Recent News

It wasn't the best week for the Minnesota Twins as the team lost the rubber game of their three game set with the Orioles on Sunday. This was followed by losing two out of three games to the dreaded White Sox. Now Boston's in town for a three game series but don't forget to check out some of the top baseball news from the last week.

• Byron Buxton smashed a walk-off grand slam and his teammates even let him get all the way around the bases! (The Kernels didn't do this on a walk-off a couple weeks ago.)

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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. ...

Like the Minnesota Twins, Twins Daily has a farm team on the blog page. Here's what you've been missing if you haven't been checking it out the writing from our top prospects...

• Cody Christie reminds us of a Twins starting pitcher who is about ready to rejoin the team. And it's not Kyle Gibson.
• Thrylos gives you 129 college pitchers that you will want to know before the Twins start drafting them in June.

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Numbers are so clean. Until they aren’t.

Yesterday we studied strikeouts/game and runs/game for teams and found a “correlation coefficient,” which is a number between -1 and 1. 1 means there is a perfect correlation, like the temperature in Fahrenheit and the temperature in Celsius. -1 means there is a perfectly negative correlation, like the amount I spend and my checking account balance. And 0 means there is no correlation, like the amount I spend and the temperature in Celsius.

Unfortunately, the number we found was not 1, 0 or -1. It was .54. So what does that mean? ...

The Twins concluded their three-game series with the White Sox by playing a little Wednesday afternoon baseball. With how bad the White Sox looked in recent weeks, it seemed like the Twins should be able to earn a series win. That didn't happen as the Sox took the final two games of the three-game set.

Joe Mauer has been on fire lately and his recent hot streak has him in some rarefied air. He took over the active career leader board for batting average. Albert Pujols (.323 BA) had been on the top of the list followed by Ichiro Suzuki (.321 BA). Those two players are on the decline and Mauer looks to be in the prime of his career.
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After finishing the month of April ranked near the bottom of the American League in most categories, the Twins’ offense has undergone a stunning turnaround in May, in which they led the league in scoring through Monday. Prior to Tuesday's loss to the White Sox, the Twins had averaged 6.2 runs per game this month and had crossed the plate five or more times in eight of their past nine games.

A sleeping beast awakened, indeed.

Can this unit continue to excel and help keep the team hovering around .500? ...