LaBombo

Pena limps off... Coomer chuckles... scrambling to find cash to wager on the newly-improved .11 percent chance that the Twins make the playoffs.

It's just 'bingo'.

Taken out, yes... but... where? Don't worry, your back yard is perfectly safe, as far as my PED-addled brain can say.

How else? By eyeballing the declination and hour of the across-the-street neighbor's motion-activated security camera, estimating the odds that it would gather incriminating evidence against me, eating a Double Whopper with Cheese, and then flipping a coin. How do you play? http://tieryas.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/entomologist.png

Fair enough. But if shame be the instrument of thine governance, it is only fair that you should know that my family (Love Ya!)-free day off began with a brief but intense internal debate about the effort cost/benefit ratio of taking out the trash with or without pants.

TD stock down 5 percent after controversial change to business plan...

Isn't that why Twitter was invented?

Mornozie's HR is the third crazy Tigers/Twins home run I've seen. If it had been a bloop that fell in to shallow center/left, it would have been an "excuse me" single. Instead, it was an "excuse me" homer.

...Or forgot about the toy that they begged for until their little hands briefly grazed the troposphere of Walmart....

Visual ipecac! Undigested anesthetic... lost! Why? Why? The site says we're friends, but now.... doubt.

Yup. That, or "You're ruining my life!". Even though you're too tired to remember how they provoked you to scream it.

Somewhat more awful than it is when the absence of your best hitter puts Herrman in the 2 spot?

Yes, but their screams of "Stop!" and their pricelessly cute stumbling pratfalls when you put them down after the Helicopter Spin is what parenting is all about...

Doumit compensating for framing impairment! Speaking of impairment, .12 and Twins offense still looks awful.

LEN3 wrote short article about that, if memory serves. Some sort of nasty business involving carpet and drapes. One more reason 'Twins beat writer' continues to somehow elude my list of dream jobs.

Bonus rotation bummer: In 2012 Drew Smyly made only 18 starts, threw fewer than 100 innings, out-WARed all non-Diamond Twins starters combined... and didn't make their 2013 rotation.

Put another way, it's the second straight season where none of our starters makes the Tigers' rotation. That was where Ryan lost me with the whole "meaningful games" thing...

.10 ... Too much to drive, not enough to numb the unpleasantness of Twins' offense...

Should work out as long as the bench player is a third catcher...

Non-Mauer Twins batting .231 at the moment, if my Midwest math is right. Was going to calculate their OBP and OPS too, but then I wouldn't have enough time to properly pre-medicate before the first pitch against the Tigers tonight...

Reverse peristalsis chain reaction! Also, I believe Chief deserves either the credit or the blame for the orignal Wes Craven-esque proposition of KC and the Sunshine Band getting extended. "Do a little dance, make a little love, extend tonight!" Apocalyptic yet infused with a catchy pop sensibility...

Thanks, and you're now officially the primary character witness at my competency hearing, provided your rates are reasonable. Also, if I had known my post was going out to dinner, I would've had it wear something a little nicer. Maybe next diatribe, after Correia's four year extension...

It's always a treat when one of the TD Mount Rushmore heads comes to life and talks about baseball. Out of respect, I put down my philly cheese steak Hot Pocket while reading your input, Seth. Disagree with much of what you said, though. Punto's hypothetical belief system is wrong. Sliding into first has ranked right up there with Dusty Baker's Baseclogger Theory of On Base Percentage in the pantheon of common knowledge baseball fallacies for just about forever by now. Not faster. Injuries. Bad idea. The end. Superman delusions aside, Punto also sometimes suffered from the Little League, situationally unaware 'run as fast as you can until someone tags you out' syndrome. Running out a routine grounder down 6 in the 9th is hustle. 'Digging for two' while you're 10 feet short of halfway to second when your soft infield popup is gloved is not just fake hustle, it's foolish. Also, why compare L'il Nicky to bench players? Punto put up over 400 plate appearance per season for half a decade. Whatever his label, Punto spent the majority of his Twins career as the at bat equivalent of the lefty half of a platoon, which made him just about an everyday player. And a fairly bad one at that. And he was a pretty bad almost-every-day player on a team that was expected to contend every year, not a stopgap on a rebuilder like Newman or Hocking in their 'peak' years. That made his offensive futility even more of a kick in the groin than the statistical nuisance that an actual utility player's would be. Few people would deny that Punto was a good infielder. But shortstop is the make-or-break position for utility infielders, and in that respect, well, Punto was no Jeff Reboulet. Jmo. Also, Punto wasn't even Reb's mustache, which rocked the free world: http://cdn0.sbnation.com/imported_assets/152452/jeff_2bking.jpg If Punto was really under-appreciated by the fan base, why was that? Was it because they didn't see that his uniform was dirty halfway through his warmup routine? Was it because they weren't listening to the incessant Twins spin machine's inane chatter about piranhas battling their small-ball tails off the right way while moving the runner over? Or was it because they had no energy left to appreciate him due to the enormous workload generated by frequently under-appreciating a likely future first-ballot Hall of Famer? Maybe some of each. Now that I've crossed the border between rant and diatribe, there's not much to lose by throwing in a summary. Punto probably generates criticism (including mine) out of proportion to his actual effect on the team for one basic reason. He represents an ugly byproduct of pitching to contact: overvaluing defense at the expense of offense. That, and he never lived up to the lofty stats put up by Al Newman in comic relief. Who can forget the time he knocked TC Bear out, donned his costume, ran into the stands, and bit a lady's head off?

Revenge! It's simultaneously the most ridiculous motive I can think of for the Twins not trading veterans for prospects, and yet the most plausible. Well done, and not the facetious kind.

Or you could just cut to the chase and compare him to the snowballers who populate an organization that has generally been terrified of employing pitchers who throw hard enough to break glass...