Dodecahedron

He sure was. No Hrbek = a different Puckett, et al. I know we all appreciate and love Hrbek, but we also take him for granted too. Hrbek was the first player who learned to get hits by chopping the ball downward to the Metrodome turf straight in front of him, sending the ball careening to the back of the infield as if it were a high fly ball. More than once, I saw opposing defenders catch the ball and not throw it to first, thinking they just caught a fly ball. Other times, the Twins could simply outrun the ball and make it to first before the defender had a chance to throw to first. Genius stuff, and Hrbek showed the others how to do it. The Twins hit the weights just to be able to do this as hard as they could! After several turf changes, this did not work as well by the late 80s/early 90s.

Be skeptical of any stratospheric player who suddenly looked human as steroid enforcement kicked in.

I doubt he will ask for $15M. He made $14M in 2019 and was due to get $12M last year before proration. I can see him taking $20M for two years, split up however the Twins want.

Is there much evidence of players who have played DH for a few years "falling off a cliff"? For Cruz, it's not so much about 2 years, it's about the money. If the first year is $12M and the second is $8M-$10M, I think you take that without hesitation.

Looks like quite a hurler, but unlike some pitchers it's not difficult to track the ball. I would not be surprised if better MLB hitters would dominate him. Some hitters may be able to hit off of him with their eyes closed once they saw the trajectory...

Garver: Still young. He hit well enough in the minors to prove that 2019 was no aberration. He will hit well again. Although he will soon be 30, he is a "young player" by MLB experience standards. Giving up on him now is insanity. I don't understand how this could be on anyone's mind. Polanco: He always had and always will have a history of errors. He has 57 errors credited to him since 2017, and this doesn't count the errors attributed to 1B that would not have been errors if Polanco had thrown the ball properly. At this point there is plenty of documentation to prove he has trouble throwing the ball.. I have been high on Polanco, but always because of his hitting. If the Twins can find a different 100+ OPS+ hitter who can field dependably to replace Polanco, they should do it. But they won't! The dude is signed until 2025. Get used to it.

If this ever happens, the Twins will win the WS.

The Twins, like all of baseball, no doubt see themselves as having taken a significant loss on 2020. The Twins will not want to take on risk at this time. These are likely their priorities: 1) Don't take on more risk 2) Don't throw risky money at at unknown 2021 season What is the least risky thing to do? Keep the status quo as much as they can. The budget is always important, but it's less important than reducing risk this year; though of course the team could go all Terry Ryan and strip down to nothing, I'm certain the team learned their lessons there when people stopped showing up at the stadium. More teams than usual in the MLB are also going to be taking this strategy. This will probably not be a great year for free agents and there may even be some unexpected retirements. I see the Twins largely trying to keep who they've got. Some disappointing players will be let go, but a full reboot in a division championship year is not in the cards. Don't expect a big free agent signing, and don't expect anyone who performs well to be let go. 75%-80% of the team next year should be faces they already have, minimum, even if the Twins have to spend to keep things as they are! There will be no earth-shattering moves to improve the team, nor will there be a stripping the core talent.

I thought for sure you were Terry Ryan until you got to item 6.

Yep. Future generations will look at the championship lists and playoff results. Heck, even in 3-4 years most of us will have forgotten the specifics of the year, much less our children.....

When future fans look at WS wins, it won't dawn on most of them that this was a shortened season unless they dive in and look deeper; even then they probably won't care as they won't understand the true nature of what we are going through. When people talk about the Twins losing streak in the playoffs, there won't be an asterisk because of the pandemic. In sports, the only thing that exists is the now. The Twins can't practice for next year, next year will be a different team. There will be different players, different coaches, different schedules, and different challenges to face. The Twins talked a lot over the course of the season about wanting the 2020 AL Central Championship banner to hang in the stadium. They got that. For whatever reason, they had nothing else left in the tank, but that banner is still real and it still counts. Sure we can be disappointed, but the Twins did more this year than practice and there are a lot of recent years where a division championship was a pipe dream. Apart from being lame against the White Sox and Royals, the Twins did a lot of damage to a lot of teams this year! Teams missed the playoffs or were seeded worse because the Twins laid waste to the two Central divisions. Going 24-7 at home...wow! We will never see that again in our lifetimes.

It's not time to move on, it's time to add more players like him.

MLB likes to finish up the season with divisional games to potentially have good September matchups. I imagine all of you have noticed that the AL Central tends to have the worst teams in the AL.

Were the Twins hitters reborn as rookies in 2020? How much influence could a pitching coach possibly have on the 2019 players?

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.

Championships are great, but no one is a baseball fan for the championships. This would be both exhausting and futile, having a new "favorite team" with each new champion, even though they were last year's champion and probably would not repeat. It probably goes without saying that anyone who survived the Ryan II years and is still a fan will always be a fan.

Well, sorta. Like in the series v. the Reds, the pitchers were dinking around the edges of the strike zone too much and the hitters were taking too many pitches. There were good pitches to swing at. Baldelli was thinking ahead too much. In the Reds series he was changing out pitchers to give people work but also rest, thinking about the long playoffs with no days off. He shot himself in the foot with the new rules for changing out pitchers when he pulled pitchers who were doing well. Baldelli stresses "never looking ahead" but this is exactly what he was doing. Bafflingly, Baldelli also did this once the playoffs started. He was not managing to win game 1, he was managing to win game 13. The looks on everyone's faces also started in the Reds series. Everyone looked like they were in the waiting room to get rectal exams. Nelson Cruz looked like he would rather be dead than be playing baseball. Maybe there is a reasonable explanation, like he was posing for the next Fiona Apple album cover or something, but I doubt it. For a franchise that pats its own back on having fun while playing, there was no fun anywhere to be found. It's not just that fun was lacking, either, they looked downright depressed. They did not look nervous or businesslike, they looked like all of their dogs just died ... and this started before the playoffs. What happened this week was completely predictable if you watched that last series of the year. I can't be the only person who saw this coming, though I hoped I would be wrong. There's just no way a team playing like they were is going to win in the playoffs. The last time I saw a baseball team this depressed while playing was the 2011 Twins. But they finished last, not first. What the heck happened with this team?

There is no curse. The Twins were playing terribly, and it started in the series against the Reds. I knew the Twins were cooked after watching the second Reds game. I'm betting many of us knew.

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.

Lots of discussion about home field v. the Yankees. If the Twins win the division, they won't face the Yankees until the 3rd round, if ever. Plus, all of these games are on the road for everybody. All of the AL games will be played in SoCal; all of the NL games will be played in Texas. They Twins are now in first place and if they take 2 out the 3 remaining games they will win the division.

It looks like the Twins might face the Yankees yet again in the first round. The way the Twins can avoid this is by winning the division. For the playoff rotation, you start with the best. I'm sorry but that's still Berrios. Maeda is next, probably. I worry about him being unproven in the playoffs. For the #3 guy, you go with either Odorizzi or Hill, depending on the matchup. Hill is the only lefty. No one should be upset if others gets pushed back by Pineda or Dobnak. Both are fine options too.

If I were in charge, I would never call up someone new in a bonkers season like this one unless I had no alternative. I would even sign or make a trade for a placeholder instead of calling up a prospect.

The MLB is trying to starve minor league baseball. But let's unpack that. We know pretty much any player can make it to the bigs, given the right attitude and approach. MLB signs a player and shuffles him to the minors for 3-5+ years before ever seeing a return on the investment. Often the player comes up with approaches that are all wrong. Sometimes players get injured in the minors and are never the same. Where is the rule that says MLB teams have to have a farm system? Could it be that the players would be better off being coached by the team? If a team has 10-15 players training with the team at all times, would they more likely to succeed than the 150 signed players in the minors? Would it take them as long to be productive? It would suck for local economies to potentially lose minor league teams, but I'm not sure the MLB even needs them.

I read a UK government report, and their take was the people who died early on "would have died anyway." This is of course a ridiculous take. The people may have died in six months or six years, they don't know. Yes, the death rates in the US and the UK have gone down from their peaks (the US not far enough), but one must remember this is a global pandemic. The global death rate has been flat since the pandemic took off early this year. The global death rate has not fallen at all! This means the UK and the US cannot simply start to believe it's over -- as long as the pandemic is active anywhere it can strike the UK and US again at any time. As for the response in the USA, if you ignore some very vocal pundits and politicians (who have been proven wrong, again and again), the response in the US has been pretty good. Retail stores have all adjusted very quickly. Overall, I am proud of the response in the US, and I'm doubly proud of how organizations ignored politicians and pundits to do what is right and obvious.

I'm not worried about Dobnak or any of the Twins long-term pitching options.