ashbury

Tell me you've clinched the division and are just preparing for the postseason, without actually saying "we've clinched the division and are just preparing for the postseason,"

Hope they alerted the Stationmaster at third base, because a runaway freight was headed their way.

Have you looked at who these three teams play in the coming week? Each other, to a large degree. Wins are guaranteed to happen. It's still faintly possible for the Twins to pass all three but in the spirit of fairness you should offer higher odds than 10-1 or you're just taking Peter's dollar.

Took more effort than I expected - and it depends on some arbitrary choices - I ruled out spring games and threads where the game got rained out and anything in 2012 when the site was just getting its legs under itself - but I found this one from 2021 with 16 posts which includes the OP:

Sonny Gray, this coming November: "In September you gave me Stevenson, Luplow, and Vazquez in the starting lineup with MAT as DH to rub it in. Today I'm giving you my polite turndown of your Qualifying Offer."

Don't include Andrew Stevenson in this list. He's just less than 6 months younger than Byron.

Against 28 year-old ex-Twins farmhand Bryan Sammons who came into the game sporting a 5.21 ERA. Oh my OMG.

I was worried sick about Gallo's (checks transactions log) "left" "foot" "contusion." Glad to find out he's staged a miraculous recovery so quickly.

Concur. Second half numbers, which are by now more than merely the Smallest of Sample Sizes, have both Ober and Ryan's ERAs in the 5's and Maeda's at 4.14. Unless there is something currently the matter with Kenta physically, he'd be my choice for a Game 3.

I don't share this same nostalgia for September 2022. The team had banked a good percentage of wins by mid-May, and after that they were a stubbornly sub-.500 team for the large majority of the year. By early August the trend seemed pretty well established, and I felt like the Earnest Young Ensign in some space-faring movie, where the good ship is spiraling into the atmosphere and he whispers to his superior beside him at the helm, "we're not gonna make it, are we?" September was just a slightly further accelerated nosedive straight into the planet's surface, but they were never going to pull out; gravity got 'em. This article makes several nods in this direction, but nevertheless holds to the romance that they were still in first place or close to it, and merely needed to hold on but couldn't due to a spate injuries. For me the die was cast much earlier, and yes injuries were key all season. Constructing a roster that was injury-prone in the first place and then accentuating that tendency with moves such as the trades for Paddack and Mahle was the story.

Last year Miami's offense was third from the bottom in the majors. This year they are fourth from the bottom. Last year the Twins' runs-against per game was around the middle of the pack. This year they rank fourth best. A table-setter for a solid starting pitcher, assuming the talent evaluation and medicals all check out, is a trade I make every time. Pitchers are inherently injury-prone but we know from experience that position-players miss time and see declining performance due to physical ailments too. I liked the trade even when Arraez was hitting .400 earlier this season, and I like it now. Setting the table wasn't any kind of panacea for Miami.

Julien hit lefties very capably in single-A. Then he had a serious platoon split at AA. But in his short stint in AAA his numbers against lefties were good again. Now the small-sample numbers in the majors are bad, very bad - imagine walking man Julien drawing zero bases on balls in any random sample of 42 plate appearances, but that's what has happened facing left-handers since he was called up. Left-handed AAA pitchers aren't as skilled as their major league counterparts. But the same is true of right-handers. So I don't see the promotion by itself as the cause of problems on one side but not the other. Full time players are incredibly valuable. Julien's already a bit on the bubble with his defense. If he starts to profile as merely a platoon DH, that's not worth very much, even if it's the "strong" side of the platoon. If it were up to me, I'd make sure the batting coaches are giving him useful tips on what to do against really good lefties seen at the major league level, and then give him a lot of opportunity even if there are growing pains. I'd invest the plate appearances.

Does anyone here recall from past experience (2019, and on back) how easy it is to acquire Twins playoff tickets in advance? Me 'n' the boys are considering popping in for an impromptu visit to the Twin Cities, and wouldn't want to commit to airfare etc without pretty good confidence in having seats inside the ballpark. Chances are we want just one game, which probably flies in the face of the team wanting to sell the full series? Does the team do first-come-first-served or run a lottery? With the rise of the online secondary market, are the prices consistently far higher than face, or does the "spot market" rise and then fall? So many unknowns. Would be fun but don't want to arrive and come away empty.

"It's hard to field the ball when you have both hands around your throat." Just in case any young'uns might misunderstand, my recollection is that Gaetti was speaking of himself only, after (with a memory refresher on b-r.com) the Twins dropped a second straight crucial game in their final series, on Sept 28, 1984, in which they entered the bottom of the 6th leading Cleveland 10-2 and exited that inning clinging to only a 10-9 lead, keyed by an E-5 with two outs leading to 3 unearned runs, enroute to a crushing 11-10 outcome that ended their season hopes. Losing pitcher for the eventual ninth-inning walkoff? Who else, but Ron Davis. Gaetti was totally a standup guy as that "young player" critiquing himself in the moment for all to hear. Perhaps he "understood" something later on when looking back, but at the time he was simply sick at heart and embarrassed and didn't try to hide it. It's right to give him mad props for a quote for the ages. Poetic. You could write a Country song with that as the tag line. Our current crop may have similar growing pains before they are ready. Hope it doesn't take another 3 years like it did for The Rat and company.

Jays, Rays, what's the difference, who can tell those teams apart anyway? :

Since the All-Star break: Vazquez, 28 starts Jeffers, 28 starts The tide is turning.

I am not sure I'm willing to grant him even that. When Josh Donaldson was released by the Yankees last month, an opinion piece in the New York Post mentioned Gallo's "edginess" in the same breath with Donaldson's "prickliness" and implied he's not precisely a good fit in just every clubhouse. The Post is kind of a rag but I still give some credence when whispers like that are put in print.

Mrs Ash and I attended a AAA game in Reno last night in which the score was 13-0 after three innings. Glad the Twins decided to take a page from that same playbook, to go up by a couple of touchdowns before letting the opponents do much. How many sacks did the Twins defense manage to accumulate?

Currently waivers are player-centric, and each player is handled separately according to which team(s) put in a claim. That's usually fine when only a player or two at a time is put on waivers. When there are a lot of players, desirable ones at that, you have to have a draft. It need not be a public spectacle like the June draft or the Rule 5 draft in December, when multiple desirable players are routinely available. Instead, each team just has to manage its current list of waiver claims by priority, at the commissioner's office. If you want Matt Moore the most, followed by someone else, rank them #1 and #2 respectively. Every day, one of the commissioner's minions* goes through in priority order (this year Oakland first, then KC, etc) and if they have any waiver claims, they get their top priority. Then on to the next team in order. If it's your turn and your #1 guy is already gone, then you get your #2, unless he's gone too. And so on. Just like any draft, except everyone has made their decisions in advance, because the numbers of players are so much fewer than in June or December and the decision making is manageable. (Imagine ranking all the amateurs for the June draft, that would not be manageable.) Most days the process would be trivial, and with exactly the same results as we're used to - players pass unclaimed through waivers all the time and that would continue. But on a day where a team like the Angels has put a lot of good talent on waivers, the process spreads out the talent to multiple teams. * In truth the minion would be a computer program that runs through the list** as many times as needed, but I don't want to rile up any anti-computer hysteria. ** I was going to say database, but, well, you know.

That's mighty Big of you.

Tired, tired, tired of being the little people.

I look forward to a time that my team is regularly so far up in the standings that manufactured events like what the Angels just pulled are not relevant.

Such bad luck, just barely missing on Matt Moore. They tried. If only there had been a way to acquire his services, not just for September and a possible postseason, but all of 2023!

Of course it would be different. A .500 team whose record involves young players taking some lumps but now might be prepared to go on an upswing for a few years to come, is different from a veteran-laden team with the same record and likely to get worse if the status quo is maintained. Go to any site that lists 2023 teams' player stats, and sort by plate appearances (batters) or innings (pitchers). Then look at the ages. You went with Cincinnati as the comparison team. Our top 6 batters by usage ALL are older than ANY of the Reds' top 8 batters. The story with the pitchers is slightly better, with 3 of the 5 Twins with the most innings being age 27 and 2 of age 33-35, but the Reds top 5 are 4 arms age 23-25 and one at 29. Better days are more likely in store for the Reds than for the Twins. It's a supposition that some new wave of rookies will supplant our veterans, because with a couple of exceptions everyone who's going to be any good in 2024 is already up. Meanwhile in Cincinnati you don't even have to suppose. That why I'm "not very positive" on this team.

Guardians and Reds, LOL.