Dodecahedron

Some will disagree, and probably quite strongly, but in my mind this is still a young/inexperienced team. Any "rebuild" the Twins have been doing is not yet complete. Starting a new rebuild before finishing the current one sounds very Terry Ryan-like. Let's not do that again. This team took a giant leap forward with pitching and hitting was down leaguewide. After last year's record setting offense, we knew the hitters were going to be closer to normal this year, didn't we? Much of the advice I'm reading here is to strip something and build anew. After a crazy, shortened season where three teams in the the AL Central feasted upon weak AL and NL Central teams (and promptly got bounced from the playoffs), I don't think you can read too much into this year. 2020 will not have an asterisk (nor should it), and years from now when people look at division championships, it won't even dawn on most people that this was a shortened, wackadoodle season. The Twins looked downright miserable at the end, and it was a strange year all around. Say what you want, the simple fact is this team was done; how the team performed over the course of the year is almost irrelevant. When it came time to play in the playoffs, their heads were somewhere else. This was a different team that what we saw just a couple of weeks earlier. My only advice is for Baldelli to practice what he preaches. He sank the team by managing ahead. He needs to focus on the current game like he says he does. Don't pull healthy and performing pitchers or hitters to rest them for later. if you don't win today, tomorrow does not matter. It was a stroke of luck that the Twins won the division, and of course you don't win in the playoffs by luck alone.

Yesterday's game was hard to watch. The Twins were not aggressive enough when hitting -- ya gotta swing to hit the ball -- and the pitchers were dinking around the edges of the strike zone way too much. Baldelli made pitching moves which were questionable, but I can see what he was trying to do. Hopefully this was just some jitters and they got this out of their system. This felt like a playoff game in that the Twins were way too far in their own heads as they tend to be in the playoffs. Still have to give credit to the Reds for making the Twins doubt themselves, I suppose. To make the playoffs with such a poor hitting staff calls out how great the Reds pitching is.

Berrios is probably the guy who will be around the longest and be good for the longest period of time, if that helps.