ashbury

Shoulders? He's a switch hitter now?

I'd need a considerable promotion to become an underling. Also, a paycheck signed by Falvey.

Sadly, Las Vegas already has a hockey team, otherwise they could invite the Edmonton Eulers to move down and collaborate with this new E's franchise in some scholarly work The result could be transcendental.

There's no i in team.

Max "The Beast" Kepler does have a ring to it, though he'll never be mentioned in the same breath with Jimmie Foxx.

LOL, no. Reno signed a 10-year deal a couple of years ago. Never mind. https://www.milb.com/news/aces-officially-arizona-diamondbacks-affiliate-for-10-more-years Eh, Vegas and Reno have always been more like frenemies anyway. The Minneapolis versus St Paul rivalry doesn't compare. 400 miles of lonely desert road can strain the ties. Then again, Reno doesn't get along well with its next-door neighbor Sparks.

I don't know the length of minor league working agreements - used to be only 2 years but it may have crept upward. But if the timing is right, I wonder if the Reno Aces become affiliated with the new Las Vegas team, and the Diamondbacks in turn work out something to bring AAA back to Tucson.

Unless the FO had more definitive information about Correa's heel than they shared publicly, you can bet that (at least) some underling was asked to work up two or three scenarios that someone in the Big Chair would then choose from in the event that a move needed to be made. That's not wasted effort on their part, and for us it's fun to try to "play along at home." IOW I stand by my work, amateur hour though it may be.

Carlos Correa hits right-handed, and I'm sure he could handle first base. Whatever became of him? Okay, but seriously, in this age of short benches and 13-man pitching staffs, I'm not a huge fan of paying too much attention to which side of the plate a batter stands in. To paraphrase an old saying, I don't want a right-handed hitter, I want a hitter who can hit lefties. Only sign one of those guys if you plan to play him full time, and in this case we had first base well enough covered.

Rocco will likely be here as long as Falvey and/or Levine are. But it might not be on the field. His analytic mindset fits in well with his depth of experience as a player, making him valuable for many kinds of decision making. I could easily see him in a front office role, if the W-L record doesn't improve and it's decided to get another manager, say more of a disciplinarian.

But he was hitting .310, admittedly in small sample size. Wait. That was his OPS.

He's far exceeded my expectations. Seems to have the bulldog mentality that you look for in a young pitcher. Nice to have a welcome surprise for a change. Fifth starter is generally not a role, just a waypoint on the journey, but for now he's a pretty good one.

"You know how to whistle, don't you? You just put 'whistle how to' into Google and then click the first link and follow the instructions."

And yet, somehow, some way, you just did.

Timberwolves fans from the early days will remember the saga of Micheal Williams, point guard of some talent. Plantar fasciitis struck, and he was essentially finished as a ballplayer at age 28, though he kept trying to come back into his early 30s. This is not something to be trifled with when it's a high end athlete putting enormous stress on the connective tissue.

I'd put Alcala on the 60-day IL and bring up Hernan Perez. (Alcala's already 10 days past his last game appearance, and if he needs rehab time at AAA if-and-when he's healthy again, that will be some portion of the remaining 50 days. I'm skeptical we'll see him on the field again this season.) When-and-if Royce Lewis is ready for the majors, DFA Perez;. Perez is no great shakes and he won't be claimed. But for a few days he can contribute in ways on both sides of the ball that MIranda just can't right now. I haven't seen Perez play but I assume he's just mediocre-to-poor, not helpless. This is the downside of carrying 22 pitchers and only 18 batters on the 40-man. But pitching is the coin of the realm and it's more difficult to acquire a reasonable arm than it is to replace Hernan Perez in the unlikely event he gets claimed. So I can understand why the FO chooses the 22-18 split, or even sometimes 23-17 and 24-16 during the winter. But we're at the time of year where 21-19 seems more sustainable. If they really want to get back to 22-18 in a few weeks by DFAing a position player and none of those are hurt, Solano and Garlick both have bulleyes taped to the backs of their uniforms by clubhouse practical jokers. We could think outside the box and bring up someone other than a middle infielder to replace Correa on the roster, since SS is covered in his absence by both Farmer and Castro. Move Castro out of LF and replace him on the roster with... ummm....., errrr....., well, that's the problem, among the non-prospect players even the outfielders aren't hitting - Contreras started hot but his AAA OPS is below .700 in the month of May (and I could cherry pick a little to make it even worse), so knock 100 points off of that when coming up to the majors and he's not even playable in a corner OF spot and he's pretty marginal in center. Yeeesh, we chide ourselves for making fun of the AAA signings over the winter, but now that we've called up the genuine prospects and still need one good reinforcement, there really isn't anybody. What did we sign Hernan Freaking Perez for, except for an emergency situation anyway? We need someone for a few days, put someone on the 60-day and just call him up.

I was skeptical about DHing him. His bat is good, but that's always been in the context of being a good center fielder. To be a difference maker at DH requires a very high level of production. ... is what I thought. Across the majors this year, DH has an OPS of .746, versus a league-wide .728 at the moment. Past years have been similar. Teams use the DH for a variety of purposes, not always to just have a masher in the lineup. Buxton has an OPS of .832. Assuming he keeps this up, we have an advantage over the opposition at the DH slot, more days than not. I'd still rather see him in CF if he's able, of course - who wouldn't. And installing him at DH has other roster ramifications. But DHing him isn't the bad idea I thought it was.

I don't like the idea of calling up Miranda, period, full stop. There is something wrong with him and he needs to get that fixed; until then he has no role on a major league team, sorry to say. As for Long Man Mushinski, if that isn't his Official nickname, it needs to be. Long Man Mushinski should be a character in a Mickey Spillane crime novel, a Mark Twain frontier tale, a Damon Runyon short story, or a Grantland Rice sports vignette. Long Man Mushinski, never good enough to start, never bad enough to get cut, never sober enough to get out of his own way, just putting in the years for the perennially cellar-dwelling Metarie Pelecanidae of the old Western Southern Association League. Only his mother should be allowed to call him Parker, and only when he is in dutch, at that.

I gave them a C. I expected them to be an A- at this point.

Didja see that Toronto whomped on Tampa Bay yesterday, 20-1? https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/TBA/TBA202305230.shtml That can happen to any team, I guess. I still am at the stage of marveling what the new pitch clock does, though. 2:31 time of game, including the full 9 innings (since the Rays were home), in which a total of 33 hits happened. Even if I were a Rays fan in attendance at this game, I think I would have to marvel at how they all got on with business.

I don't know whether The Twins Front Office Has Difficulty Admitting When They Are Wrong, but I'm pretty sure they fail miserably at Admitting When TD Posters Knew It All Along.

It is interesting to look up, and you're not wrong. It's hard to measure apples-to-apples, using raw totals (Opening Day for instance can skew things), but across the majors, and looking at the team ranked 15th respectively each season, attendance is down about 500 per game from last year. Our Twins? Down about 1900. Numbers aside, Dave St Peter needs to take a vow of silence. He makes the mistake many public figures do, of saying what he knows, instead of saying what helps. Whether he's technically the FO, he speaks for the Twins and people take his words at face value. Our new guy Joe Pohlad needs to do what DSP's underlings have apparently failed to get across, and politely tell him to STFU and just do his job, which as far as I've been able to figure out is making sure enough packets of mustard are ordered so the concession stands don't run out, or whatever. The business-side of the franchise presumably is doing well; he should stay out of PR if he can't stay on-message.

Don't look now, but we've jinxed the young man, with all this hopeful talk. A pair of 0-for-4s in his last two games, 4 strikeouts total. We Can't Have Nice Things.™

In play: runs.

Solano's on the roster because of his bat, not his glove. Rocco forgot that the above logic is an indictment of the glove. Not an endorsement of the bat. Ah well. It's time for the hitters to bust out against someone. How about today. Maybe today's the day DeSclafani goes fewer than 5 complete.