Brock Beauchamp

Neither do I but all those names you listed are likely to be just as bad as Shoemaker. Different isn't better. The thing is that you can't predict literally half your 26 man roster being on the injured list at once. Shoemaker has been absolutely awful, we can all agree on that. If the Twins don't move on from him in the next 7-10 days as formerly injured players return to the team, I'll be right there with you.

The league has a record number of injuries after a year of no minor leagues. There aren’t guys just waiting to be claimed, not guys any better than Shoemaker, anyway.

People really need to realize there literally isn’t anyone ready to call up, as spy just pointed out. At this point, it’s either Shoemaker or a waiver claim, someone who’s also going to look and perform a lot like Matt Shoemaker.

The thing is about emulation is that once you write the software once, it's not hard to maintain going forward... Sony simply hasn't bothered to try until this generation (which, uncoincidentally, is the first time they've kept the same chip architecture two generations in a row, which makes BC stupid-easy and almost automatic). All past Sony BC involved them literally putting last generation's chipset somewhere in the newer gen machine, which is a pretty ugly solution (also expensive, which is why they stopped). From the beginning, Microsoft has always prioritized BC emulation (even when they changed architecture) and they deserve credit for doing so. Anyway, my kids play Wii/U and Xbox 360 games all the time, particularly the motion/dance games, which means BC is pretty important to me (and I'd someday like to have fewer than *six* consoles plugged into my living room television). And frankly, it's a feature console makers should just offer to their loyal customers who may not want to be forced to maintain a working PS2 indefinitely if they ever want to play their PS2 games again. I mean, there are literally open source, free emulators that do a pretty bang-up job up through really recent console generations running on $40 hardware. It's not a stretch to ask a multi-billion dollar conglomerate like Sony to add emulation to their $500 console.

Except I have to pay to re-buy all those games and I have to trust in Sony to maintain their store indefinitely, which is a stretch. They recently got in hot water with fans for announcing they were going to sunset the PS3 (? I think it was PS3) store. Sony doesn’t have a great track record of long term support, or at least not as good as Microsoft. I’m not knocking the PlayStation, I’ve owned every one of them and love a bunch of games, but their legacy support is miles behind Microsoft.

I'll end up with a PS5 someday but Sony's backwards compatibility is embarrassing. The PS5 will only play PS4 disc games. No PS1, 2, or 3. Whereas Xbox Series X will play disc games all the way back to the original Xbox. It's not 100% compatible with all games but it's an impressive list none-the-less. But frankly, I'm a long ways from seeing a compelling reason to spend $500 on either console right now. Maybe in 2022, more likely 2023 for me.

Yeah, last night was a good example of how we as fans view win “probability” versus the actual win probability of a situation. That was a low leverage situation in the ninth.

I don’t get why this trade makes sense for the Twins but then I remembered “oh, Mark DeRosa”. Either the Twins want to offload salary or they want to compete. This deal makes no sense for either option.

I'm relatively down on Rooker, though he probably deserves (and will likely get) another real chance to hit in MLB later this summer. I suspect there's going to be quite a bit of open roster space around 3pm on July 30th.

@Tom Froemming Why stop at five? 26 is a pretty good number, in my humble opinion...

Some guys don't do well with back-to-backs, even fewer do well with back-to-back-to-backs. My statement wasn't that it should be universally employed, only that the Twins don't seem to shy away from it in general. They may avoid it with specific pitchers, I've never really looked closely enough to notice.

Everything is snappy for me but if it continues for you, please let me know.

There's a balance in there somewhere, depending on the player and their batting profile. You don't want a low power hitter striking out constantly but you also don't want a high power hitter choking up with two strikes just to make (probably bad) contact. The current problem extends well beyond Josh Donaldson and even the Twins; it's a universal MLB problem. Pitchers have too great an advantage and it feels as if hitters are striving to become too homogenous in the wake of that pitcher advantage. There are fewer ways for hitters to succeed in the modern game so they all start trying to do variations of the same approach. It's not a good combination, which is why I'm heavily in favor of MLB making significant rule/policy changes following the 2021 season.

The front office and coaching staff doesn't believe this at all. Guys pitch back-to-back all the time. What the Twins haven't been doing is using a single person in the ninth inning and instead base the ninth on matchups, which means the same guy doesn't get the ninth on consecutive days very often. Here's the bullpen usage as of Wednesday night. As you can see, lots of back-to-backs in there. Robles had back-to-back ninth innings on May 22-23, less than a week ago. SAT SUN MON TUE WED TOT Robles 27 24 0 13 20 84 Rogers 9 14 0 26 0 49 Duffey 13 15 0 0 15 43 Thielbar 0 18 0 2 16 36 Alcala 17 0 14 0 0 31 Colomé 2 0 8 13 0 23 Farrell 0 0 16 0 0 16 Stashak 0 0 0 0 0 0

The old Twins Daily had a pretty simplistic version of the feed but I felt it was so awkward and weird to use that I hid it away from most users' eyes. Not so with the new version and I suspect after reading this, some of you (particularly forum users) may set a custom feed as your Twins Daily landing page. It's that useful. Instead of having to click through the (kinda insanely large now) Twins Daily site, you can tailor a feed to show basically whatever you want: select authors, topics you've followed, fellow users, unread content only... the list goes on. First, to find your personal feed, near the top right of the screen you will see a newspaper icon in the red bar below your user information. That brings you to the default view, which is Unread Content. Here you'll see a variety of options to tailor your custom stream to do almost anything you like on the site. I'll spare you going through each item in detail individually, as it's all quite self-explanatory. You can choose tagged content, type of content (news, forums, blogs, status updates, etc.), read/unread only, content you've participated in or started, followed content, and finally, how it's sorted. Depending what kind of device you're using, you can also choose Condensed or Expanded. Condensed just gives you the title and link while Expanded offers a truncated version of the content as a preview. Once you've decided on your changes, you can save this stream using the save prompt below. You're allowed to have multiple custom streams so name this new stream and it joins the others. Once you're done customizing your stream, Click Stream Options at the top right of the selection drop-down, and your choices become your default custom stream. Every time you click that newspaper or visit your stream, the selections you've made will remain in place. That's it, enjoy the new site!

BTW, great blog entry, but I wanted to let you know you can now copy and paste tables directly into the Twins Daily text editor. Read this for a quick tutorial:

I also wanted Semien more than Simmons but if it's December of 2020 with pandemic worries looming over MLB, I completely understand the reluctance to pay for Semien when you can get Simmons for roughly half the price. But like pretty much everything in 2021, that decision is not working out for the hometown team...

Fair enough. I agree the Twins should be playing much better than they are while KC is performing close to where I expected. Any comparison between them is at least mildly damning to the Twins season.

My opinions can basically be boiled down to "does this rule change speed up the game and/or increase action?" If yes, I'm probably in favor of it. If no, I'm probably against it. The easiest rule to change that will make the game better without impacting the on-field strategy/play at all is "the batter cannot step out of the box during a plate appearance". If that's too much, then eliminate the rule where the pitcher cannot pitch if the batter isn't in the box (basically, force the batter to be ready and in the box at all times). And then actually enforce the pitch clock, for god's sake. Those are rules that have zero impact on game theory/strategy (though players will surely try to claim otherwise) but will keep the game flow accelerated and fans more engaged. Because while three true outcomes can be boring, what really drags down a baseball game is watching the batter and pitcher take 25 second breathers between every. single. pitch.

I'm not really sure why you included BABIP in that comment, as it's not generally regarded as something that can be controlled by the pitching/defense, at least not to a large degree. But toggle that page over to offense and basically the exact opposite is true (except even moreso). Offensive WAR: Minnesota: 5th, 8.3 WAR Kansas City: 26th, 2.4 WAR That's actually a much larger gap than pitching WAR. And besides, does this tell us a significantly different story than the stats I listed above? Both stat groups tell us the Royals have a pitching advantage and the Twins have a significant hitting advantage so far this season. And my post was originally a rebuttal to "Kansas City has looked like a much better team than the Twins this season" and your stats don't suggest that's any more true than my original stats. An interesting thing I just noticed, though, and I definitely didn't see it coming. FanGraphs has the Twins as the seventh best defense in MLB. The Royals are below average, in the negative numbers overall, at 18th in MLB. That's just more evidence the Royals haven't been a better team this season, though, or at least not a noticeably better team anyway.

Have they, though? KC is ahead of the Twins in the standings but their pythag record is worse (21-26 vs 23-26) and the BaseRuns gap is even larger (21-26 vs 24-25). The Twins have been woeful in very specific ways but the Royals haven't been good, either, they've just been more lucky. Ranks in AL: Bullpen ERA: KC 9th, MN 13th Rotation ERA: MN 10th, KC 11th Offense OPS: MN 5th, KC 12th KC can't even crack the top half of the AL in any of those categories and rank in the bottom third in two of them.

I stopped reading here because I'm pretty sure close to 100% of the Twins fanbase assumes this will be the case in pepetuity.

Eh, hard to say. If this group of walking wounded ever get back on the field, the Twins could be competitive (just Buxton by himself is a massive team upgrade). If they continue sputtering and getting injured as they have, I don't like their chances.