isn't striking the same place twice. The team's two cornerstone players, Paul Konerko and Mark Buehrle, were in place when Williams took over for Ron Schueler. Just how much loyalty does a World Series ring buy?

Ozzie goes before Kenny goes. I bet $500.

Phil Watch: Even Joe Morgan Asks For "Consistency"

The winds blow in baseball probably more than any other sport.

In the NBA, it's pretty much predetermined before the season begins who will be the last four teams standing. In the NFL, there's always a few surprises, but good is good and bad is bad for the most part.

In baseball, the season's long. Sure, there's always a few bad teams that play good for extended stretches and good teams that go in the crapper for a bit just like the other professional sports.

But due to the length of the season, it's the extended length of the good stretches/crappers in sheer number of days to overly analyze it that results in wildly stupid conclusions relating to "trends" and assumptions about "what it all means."

It also means that when it comes to individual players, since there are so many moving parts in baseball and so much verbiage about who could fit where and make an impact, things tend to get lost and the big picture gets obscured.

In short, a lot of people can say anything they want and that's okay. Because it's complicated.

Like Phil.

From this weekend:

...But because of Griffey's popularity and stature, they brought him back while letting their leading home run hitter, Russell Branyan, leave as a free agent.

The flagship Phil column this weekend is in the Dump Griffey vein. It's Phil's new thing. Waive Zambrano. Waive Bradley. Dump Griffey. Because they're not worth the trouble.

They always feel a bit rushed and somewhat out of character, like he's playing above his ability to take hard stances on things. Like he's trying to meet his quota of what sportswriters should do - take a detailed and nuanced position on something a few times a year. Except in Phil's case, it's rarely detailed and/or nuanced. It's usually drivel that tweaks what other people have already said.

To be fair, his Dump Griffey stance this time doesn't actually say that. He simply alludes to it, using the Mariners' unwillingness to resign Branyan as a comparable of "what could have been."

But this is what Phil said about Branyan in February:

Russell Branyan, who should have been more receptive to re-signing with the Mariners, whose general manager, Jack Zduriencik, gave him a chance to increase his at-bats.

And that was the case by all reports. The talk at the time was that Branyan wanted two guaranteed years at something like $5 million per as a bad-backed 34 year-old.

But in February, Phil puts it on Branyan's shoulders on why he didn't sign back with Seattle. Now, it's Zduriencik's fault.

Consistency. That's all.

Look at them now — last in the American League with 3.4 runs per game, dealing with the ugliness of teammates fingering Griffey for sleeping during a game and faced with the awkwardness of how to handle the Griffey story on a daily basis.

Can the M's see the future? It's not like he was Milton Bradley, a guy who you can predict some level of weirdness at some point during the season. This is Ken Griffey, Jr. He's been bad but never in a million years would anyone ever have predicted that the 'sleeping in the clubhouse' storyline would have happened.

If the Mariners simply had kept Branyan, giving him the two- or three-year deal he wanted, they might not have traded for the troubled Milton Bradley or hung on to Griffey. You have to think that would have seemed like a better option, even if Branyan, 34, opened the season on the disabled list with the Indians because of back problems the Mariners knew about.

And if I just would have known the lottery numbers from yesterday, I'd be rich today.

And THREE YEAR DEAL???!!! With a bad back? At 34? I'd love to see Phil as a GM. I can only think he's making this comparison because Branyan has three homers in 56 plate appearances this year for the Indians. I wonder if he also looked at his .245 average on a .375 BABIP and 45% K-rate, a number that is nearly 10% higher than Mark Reynolds' career K-rate, a guy that Phil questioned whether the D'backs to a long-term deal. I wonder.

Signing Reynolds, 26, to a long-term deal = iffy. Signing Branyan - 34, bad back - to a three-year deal = good.

This is why I love you, Phil.

Consistency. That's all.

You can argue the White Sox would have been better off if they had kept Thome and Jermaine Dye, as the Mariners surely would have been with Branyan and not Bradley. That might have kept the White Sox from dealing for Juan Pierre (a trade John Ely seems determined to make them regret).

First, along with Wilson Ramos (getting to him), Jon Ely is Phil's new hard-on. He's determined to find a Kenny Williams deal that blew up in his face. It's ten years now but when it happens, Phil will be there.

Second, I LOVE-LOVE-LOVE the "you can argue" line. Because it's limp-dick writing. Anyone can argue anything. Just listen to Score callers. It's the degree of coherence or stupidity in which the writing is ultimately judged. But if you put a "can" in there, the writer can wiggle out of being pinned down to anything. It then falls into the speculative category that doesn't require quantifying anything. Throw in Dye, a guy who hasn't played this year so there's no body of work to compare anything, and we can speculate away!

But Dye would have had to accept a cut from his $11.5 million salary and at least occasional stints as the designated hitter, and there's no indication he would have done that.

Holy crap! Then why write what was just written? If it was NEVER going to happen, then why is it a topic?

It's easy to see how ego becomes a problem when it is displayed regularly by the likes of Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds. But it's a factor in handling even the good guys at the elite level — such as Griffey, Thome and Dye.

So...wait a minute. I'm lost. Thome? Ego? He wanted to come back. But Guillen wanted to play a different brand of baseball. Thome?

THOME?

By the way, the treatment of the Tacoma News Tribune's Larry LaRue, the reporter who broke the story about Griffey dozing in the clubhouse, is shameful. Players closing ranks against him is no indication he did anything wrong professionally.

And this, along with the Bradley trade, is why this is a topic. A member of the writer fraternity was wronged.

But I have a question. Why did the writer admit to prematurely posting the blog then?

I don't know the real details. Nobody seems to. But there WAS a tinge of piling-on to the story. I wonder if things were going good for the M's, would the story have been published? I doubt it, which displays to the players, however wrong and however nuanced the real truth is, what a certain writer might do if and when he gets an itchy trigger finger on the send button.

The Padres and Giants are looking for run producers but haven't reached out to Jermaine Dye. He could fit in left field in San Francisco but would be severely challenged by the open spaces of San Diego's Petco Park. …

BAH! Dye's in left field now in Phil scenarios. Third-worst outfielder in all of baseball over the last three years but "he could fit".

And "he could fit" in left field in San Francisco but not Petco? AT&T Park's left field dimensions are 339 ft. down the line and 382 in the left field gap. Petco's is 334 ft down the line, branching out to 367 ft. in the gap. So...AT&T has more open space in left. But Dye would fit there.

And both the Padres and Giants are winning with pitching. Part of that has been the good fielding that the pitching has received. Basic logic, really.

The Giants' platoon in left has been DeRosa, Bowker and Velez with UZR/150's of 20.9, 9.1 and 24.8 respectively so far this year. But yes. Let's sign a guy that has put up numbers of minus 21.6, minus 19.4 and minus 18.7 from 2007-2009.

Let's.

After two strong starts in a row, John Ely is set to spend at least the next month in Los Angeles. Dodgers manager Joe Torre says he's going with the rookie from Homewood-Flossmoor until Vicente Padilla comes off the disabled list. Ely could start May 27 at Wrigley Field if Torre decides to skip fifth starter Ramon Ortiz in that turn through the rotation. Ely had a 23 mph difference in pitches Tuesday against the Diamondbacks, throwing his fastball 91 and his curve 68. …

Ely's a bit of a double-whammy. He's a local product and Kenny traded him. So he's a Phil guy.

He's been mentioned by Phil at least eight times since the Pierre trade. I can only imagine if he was traded to the Twins and he pitched with Wilson Ramos catching, the catching über-prospect for the Twins that Phil posited should stay up with the big club, even with Mauer catching.

The theory goes that Gardenhire could find at-bats for Ramos by giving Mauer time off from behind the plate by DHing him a couple times a week and slotting Ramos into the DH role (presumably) another couple times a week. I don't know how Mauer would feel about that given he just signed a monster deal with the Twins to catch and I don't know how Thome and Kubel would feel about losing...well...pretty much ALL their playing time with that DH rotation.

Only Phil knows.

But for right now, with this roster, the Twins know...

The Twins sent catcher Wilson Ramos to Triple A because manager Ron Gardenhire didn't think he could find enough at-bats for him with Joe Mauer healthy again. They would have to be absolutely overwhelmed to trade him, however. …

Please, please, please! Seek a career change, Phil. The world needs you as a GM.