ashbury

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.

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 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 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.™

"We are going through a difficult period of time with, obviously, some health issues." -- Rocco Oh, that darn injury bug. I guess pneumonia is an injury to the lungs. I'm still going with my pre-season prognostication of 93 wins, barring injury. If it's valid for them, it's valid for me. Looks like I need to update my terminology though. Barring health issues.

Well, see, I think I've found the problem - we've been letting the evil twin pitch instead of the guy we intended.

Announcers often have insights from coaching personnel, so this sounds like a definite nugget. Thanks.

I came here to lament Mack's demise as well. I expected something from him when he was drafted. Ft Myers has always had a reputation of being a hard place for the hitters, so the .723 OPS didn't bother me, his being a high-school draftee and all, as I don't hold the same bar for catchers as at the offense-minded positions. But he hasn't hit a lick at Cedar Rapids where I think of bats as sometimes coming alive, for two seasons now, and I guess his work behind the plate wasn't good enough to save him. Mack's only 3 months older than Cossetti, but the difference in bat looks pretty undeniable and that spelled the end. I bet he catches on (heh) with another organization, assuming he still wants to go through the grind and all that.

It's a site bug that I believe occurs when you are composing a reply and meanwhile one or more other replies come in that cause the site to construct a new page. You click Submit but it doesn't take you to the new page and you don't see your published post, just the WYSIWYG editor with your text. So you naturally think it's just a glitch and your comment didn't take, so you click Submit again. Over-under is about 3 times, I find. Some post half a dozen duplicates before catching on (or giving up).

Hur dur, hur dur. I will wait to form my opinion about this condescending article until the hivemind informs me of whatever decision coalesces. Meanwhile I will continue to seethe impulsively in my mindless bloodlust for seeing Royce Lewis in a major league uniform on or about June 1 And I reserve the right on or about June 3 to call for his DFA and release if he has an o-fer in his first game. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a festering, bile-spitting pet demon to go feed. Hur dur, hur dur.

The problem is that run-scoring isn't evenly distributed, because there's no upper limit for a game but the lower limit you can score is zero. So there's a skew to the stats which affects simple averages like the mean. Individual high scores move the running average more than a low score can. Some of these near-nohitters the Twins have suffered deserve lower than a 0 for runs scored. It's why this offense feels worse than season run totals would have us believe. Because, IMO, it is.

I'm with you but the specific bar you set seems a tad high. Currently there are only six teams with even one such hitter (ATL has two), and this includes Oakland with the ultra-consistent Brent Rooker. We're still in the small sample size of one-quarter of the season, which always leaves room for flashes in the pan. For the full season in 2022, only three teams in the majors had the luxury of one "really good" hitter by this standard. Two years ago there were five, and when talking about consistency none of those five have been at .950 this year or last. But your point is still hugely valid. Who on this roster is a threat to pull a Nelson Cruz type of season out of his ear, starting now to the rest of the season? Kirilloff, maybe, but he's got less than a season of experience under his belt and fails the "consistent" criterion. Gallo's kinda sorta on that track at the moment if he pops another homer or two, but he's never put a full season together at his current level and even at that he falls short of .950. And in fairness, the standard you set does have a certain kind of merit: last year two of those three teams with a .950 OPS hitter faced each other in the ALCS, and one of them went on to win it all. (That third team, St Louis, went home after losing the wild card series so it's not a sure-fire solution, not that you were saying it was.) So I've kind of talked myself into a circle and am back to supporting your point after all. I think it's just the implication by the repeated plural that there are scads of hitters out there and we are failing to scoop any of them up. They are rare, rare, rare.

The bar is lower for the bat, when it's a catcher. He's maintained similar stats as he's moved up to higher levels, and that's not stagnation but progress. He needs to maintain for the rest of '23 and then progress with the bat two more times, of course, to become relevant; that's one reason I suggested 2025. (The other reason is that the system is so bereft of catching prospects, so he'll get every opportunity* once he's deemed "close".) Wait, I just noticed, he bats lefty. This young man will live forever as a catcher! * Need I say, everything I post comes with "IMO" implicitly sprinkled freely throughout

And that's just their own pitching lines. Doesn't include the inherited runner charged to the starter. Very poor showing after a fine start that had us in a pitchers' duel to that point.

Do they like Pat Winkel's defense? Looking at his progression since being drafted, he's on course to hit the majors in '25, as a quality backup if his glove plays.

Still almost two weeks until league rules allow him to be activated.

He's the lead singer of Maroon 5, referenced in the article. Impressive tats, for those impressed by that sort of thing.

Not on an empty stomach, anyway.

Some can claim the partial defense of having wanted to be close to their mother when they were born, and now going back to see her now and then.