Jump to content
Twins Daily
  • Create Account

LastOnePicked

Verified Member
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    1,391

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    6

 Content Type 

Profiles

News

Minnesota Twins Videos

2026 Minnesota Twins Top Prospects Ranking

2022 Minnesota Twins Draft Picks

Minnesota Twins Free Agent & Trade Rumors, Notes, & Tidbits

Guides & Resources

2023 Minnesota Twins Draft Picks

The Minnesota Twins Players Project

2024 Minnesota Twins Draft Picks

2025 Minnesota Twins Draft Pick Tracker

Forums

Blogs

Events

Store

Downloads

Gallery

Everything posted by LastOnePicked

  1. LastOnePicked
    That is fun. And here I thought it would take a few weeks or more to right the ship. A good lesson for me to chill out and keep the faith. Buxton is special. This series might be the boost this team needed to take itself seriously as a force in the AL Central. Love it.
  2. LastOnePicked
    Seth, didn't you just ask for an easy 7-2 victory? They saw that, and raised you two. In short, make more requests like this. See what happens. And I agree about momentum. Yesterday's unlikely win felt like an antidote to snake bite venom. Keep going for the sweep tomorrow.
  3. LastOnePicked
    Good stuff, Dave. I should add that I work with young adults in my career (community college instructor, but don't hold that against me), and I really like them. I think they're every bit as sharp as I was at their age, and mostly more so. I also know that I have a lot more patience than most. A lot. I can handle seemingly slow movies and seemingly slow ballgames. My mind works kinda slowly, so too much extra stuff going on usually puts me in a trance. So I like the pace of baseball, but I understand that it's getting harder for others to enjoy. Maybe there's a place to meet in the middle. Speed up the game a bit, sure, but cherish the very small - sometimes slow - aspects of the game that reflect the balance between what happens in the mind and how it impacts the bat, the ball, and the glove. Baseball still has a lot to offer about how good deliberate decisions can quickly lead to good outcomes. Thank you for attending my lecture.
  4. LastOnePicked
    "None of them could even sustain their attention on the ninth inning of a tightly contested one-run game. Even as a total diehard who revels in every intricacy of the game, I could feel their pain." Oh. Come. On. "Feel their pain"? Really? A one-run nailbiter on a sloppy April night between two teams that may be smacking each other around all season is considered "painful" now? I think this says more about the audience than it does about the game. I like you Nick and all of your TD contributions. But if you and your friends are indicative of how others feel and we really have moved into constant-entertainment-needed-or-I-feel-pain mode, this beautiful game isn't long for this world.
  5. LastOnePicked
    Funny. I used to tell my daughter that, for two glorious years, the Twins were the most clutch postseason team ever known to baseball. She would look at me like I was nuts, and because the attic mice ate the Wheaties boxes and I no longer had a VCR to run the Twins Win! tape, I had no viable proof to offer. And so, a triumphant MN postseason is just a fairy tale now.
  6. LastOnePicked
    I think this is probably true. The problem is this: the lost opportunities are already banked by that point. If this is a .500-ish almost-WC team under better conditions, they've already dug themselves a hole to climb out of. To be an 85-win club they need to start playing at a 90-win pace, with less additional room for error from here on out. That's why a strong start really matters for a team on the cusp. I think that's why some of us are so frustrated already.
  7. LastOnePicked
    We were facing a 50 year old Zack Greinke today and scored one run. With Buxton. Okay, maybe he's not 50. But we aren't setting the league on fire in offense, even with Buxton.
  8. LastOnePicked
    Good for Rodon, but way too many question marks going into the season, and this stretch may not last as long as last year. I know I wasn't pushing for the FO to sign him, so I can't do any told-ya-so-ing here.
  9. LastOnePicked
    "Can the Twins kick the division favorite while they're down, at home, while reinvigorating a fed-up fan base?" My guess is a very solid "no," but I just love this sentence regardless. We can't score more than 2 runs a game, and the White Sox, despite their troubles, certainly can. Prove me wrong, boys.
  10. LastOnePicked
    "in a matchup between arguably the two best teams in the AL Central." That would be a tortured argument at this point. Nice win today, but the Twins aren't even in the same league as the White Sox unless the bats magically wake up.
  11. LastOnePicked
    I'm surprised by how much I'm wondering if Jermaine Palacios would have been better in the lineup than Carlos Correa. I'm surprised how much we've struggled against teams with blue jerseys. I'm surprised that the starting pitching has given us all kind of chances to win and our offensive has given us almost no chances to win. I'm also a little surprised that my brief preseason optimism is completely gone before May 1st.
  12. LastOnePicked
    When individual players struggle, it is on them, yes. But when an entire team plays well below their capacity, that's probably on the coaching staff. Rocco has said several times that he preaches the players go up to the plate "with a plan." That might be part of the problem. If there's too much of a "plan" going on in their minds, it might be messing with their ability just to see the ball and hit the ball. So, yes, Rocco should be included in the blame. After an almost total roster turnover, and the team is still in last place and abysmal with RISP, he and his staff should be on the hot seat.
  13. LastOnePicked
    Yup. Trouble is, you gotta win four straight series now - two weeks worth of games - just to get to .500. This team hasn't shown any capacity to even win a single series. Gonna be over before it even got started, unless someone can light a spark.
  14. LastOnePicked
    Rogers > any other option out of the pen in a close game. By a lot. Could be a matter of several wins difference or more in 2022.
  15. LastOnePicked
    Fair, but the point of the the Correa signing was kinda to win now, wasn't it? That trade is clearly hurting our ability to win now. Unless Pagan would have been fine in the Duffey spots - in which case, this mess is more about Baldelli's poor choices.
  16. LastOnePicked
    It is funny how the small things become the big things. Duffey's role in the pen is magnified because of the Rogers trade. The pen's role in the team's success is magnified because of last year's April-May debacle. Now, a team that should be at least 6-5 and feeling loose is playing with additional pressure under the shadows of 2021 at 4-7. It's not that I thought Rogers was going to be team MVP, but I feared that a few out-of-the-gate bumps without him (coupled with Rogers very predictable lights-out success in SD) would cause an early momentum downslide that will be hard to overcome later on. And that's exactly what's happening. How could the FO not see this as a likely outcome? At any rate, back to Nick's point. Yes. they better adjust their plans fast. Duffey shouldn't be doing anything for this team but mop-up work in blowouts at this point. You can't make the entire team suffer for one guy's inability to get it done.
  17. LastOnePicked
    I felt it at the time and feel it even more strongly now: the Rogers/Paddack trade is going to be the defining blunder of this season. This team on paper had a small margin to sneak into a WC berth. That trade has made that margin even more narrow already.
  18. LastOnePicked
    Similar to last year, every button Rocco pushes seems to implode. He was a great manager when the Twins were mashing home runs at a record pace (who wouldn't be?), but he seems to lack a feel for the game when things are tight - who's hot, who's not, who needs to be tested, who needs to be rested. Again, I like what I see of him as a person, but I don't find him impressive as a big-league manager. Every team is going to win 54 and lose 54. So far, I think the Twins are 0-3 in the remaining 54. And those losses are on the manager. And he doesn't seem to be learning from mistakes.
  19. LastOnePicked
    Me after Monday: "Not a terrible start at 4-6. It's a long season." Me after Tonight: "The new draft lottery is going to give us a good shot at the #1 pick next year."
  20. LastOnePicked
    "Fans can point to the base-running send error by Watkins or another implosion by Duffey."
  21. LastOnePicked
    I'm leaning a bit more pessimistic, but this is a fair take. Two splits against good teams isn't terrible, and the two-game trouncing by arguably baseball's best team wasn't unexpected. Nice win today. Good teams get clutch contributions from all over the lineup. Good for Garlick.
  22. LastOnePicked
    I seem to recall that Cron's thumb was injured at the end of his year with us, and the injury seemed pretty bad at the time. I liked Cron, and I'm glad he's had a resurgence, but I can't really fault the choice of Sano over Cron. Sano seemed on the verge of stardom. All that said, the bad luck and the missed opportunities are starting to add up again.
  23. LastOnePicked
    "The Twins will show us glimpses of who they are as soon as this weekend at Fenway." Well, we've seen the glimpses now. Yes, it's early, but these glimpses have me thinking more about the trade deadline than the postseason. We heard a lot about the Giants-style increase of the coaching staff this offseason. I can't tell if this team is under-coached or over-coached, but they don't seem ready to hit or to play defense.
  24. LastOnePicked
    Fun read, with great notes on the total game experience. I'm waiting until May to get back to the ballpark myself. If the Twins heat up, that should bring some more folks back as well.
  25. LastOnePicked
    I agree with everything here, BUT ... the only way to field a dominant team like the Dodgers is to buy one (we'll never spend that kind of money) or build one. And building one is going to be a decade+ of Astros/Rays like futility, coupled with major scouting/developmental changes. And even then, you gotta keep all the right guys at the right time, Personally, I was kinda ready for a long rebuild. And it may happen anyway. But I do appreciate that this FO made improvements, here and there, to see if things might click and we could squeak into a WC berth. And that's still possible, because it's very very very very early, The 1991 Twins stunk in April, for example. In short, we ain't the Dodgers. But we don't have to be to have a satisfying season.
×
×
  • Create New...