Brock Beauchamp

He had a wRC+ over 130 like two weeks ago so that’s not accurate.

We’re witnessing the dangers of a groundball pitcher who doesn’t miss bats. It’s not an indictment of Dobnak but there’s always the danger of this happening.

Hahahahahah

Mitch giveth, Mitch taketh away.

Holy ****, Garver got ahold of that one.

Dobnak just kills me. The mustache, the glasses, the unbuttoned jersey with a hairy chest peeking out. He is really just going 100% right at “1970s porn star chic”.

I’d counter that what you need is for someone to fix it and however that gets done is more important than words and bluster.

Gonna be hard not to flip over to the Wild soon if the Twins don’t make this more interesting…

Yikes to the fielders. Dobnak sure looks good.

I’d prefer scoring but running up the pitch count against the starter of a division rival in game one of a series is okay for now.

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.

This. My god, this. Why do we have to attribute malice, incompetence, or other character flaws when momentary stupidity is so clearly in play here?

I have two children, one of which with significant trauma history. My life was completely flipped on its head as all our resources were taken away in basically one week's time.

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

I thought that might be the case but looking back at the timeline, it doesn't really jibe with reality (though the covid situation not happening could have ended the already-existing slide). Here are the results from the two series leading up to the California trip. Things had already gone pear-shaped before the Twins left town. Gm# Date Tm Opp W/L R RA Inn W-L Rank GB Win Loss Save Time D/N Attendance cLI Streak Orig. Scheduled 7 Thursday, Apr 8 boxscore MIN SEA W 10 2 5-2 1 up 1.5 Berrios Gonzales 3:27 D 9,675 1.06 ++ 8 Saturday, Apr 10 boxscore MIN SEA L 3 4 10 5-3 1 up 0.5 Graveman Rogers Middleton 3:14 D 9,817 1.05 - 9 Sunday, Apr 11 boxscore MIN SEA L 6 8 5-4 2 0.5 Steckenrider Colome Montero 3:28 D 9,792 1.09 -- 10 Tuesday, Apr 13 boxscore MIN BOS L 2 4 5-5 3 1.0 Ottavino Dobnak Barnes 3:17 D 6,724 1.01 --- 11 Wednesday, Apr 14 (1) boxscore MIN BOS L 2 3 7 5-6 5 2.0 Eovaldi Maeda Barnes 2:40 D .99 ---- 12 Wednesday, Apr 14 (2) boxscore MIN BOS L 1 7 7 5-7 5 2.0 Rodriguez Berrios 2:31 N 7,074 .93 ----- 13 Thursday, Apr 15 boxscore MIN BOS W-wo 4 3 6-7 3 2.0 Colome Ottavino 3:25 D 7,925 .87 +

I honestly have no idea how to view basically anything about baseball and the pandemic. All of our lives changed so much in such a short period of time, I can only imagine how hard it was for organizations to stay on top of it all and for players to maintain discipline when deprived of so many resources.

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.

I think most people were questioning the coaching staff to some extent; I know I certainly was during that abysmal stretch of ball. But it also appeared to be temporary and nothing goes right 100% of the time (but boy, that month of baseball was hard to watch). The Twins faced some pretty ugly stretches in 2019 ad 2020 and came out the other side as division champions (anyone remember that terrifying climb up the standings by Cleveland in 2019?). I think the core of this conversation is "calm the **** down, we don't know what's wrong yet, give it time" when things go completely sideways like they did this season. If that horrible stretch of baseball continues through June, it might be time to consider coaching changes because something is wrong and sometimes, change needs to happen for change's sake. To me, a lot of this conversation comes down to arrogance and tone; a little humility and acceptance of personal ignorance goes a long way, particularly with the tone/certainty with which some people speak about things they simply don't know much about (like the inside of a clubhouse or internal operations of an organization). I can glean a little information about how Baldelli views the game of baseball by watching him nightly but it's just that, "a little information". It's nowhere near what I would even consider "good information", only fragments and snapshots that are obviously incomplete and probably inaccurate in a lot of cases.

I’ve noticed a ton of contact plays as well and I also am not much of a fan. Maybe with some guys at the plate but I wouldn’t call them nearly as often as this team does.

Oh boy...

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

I've written a new blog entry about an improved feature of the site, check it out!

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!