TheLeviathan

I don't believe you're reading that right. The 2021 data is for 40% of the season and the other seasons are for the entire year. At least that's how I'm reading it. Is that right @Tom Froemming? If so, not only are injuries up, but they are up at a ridiculously high rate both for the Twins and the league as a whole. (Which jives with other articles I've read)

I just play franchise mode mostly in Madden and The Show. I play while I use the treadmill and that's usually all my gaming time so I dont get caught up in all that. PS5 is a beautiful machine to use...I can't wait for that hardware to get put to full use. Should've mentioned I still run a baseball mogul online sim league that has been going since 2010.

I got the PS5 so I'm reliving my favorite series of all time with Mass Effect Legendary. We got the game "Strike" for our kids and really enjoy it as a family game. Ditto "Can't Catch Harry" which is a version of Spoons. I wish we had more time for adult gaming, but we don't get to that a lot.

Great SI article. Baseball has so many rules already on the books that could solve so many issues and they do nothing.

All future Weeks In Review can be summarized thusly:

Helluva video, thank you for sharing it. Baseball just can't get out of it's own way.

Yeah, but those 100 loss teams were super fundamentally sound!

The driver who taxis our guys from the Saints to the Twins. He's handled a meteoric rise in volume like a champ.

What Dan said, they wanted to move up 6 spots and offered peanuts. A 3rd and a 4th may not move you from 14 to 12 much less 8.

Yeah, I didn't mean to imply all-in, just that this year was no longer worth caring about as far as outcomes.

This is an impressive combination of fallacies and bumper sticker logic in service of a self-evidently silly premise.

Nobody to "fire" but plenty of players should be in different uniforms by the end of the year. Things started poorly, injuries have managed to continue to get worse, and we're too far behind. Time to sell and prep for next year.

Judging by what they offered to move up....I feel like they didn't love him THAT much.

I'm not sure I need to wait until July 20th any more. I think we can start talking about who stays and who goes right now from a selling point of view. Maybe the upcoming NYY/Hou stretch will shock me, but I doubt it. It's time to think about the wave of guys they have coming as the new core.

Maybe, but you're going to have a hard time convincing me any pitching staff that was going to feature Happ and Shoemaker for 40% of the starts was going to be average much less good.

The Parise thing is impossible to predict without being behind the scenes. Ideally, in my eyes, you find a way to get rid of him. He's not a bad player, but dumping that contract would be a godsend. It's the biggest question to me. Rossi and Boldy are coming and that means Johanssen and Rask are gone. There may be other prospects available to call up too. There are a lot of moving parts only because Guerin retooled the roster with a bunch of expiring contracts so he could rebuild it. I can't wait to see what Kaprizov and Fiala can do with some competent players around them. Between the two of them they had only one competent player helping them (Zuccarello) otherwise they created all of their production with a bunch of scrubs.

I appreciate this post, Baldelli seems like a fine manager. Reasons to criticize him exist, but so do reasons to appreciate him. At the end of the day people fall into these lazy criticisms because they want to believe something that isn't true: that managers matter. Baseball managers have an influence on the culture in the clubhouse, but we're FAR removed from them controlling the game on the field with their decision making. Baseball managers are mostly irrelevant. At the very least, WAY overstated by fan bases. Just the easiest scapegoat with the laziest reasons to scapegoat them.

Whoa did this thread go off the rails! Javy Baez running back to home seems like the baseball equivalent of running at a grizzly bear screaming your head off and waving your hands around. There is no rational reason for the grizzly to be scared of you. It's not being lazy and cashing it's bear check. It just gets so disoriented by your brazen lunacy it forgets itself. Will Craig got duped by a bat-**** crazy move that was so off the wall it removed all logic and fundamentals from the equation.

I'm excited for this team's future, here's what I would do this offseason: (admittedly, I'm an idiot compared to Mr. Guerin who has done amazing work since taking over) Expected Salary Cap: 81.5 Wild Salaries already committed: 59.5 Cap Space: 22M First act: Buy out Victor Rask so his punishing brand of hockey to viewers is relieved. Fans rejoice in the streets. (Saves 2.67M this season with a buyout of 1.33 this year and next) Cap Space: 24.67 Second Act: Trade Matt Dumba to Florida for Pick 27 and their 3rd Round Pick (I love Dumba actually, but I think his injury last year has resulted in a player who will never quite be the same. Plus, you can't deal Spurgeon or Suter. Brodin is a beast. He's the guy left) Cap Space: 30.67 Expansion Draft: Use the 7-3-1 Protection Protect Parise, JEEK, Fiala, Zuccarello, Greenway, Sturm, Fogliano, Suter, Brodin, Spurgeon, and Kahkonen This leaves Seattle to choose from Soucy, Talbot, or Hartman. They'll choose Soucy without a doubt. Cap Space is now 33.5M Resignings: Marcus Johansson: Bye Nick Bonino: 2 years 6M Nick Bjugstad: Bye Victor Rask: I just wanted to say bye again enthusiastically Kevin Fiala: 6 years 36M Kaprizov: 4 years 20M (I'd go more, but I don't think he will) Joel Eriksson Ek: 5 years 25M Ian Cole: 2 years 7M Remaining Cap Space: 11M Free Agency and Trading: Trade a 3rd and a 4th to Montreal for D Joel Edmundson (Big, physical, smooth skating guy on a reasonable deal. Adds serious size to the blue line) Cap:7.5 Sign Philip Danualt to a 5 year 27.5M deal (Center with good defensive chops, can win faceoffs, and has decent size) Cap: 2M That last 2M will be for filler guys and a little wiggle room. Lineup: Suter-Spurgeon Brodin-Addison Edmundson-Cole Kaprizov-Danualt-Zuccarello (No Rossi here because I think this line is too small with him. Danualt is an ideal fit for these two) Parise/Greenway-Ek-Foligno (Bumping up Parise assuming he's still here. If he's gone....all the better, but he fits with this group) Boldy-Rossi-Fiala (Finally....Fiala plays with people who don't suck) Sturm-Bonino-Hartman (This fourth line can score, grind, frustrate the hell out of people. In other words....they'll make you fall in love with them) Odd guy out right now: Greenway or Parise. I'm not sure how this plays out, but I hope it's with Parise out and Greenway back with that line

Helluva season. One bright spot: I sincerely hope this is the last night I ever watch Victor Rask play hockey.

Not to mention the obliviousness towards the idea that everyone having a college degree will make that achievement have less meaning in the economy or cause colleges to even further dilute the rigor or a variety of other negatives. It's already depressing wages because of competition and forcing people to chase higher degrees to have a competitive advantage in the hiring process. We'd be handing billions to a group (colleges) that have been exploitative in ways that would make oil companies blush....but then also so significantly water down the value of a college degree that the trickle down effects would harm an entirely new generation in freshly awful ways. We've got some sacred cows to slay before we take on this problem.

It is still TD but the laws of this area are enforced by roaming Australian Biker Gangs and their leader Carole. Stray at your own peril. But yeah, the right wingers love to whine about cancel culture. Which is hilarious because your average bible-thumping social conservative of the last 50 years basically made their identity into canceling the parts of culture they didn't like. I'm not a fan of the left's current brand either for that matter, but they are hardly the first to practice it.

That's fair....but there is dubious value to be had. I Agree though, at some point you get what you can.

Analytics may change if strikeouts are not as prevalent. There will likely be a feeling out process, but the "swing for the hills" mentality exists, in part, because making contact with today's pitchers is so damn difficult. We have to give hitters a chance to make contact. Hell, we have to give them time to read the pitches being thrown at them. In 1980 most pitches were a 90ish mph fastball from a dude whose 6 feet tall. Now guys 6'5 are throwing 96 but throwing that heater LESS because their high spin-rate, offspeed pitches are harder for a hitter to see. At the end of the day the human eye can only pick up so much in such a limited space of play. Batters simply don't have time react. Swing for the fences and pray is about survivability as a hitter more than anything else. If the option exists to use a better strategy, they'll take it. We have to give them options though. I can agree with deadening the ball a bit, but priority number one needs to be to move the mound back. It's long overdue.

One thing that I think makes this really hard to predict is that injuries across the league are out of control. I don't know if the pandemic is to blame, but teams have guys dropping like flies. It's a double-edged sword....have the Twins seen "their share" and now they play on against teams who lose big contributors? Or, is this just the beginning of a frustrating rash of injuries and no amount of good play is ever going to be convincing? Personally I feel like this entire season is going to feel like a mulligan where some exciting young players got to debut and we do basically nothing at the deadline.