Unwinder

I think I personally believe in the Kuechelaissance enough that I won't be utterly furious if they trade Maeda to fill holes, though my preferred outcome, as always, would be for the Twins to get everything they need easily without giving up anyone I like.

He's such a valuable trade asset that it's nearly impossible to imagine an asset worth trading him for. If they traded him 1/1 for Ohtani, my knee-jerk response would be "they'd better have an extension worked out!"

I keep seeing people posting very confidently on here that Buxton isn't going to heal. Why do you think this?

Another disappointing start, another 5+ run game. We really just need the starting pitching to return to normal 2023 levels without the offense going back to normal 2023 levels. You can complain all you want about Buxton (and he'll deserve it) but offense was overall good again.

I'm more convinced than ever that this shoulder issue has been a problem all year. If I'm a rival front office out of contention, I'm going to try to buy low.

I've got to imagine MLB would be delighted to tilt the balance in favor of offense a little bit more.

OK, despite some struggling big names, and a lot of memorable whiffs, and the A's being the opponent, the outcome of this series would honestly look pretty good if the starting pitching had been up to the usual 2023 standard. If the Twins could score five runs on anything resembling a regular basis, they'd be unstoppable.

OK, the game overall was ugly, but the play where Willi Castro stole home was really good.

My impression of Popkins is that he has a lot of knowledge and a lot of information (which is something Correa admires) but has been unable to turn it into results. Just spitballing here, but if the players like him so much, maybe the answer isn't to fire him so much as to pair him up with an assistant who knows how to apply that knowledge in a way that helps these guys hit baseballs.

I don't think that a new coach is going to overhaul the team's hitting philosophy, but some people are good teachers and some people are bad teachers, and maybe a good teacher trying to coach these guys to hit a lot of homers is going to have more success than Popkins. I mean, you can have two Algebra classes teaching from the same exact books and have one class test well, and the other class test poorly because one class has a good teacher and the other class has a bad teacher. I don't think an offense based on sacrificing contact for power is inherently a bad thing, but I don't get the impression that Popkins knows how to equip these guys to do it successfully. The all-or-nothing approach would be fine if there wasn't so little all and so much nothing.

I'm kind of hoping that the player-led meetings that have seemingly been waking up some of the other struggling hitters are what Miranda needs.

Adding Pete Maki jersey to cart...

I remember someone on here over the offseason commenting that they hoped weight loss wouldn't result in a loss of power for Miranda, and lo and behold, he seems to have lost power. I don't think that's DEFINITELY connected (he still looks pretty muscular to me), but it makes sense to look at what's changed.

It sure didn't seem to be impeding him at the time, but spring training is still a small sample size, can't totally rule it out.

I think it's some combination of his weight loss messing with him (and possibly reducing his power?), his shoulder injury from way back in spring training still nagging in some way, and his approach getting a lot worse, possibly as a side-effect of trying to adjust to one of the other things.

Ober seems to be constantly underrated, I trust him on the mound as much as I trust Gray and Ryan.

I think when fans complain about "analytics" they're really complaining about one of the following: -Management continuing to play a player who has been in a deep slump because the "numbers" say he's a good player. In the fans mind, "analytics" here means management having their noses in spreadsheets which compile data from previous months, or previous seasons, and ignoring the player's current performance. -Management following a very simple top-level rule (righties should always hit against lefty pitchers, always pull the starting pitcher the third time through the order, hitters should always swing for the fences, never steal bases, never bunt...) and seemingly ignoring any complicating factor like which hitters are hot, whether the pitcher is cruising, whether there's a guy on third base and you only need one more run to walk it off, etc. What this fan is reacting against isn't "analytics," but bad, overly broad analytics. All those complicating factors are measurable, and could be used to make decisions mathematically. -Management valuing a player for some esoteric stat (spin rate? launch angle?) and continuing to trust that statistic over the player's actual bad performance. I think fans sometimes even apply this to useful stats like OPS or WAR if the eye test tells them that a player strikes out too much or throws meatballs down the middle of the zone in clutch moments or whatever. None of these errors are inherently what analytics are about, they're just a caricature of analytics.

If this team is really just the Timberwolves then maybe a players-only meeting is what they need to turn it around.

I'm less engaged than usual lately, I followed very closely up through the first Tigers series and then since then I've been checking the score partway through the game and tuning in if things don't look completely woeful by about the fifth inning. I've been very uninterested in reading articles and takes from fans because it's so overwhelmingly negative. I don't blame them! The team is frustrating! But I don't want to wallow in it. Getting more into chess as a pastime for now, if anyone on here uses chess dot com, message me.

There's always Rocco to fall back on. I'm sure there's a way to use Ryan's complete game as a springboard for complaining about "rockhead" pulling pitchers too early.

I wouldn't be worried about this series at all if it wasn't a part of a larger trend, great teams get rolled by trash teams all the time. But the Twins haven't looked like a great team and this doesn't look like much of a fluke.

I'm pretty sure they're keeping Gleeman based on some stuff I saw people saying on Twitter. Otherwise that'd be a pretty easy way for me to save a few bucks a month.

Timberwolves' Disease

I did not take this into account, and it's encouraging enough to keep me invested through at least another month of (gestures at Twins) all this.

I think the Twins should do it, and the reason I think they should do it is because it's not my money.