Recent News

The thought of Joe Mauer getting taken out at the plate is a scary thought for fans to process.One of the hottest topics across the baseball universe as pitchers and catchers have reported is surrounding whether catchers should block the plate. The Giants suffered a major blow last season when their budding superstar Buster Posey was bowled over at home plate by outfielder Scott Cousins. As a result of the collision Posey suffered a broken leg and ligament damage that required multiple surgeries to repair the damage. The Giants offense suffered without their star and the manager of the Giants felt that changes needed to be made for 2012.
On Monday Giants manager Bruce Bochy announced that Posey would no longer be blocking the plate. ...

Eight months after suffering a concussion in a home plate collision with Royals catcher Brayan Pena, Denard Span still says he has "bad days" in which his head doesn't feel quite right, but he has no way of knowing whether or not those symptoms stem from the incident in Kansas City.

Span's situation is unique, in that he had dealt with migraines and vertigo back in 2009, long before taking that blow to the head on June 3rd last season. At the time, those issues were linked to an inner-ear condition. His current maladies might be attributable more to that problem than the concussion, but whatever the case, it's concerning that a 27-year-old continues to have – as he puts it – "days where I don't feel my best and have to find a way to fight through."
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The 2011 season was quite a mess for Francisco Liriano. Coming off the solid 2010 season, expectations had been high for the lefty and instead of moving forward he regressed heavily, turning in one of the worst seasons among qualified starters. Command-wise, his 12.7% walk rate was the highest among pitchers with a minimum of 130 innings pitched.

According to a recent John Shipley article at the PiPress, Twins pitching coach Rick Anderson offered up a cure for what he believes ails Liriano:
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La Velle had a good piece on Rule 5 pick Terry Doyle at the Strib today. The 26-year-old right-hander discussed some his route to the Twins organization, listening in on Internet radio at his home in Warwick, Rhode Island when he found out that Minnesota had drafted him.


For their part, the Twins were impressed with Doyle’s performance in the Arizona Fall League in which he went while in the Chicago system and, as Neal writes, “Doyle he was dominant at times while going 4-0 with a 1.98 ERA in eight starts for the Mesa Solar Sox.” With their scouts on hand, Twins GM Terry Ryan told Neal that they were impressed by Doyle’s repertoire:

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Players with less than three years of major league service time will typically sign one year, two-way contracts. Now that spring training has started, expect many of the Twins players to sign such contracts in the next week. These two-way contracts are for a certain dollar value if the player is in the big leagues, and another (significantly smaller) dollar value if they are playing in the minor leagues.

The Two-Way Contract means that a player is EITHER making $X in the big leagues OR $(X – LOTS) in the minor leagues.

With Terry Ryan at the helm and so many difficult questions to be answered when the season starts, it appears that the Twins have set up a Two-Way Planning system for the 2012 season. How it plays out will be determined by a series of EITHER/OR scenarios. ...

One year ago the Twins were working with a relief pitcher who wanted to show he had fully recovered from an elbow injury. Joe Nathan had spent the last year trying to recover from Tommy John surgery. He hadn't been on a mound in a major league regular season game since the playoffs in 2009. When pitchers and catchers reported to spring training, he was ready to show the team everything he had and he told the team that he didn't "want to be babied if I don't need it."

Fast-forward to 2012 and the Twins find themselves in a very similar situation.
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