70charger

I took this picture of a bird at the ruins of Teotihuacan in central Mexico. Anyone want to take a crack at what it is? I think it might be a flycatcher, actually. http://i67.tinypic.com/atnia8.jpg

Ooh, conspiracies! And Thad Levine spent an awful lot of time on grassy knolls during his time with the Texas Rangers. Coincidence?

Tautology

Whew.

Yikes.

Hmm. That sounds right, but I don't know enough about soccer to know for sure.

You're right. Salary caps and drafts definitely serve the interest of parity, but we pay the price of a closed-door system.

The real problem with promotion-relegation is the way the league is set up. There aren't hundreds of independent teams, there are 30 systems. Also, the MLB, and American sports in general, have an amateur draft. What happens to that when relegation happens? Do relegated teams lose their right to draft? Or is the first round of the draft just going to be more than a hundred picks? It's a fun thing to think about, but you would literally have to clean-sheet major league baseball.

Speed kills

Fair enough. I've only seen about half the game so far.

Also, does it seem like Mauer would have made a couple defensive plays at first too?

Still questioning the decision to sit Mauer. That squibber to end the inning with a guy on third hasn't helped me get over.

Come on, man.

Wow, Kepler saves the day with a literal Superman move.

I probably just jinxed it, didn't I?

I couldn't tune in until last inning. Santana has a run against him, but 54 pitches for 5 1/3? Damn, that's efficient.

Show me the FoxTrax on that strike three.

Oh, and I'm also pretty much obligated to like Brighton & Hove Albion, after my brother's adoption of the team when he was in Sussex. But they've done quite well recently.

I'm not surprised, since I thought of the same kind of thing. I considered putting something about that in there, but I was already quite wordy. Also, I never got into English soccer, but when I moved to Istanbul a few years ago, I wanted to pick a Turkish soccer team. Turns out it's almost more of a political choice than a geographic or sporting one. Soccer in Turkey is nuts, man.

Lineups: Angels of California Anaheim Somewhere Near Los Angeles: Cameron Maybin ® CF Kole Calhoun (L) RF Albert Pujols ® DH Yunel Escobar ® 3B Luis Valbuena (L) 1B Andrelton Simmons ® SS Cliff Pennington (S) 2B Martin Maldonado ® C Eric Young, Jr. (S) LFPitcher: Parker Bridwell, ® -- Minnesota Twins: Brian Dozier ® 2B Robbie Grossman (S) DH Miguel Sano ® 1B Max Kepler (L) RF Eduardo Escobar (S) 3B Eddie Rosario (L) LF Jorge Polanco (S) SS Jason Castro (L) C Byron Buxton ® CFPitcher: Ervin Santana ®

Well, we’re back to real life after a good, long weekend. I hope we’ve shaken off our hangovers, at least gone through the motions of another workday, and are ready for some more Twins baseball. I had quite a lot of time recently to think about the Twins and what they mean to me. You see, I took an intercity bus ride yesterday afternoon that was supposed to last four hours and took nearly nine, all the while sitting in the seat directly in front of a woman whose voice was slightly more pleasant than a war crime. I made it through the ordeal, which is, incidentally, just about all that can be said for the experience of being a Twins fan the last several years. Knowing that I had my first game thread to write the next day, I thought about my own fandom, and sitting in bumper to bumper traffic in the middle of Mexico, Twins baseball made me think of home. Jerry Seinfeld said that loyalty to any one sports team is hard to justify. When it comes down to it, he said, we’re cheering for clothes. Maybe that’s easier to assert when you live right in the middle of Yankees territory, where hiring expensive mercenaries has been the norm and, let’s face it, those expensive mercenaries do a lot of winning. If all I wanted to do was a watch a winner, I could probably do a lot worse than to pick the Yankees as the laundry I root for. So why don’t I? Am I just a glutton for punishment? I mean, I sign up for nine hour bus rides and 162 games a year of Twins fandom. But these things can’t really be looked at objectively, can they? The Twins take me home, and for a guy like me that has no permanent home, that can be too easy to understate. Twins fandom has delivered a lot of losing of late, but over the years it has delivered a whole lot more than that. It delivered quality time with my dad for my brother and me when we were both young enough to believe him when he told us that the left field nosebleeds were actually the best seats in the house because you can see the entire field. It delivered the Cinderella champions of ’87, whose game seven we watched while “hiding” behind the living room loveseat because we were up past our bedtime. My parents knew and totally let it slide. It delivered “And we’ll see you tomorrow night!”, game 163, and the hometown hero bringing home batting titles. In order to justify our fandom - and, we hope beyond hope, not simply to rationalize it - there has to be something to it beyond the bare numbers of the win - loss columns. And for me, there certainly is. The Twins haven’t done much winning this decade, but to me, they’re still delivering. — I can’t do my first game thread without a “Things to Think About” section, so with apologies to Riverbrian, here are mine: Enjoy those fireworks last night? Thank China, where they were first developed around the 7th century. Gunpowder is considered one of the “Four Great Inventions” of China. The others are dim sum, Chinatowns, and fully-assembled iPhones.*
 The biggest and best fireworks display I have ever seen was midnight on New Year’s 2015-2016 in Utrecht, Netherlands. I climbed up to the roof and watched fireworks go on from every direction of the compass** for more than an hour straight. The Dutch love their New Year’s fireworks so much that they pay quite a price for it: a few years ago there were reported the following fireworks-related injuries in the Netherlands: 700 injuries total; 236 eye injuries, 91 with permanent damage, 23 cases of blindness; 5 hands amputated, along with “several” fingers***; and all of this went along with 233 fire trucks dispatched.
 Did you know that the Bastille Day fireworks on July 14 from the Eiffel Tower in Paris are actually under copyright, according to what the Daily Mail calls “an obscure clause in EU copyright rules”? I don’t abide by EU rules, so here’s a picture I took of the fireworks last year. Suck it, France.
 I visited the pyramid at Cholula here in Mexico recently, and as I got out of the car, I almost immediately heard a gunshot-like noise, which definitely made me jump a bit. Turns out it was just a firework, set off by pilgrims to the church that’s now on top, La Virgen de Los Remedios. That must have been a starting gun of sorts, because sure enough, the parade of pilgrims headed down the pyramid after, toting a very large Mary statue with them. An odd sight for what was once surely a place of both human and animal sacrifice, to the Mesoamerican god Quetzalcoatl. 
 I’m all out of fireworks-related stuff (and let’s be honest, it was already getting tenuous), but in case you’re big on bar trivia, The pyramid at Cholula is the largest pyramid in the world by footprint if not by height, measuring 400 meters per side; by comparison, the largest pyramid at Giza in Egypt had roughly 145 meter sides. It was so big, the later Aztecs named it Tlatchihualtepetl, literally “artificial mountain,” and ascribed its construction to the god Xelhua. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, it is also the largest monument in the world, by volume. In other news, there is someone out there whose job description includes measuring the volume of the world’s various monuments. * This is not true. ** Actually one of the Four Great Inventions, along with printing and papermaking. *** Why is this inconclusive!? — I know it’s kind of a taboo here on game threads, but we should probably talk about baseball, at least for a minute. The Twins are facing the Angels of California Anaheim Somewhere Near Los Angeles, or whatever they’re called these days, in the rubber match of a series in which the good guys have already taken two. Can we bring the brooms out tonight? And will we see hot or cold Erv? Ervin Santana still sports a sparkling ERA of 3.07 despite being a Jekyll and Hyde case of late. Last time out, he gave up 5 runs. The time before that 0. The two times before that, 6 and 5 respectively. The time before that, 0. The time before that, 7. The two times before that, 1 and 0. Let’s hope he’s on his game against his former team. He’ll be facing rookie pitcher Parker Bridwell, traded by the Orioles earlier this year. I could tell you more about him, but I’d just be copy-pasting Wikipedia. Sorry. Lineups to be posted when available. Win Twins!

Speaking for myself, Miguel Sanó got a bunch of votes from Mexico.

They're 16 year olds. Literally every single one of them has question marks about their bats. Would it help if maybe they went to college and won the triple crown in the nation's most competitive conference? Would that answe some of your questions? What's that? You hate that guy too? Hmm. So if we aren't picking 24 year old Mike Trout with every pick it's all just wasted? Got it.

****ing hell

You see smug entitlement on our outfielders' faces? Have you also seen aliens? Have you been probed? It's okay. This is a safe space.