Dodecahedron

Yeah, I dunno. I don't really care if a dude swung on a 3-0 pitch in a blowout game. Dude's gonna get on base anyway. Why not, who cares, etc. I'm old enough to remember where the Twins set a record for number of runs scored against a team in a double header. It was what, 30? 40? This was against the Sox. Was that "fair"? Also, I don't really care if the same dude got plunked the next day, by accident or not. These are adults. I just don't care. If it had caused a fight, sure, I'd care. I will say that Duffey looked surprised and concerned after he threw the pitch, if that means anything to anybody. Sometimes these narratives just get out of control. None of us know what is going on in the minds of either player.

I would like to see Buxton in the second half. Yeah, I know, stop laughing. A guy can dream.

Meh. These metrics seem jacked. This team is not playing good defense. What does statcast say about the team's defense? Statcast is the only defensive metric free of the data being fed through a funky algorithm to spit out a hypothetical.

Shoemaker should not be a starter at this point in his career. I think he could be a serviceable relief pitcher if used in the right situations. It makes me happy to see people speaking up that the idea of signing "#5 starter level talent" is crazy.

Ah. Say no more.

I don't know. My gut tells me those teams were a lot younger. They had some impressive names on the roster who later became very good or great. They also played really hard. Even going back to 1982, that 102-loss team won 40 games after July 1, after winning just 20 in the three months before. Do you see that kind of fight with this team? I don't. Say what you want about the records of those early 80's teams, they were fun to watch and often did amazing things. This team seems to be full of middle-career guys, not young guys. We are in "the window" but somehow we still flew right into the glass. Sure, this team has players who do amazing things, but there never seems to be the game where everything comes together.

I think the fans have been unlucky, forget the team. We might not be happy with a .500 team but we'd ultimately be OK with it. However, a .333 team is inexcusable, they are way below the threshold of luck. They need an 8-10 game winning streak before we can start talking about luck.

I think that's part of it. College financing came into earnest in the 90s, and at that time was supplemented with Pell grants. With Pell grants, the government footed half the bill for every student, leaving the student to get loans for the other half. All students who were over a certain age or lived on outside of their parents' house qualified for this. Republicans came in later and stopped this, putting the full burden on the students. When you say that Democrats aren't good at seeing the future, I think what really happens is Republicans come in later and try their best to gut all the protections and take advantage of the program. We see this with student loans, Obamacare, housing loan programs, the post office, gun control, etc. <digress> This isn't anything new. Scholars are in agreement about the Great Depression being caused by high tariffs put in by a new Republican majority in Congress. Why did they do that? The earlier Democratic majority did away with almost all tariffs. The revenge streak of Republicans has a long tradition; now that the southern evangelicals joined them we are in some real trouble! But yeah, I don't think it's fair to say that Democrats are not good at understanding the ramifications of what they do. What they misunderstand is that Republicans have a long memory and will undo or hinder progress at the first chance they get. We all saw McCain's thumbs down that saved healthcare for Americans as the other Republicans were united in taking healthcare away. We also all see HC prices going up the maximum allowed by law every year. That's not a mistake or a coincidence, nor is it "market driven" other than it's something we simply all have to buy. It has to be particularly frustrating for Republicans that the one thing they claim to care about the most -- gutting abortion rights -- has been so elusive. With the last justice appointed to the supreme court -- appointed solely for this reason as she has only been a judge for ~3 years! -- they will probably achieve it. </digress>

Ober might be really good, but it seems unlikely he is ready for the big show. Maybe the defense can help him out tonight, or maybe he is superman. We will find out. I didn't know he was on the 40-man roster. It looks like he had to be. Did the Twins hold him in the lower minors for too long? I guess 2020 jacked his trajectory up a bit.

Maybe so, but even if they doubled that number it would not make much of a difference. We are talking about the OPS in 1/9th of a game. Maybe someday the Twins will play another team like them -- in that I mean a team without a closer -- and they can tee off in the 9th. Until then, the hitters are at a disadvantage and I don't blame them for wanting to hit the showers in a pointless effort, trying to claw back when sometimes against the best pitcher on the opposing team's roster.

Yeah. One of the things I said before the season was that hitting was going to be catastrophic this year if the Twins did not change gears knowing that the MLB was deadening the ball. I felt like I had egg on my face when they came out blazing that first week. Now, not so much. Maybe teams were using up the leftover balls from last year to start the season, maybe not, but what worked last year is not working this year since those first couple of weeks. The ball is deadened, just as we were told it would be. It's worth pointing out that the same hitting approach has not worked for the Yankees, either. It's an easy guess as to which team adjusted better to the change. We just have to look at bullpen stats for each team to know the rest of the story. Their closer has not allowed an earned run in 15 games. Our combined closers probably have an ERA close to 15 in the 9th inning. Night and day.

Maybe. I mean, one would hope so. The bullpen has been really bad, and the Twins have burned through their depth at all positions already. Somehow, we all missed the fact that this team has no depth when we were predicting the Twins were going to have a good year. Yeah, the hitting has been unfortunately/unlucky, but I'm not sure how much of a difference it would make if they were hitting as expected. They'd still be under .500, probably still by a lot.

Here's a bit of the conspiracy theorist in me, but hear me out, I think this nails it. Rich families really don't want the working class elevating themselves. They just don't. College promises the ability for anyone to make enough money to raise their class. And yes, it works, graduates make more money. But there a key difference: Students from rich families can go to school and exit with no student loan debt. This means their lifetime is spent being able to spend every dollar they earn on whatever they want. Conversely, those looking to elevate their income and status by paying for college with loans are paying, what, $500+ per month for the bulk of their working lives. For many people, that's the same amount their income rose by having a degree. They earn more, but they must spend more just to survive. Their status, lifestyle, ability to save for retirement, ability to buy a nicer house, etc., barely moves. Right now, student loans are structured so that a portion of the created income funnels from middle- and lower-class graduates back to the upper class. Somewhere along the line, someone said, sure, let the lower classes make higher wages by getting degrees by promising to help them pay for it. We will come in on the back end and take the difference away again.

Even more aggravatingly, the Twins seem to have no one in the minors who can step in.

On the bright side, the Yanks only have 4 more years of Hick's 60-games per year track. $167,000+ per game is not bad scratch.

You are being generous. With the way this team is nosediving, I can see them finishing with much more than 102 losses. They are on pace for 109 losses and there's a chance the team has peaked already. This dead parrot wouldn't voom if you put four million volts through it.

I agree. These things tend to snowball, and we all saw decisions early on in the year that were astoundingly terrible and few to none of us would have made those same decisions. If the front office has a plan to build a roster a certain way, using certain metrics, and then the game manager does not know how to use the result, that's a problem. The team has already burned through it's depth and is starting 30+ year old career minor leaguers. In retrospect, we should have been able to spot that this team is a house of cards.

Please remember this is just one game. There are many other games that the Twins will lose.

I suppose I would agree, Broxton is not a good player. Counterpoint: Refsnyder is not a good player either, and they are both over 30 years old. Have the Twins exhausted their pool of prospect talent already? It's mid-May.... With some luck, Refsnyder comes in hot and does some damage before his imminent retirement from baseball. Unfortunately, this just blocks a prospect. (And with even more luck, Broxton is never needed.)

I saw this chart being discussed on a news program, but apart from noting this is going up, they missed the key point showed by this graph: no one is paying off their student debt. The system should show a plateau, a decline, or a slowing of the mounting debt if anyone was able to pay off their debt. Here's something people might misunderstand. I am in the top 4%, but I have made only a tiny dent in my student debt. I graduated ten years ago. Yes, I know what you are thinking, I can't manage money, etc., but that's not the point. If my debt is not decreasing, then no one's debt is decreasing. In college, they tell you that if you make your scheduled payments, you will have half of your debt paid off in ten years. How much have I paid off by making the assigned payments on time? 25%. Yes, I paid enough payments to pay off 50% of the debt, but before interest. The problem is the terms of the debt. It is not like housing debt, where if you pay a little extra you save thousands of dollars over the term of the loan because you save on the interest. No matter what you pay, you always owe the entire amount with interest over the entire life of the loan. Thus, there is no benefit of paying extra or paying earlier. It's not just that payers can't make a dent in the debt, they can't even make a scuff on the paint job. Though my student debt does not affect me that much, I know how much it has to affect people who make less than I do, who in all likelihood have even more debt than I do.

There is no question that they will.

Good question. Not sure. Let me take a look at what the numbers say and I'll get back to you.

Sure. If we look at Brock's OPS numbers again: With the short sample size of the year to date, the difference between .753 OPS and .680 OPS is what, 5 runs at the most? That might not even be one more win. Without a hall of fame set of hitters, these Twins just have no chance. Sure, change coaches, change hitters, whatever, but that's not solving the problem. It is strange to not see much chatter about firing the pitching coaches.

Budweiser is the only beer I know of where it does not always taste the same. It's like those $5 bottles of wine at Target. You just don't know what you are getting. It is true that no lead is safe with the Twins, but not in the way this was intended.

My guess is the hitters are deflated given how the bullpen acts in innings 7+. The pitcher struggles and the hitters give up. We have seen this before; it's like the playoffs came early this year. Apparently, advanced analytics can't predict who will fall like a house of cards when under pressure. You actually gotta talk to players to figure out what they're about. Who knew? As for coaching, sure some hitting coaches can inspire the hitters to come back to re-take the lead every night, but the number of coaches who have that skill is not high. Changing hitting coaches without fixing the pitching won't solve anything. And even if the Twins had such a coach, the team would likely still be underwater right now. The Twins would need an epic, hall-of-fame offense to overcome what they are given by the pitching crew every night.