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All four Minnesota Twins minor league affiliates played on Thursday night. Two of them won in dramatic, walk-off fashion. One was a two-run single, and one was a lot more dramatic than that. One of the other Twins affiliates won with shutout, just the way you write it up: Starter goes seven, dominant reliever with a strong eighth and another dominant reliever with a scoreless ninth inning. ...

Last week, I took a look at three prep hitters that I hope the Twins seriously consider drafting in next month’s draft. I decided to expand the series and today will take a look at three college arms.

To be considered a “personal cheeseball”, I set out two rules: be a favorite of mine and don’t be too good.

Without further adieu, here are my three college pitchers: ...

In what is thought of as one of the greatest Simpsons episodes of all-time, Nuclear Power Plant owner turned softball manager, C. Montgomery Burns gave one of his ringers, Daryl Strawberry, an invaluable hitting tip.

“You there. Strawberry. Hit a home run,” advised the decrepit hitting instructor. Strawberry took the counsel and smacked a dinger onto the Springfield Expressway. In a perfect world designed by major league hitting coaches, life would be that easy.
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Overall, it was not a good day for the Minnesota Twins’ minor league affiliates. However, you’ll want to see what the Cedar Rapids Kernels’ most productive and most exciting hitters did on Tuesday.

Kyle Gibson was back on the mound for the first time since his complete game shutout. How did the Red Wings right-hander follow up his strong performance? Antoan Richardson performed the duties of leadoff hitter very well. Cedar Rapids also made several transactions.

Check out what happened in the Twins farm system on Tuesday: ...

Pitch To Contact - at this point, I think we can go with capital letters, don't you? That phrase and philosophy have drawn a fair amount of criticism, a chunk of which is just snark, but some of which at least tries to ground itself in statistical analysis. In a thread started yesterday on Twins Daily, there was a lot of debate on Pitch To Contact, what it means and what we really know about its effects.

When Bill James unveiled several new tools for analyzing baseball, the most fundamental ones usually started by analyzing team stats. ...

By the end of the coming weekend, the Twins will have reached the one-quarter mark of the season with 40+ games under their belts. It’s as good a time as any to reflect upon how some of the decisions made by General Manager Terry Ryan in building the team’s roster have turned out.

As a team, the Twins have been hovering over the .500 mark most of the season and, after Monday night’s win over the White Sox, they are one game over the break-even point. Over the weekend, Ryan told 1500ESPN that .500 wasn’t what he was looking for out of this team, that he wanted them to be contenders. It’s great, of course, for your team’s GM to say that kind of thing, but I think most fans would have been pretty satisfied with the prospects of a .500 year out of this Twins team. ...