Old Twins Cap

What happens if the defensive replacement for B uxton ends up hitting more homers than he does.?

Five more years of Correa? That will be a long, painful half decade. And now, Buxton? Expensive DH, oft injured and well below average. Gallo: automatic K machine. Kepler has lost a step and a stroke. The old guys are making this the most boring team in baseball. Did not see this coming.

Guys, it's the Strike Outs. Leading the league. Not a small sample size Here's why: 1. Getting the bat on the ball forces pitchers to throw more pitches. It just does. Good hitters spoil the pitchers best pitches. Twins have good pitchers; when do they get in trouble? When they play teams that don't strike out much, and force the Twins to the bullpen. A team that can't extend ABs, pressure the other team's pitchers and defense, foul pitches off, put balls in play -- even weak dribblers down the 3B line can be huge! But a team that can't get bat to ball is not going to win in MLB, or even have much success. 2. Rallies depend on multiple hits, multiple good ABs, multiple players stepping up, the long line-up that puts pressure on other teams, and keeps turning over, game after game, all the way through the season, extending innings ad nauseum. A good team must be able to rally. Just in the last week, how many times have the Twins gone down 1-2-3 Ks? It's just a killer to K that much. Sure, it's boring for the fans, but imagine how dispiriting it is for the actual team. To see your best players walk back to the dugout, time after time, Buxton, Correa, Gallo, Polanco -- all-star players! Unable to even take a good AB, striking out on 3 or 4 pitches, one after another. 3. It's one thing to lose a game when a line drive is caught or a guy flies out to the warning track. It's quite another when a team just can't get the bat on the ball. It's the feeling of: "We aren't even close to being good." The other team knows the formula to beat the Twins: "no matter how many times the Twins load the bases, we can always strike them out." Over and over again, we are seeing the same script. It never gets old, because it is so familiar. We are destined to lose in the final analysis because we can be run off the plate without making a fuss. Psychologically, this is a failure that is devastating and can't be redeemed. Literally, SOs can't ever add up to redemption. (With the one extremely rare exception of a wild 3rd strike pitch. How many times a year does that happen? -- Less than once a year?) How did the Twins put themselves in a situation in which they literally have no hope, no ability to rally, no way to pressure the other team? That would be the story to write. How the Twins became the biggest K brigade in MLB, without consciously trying to do it. Popkins' job, likely his career, will not survive this massive backslide into worse than mediocre hitting. It ain't going to change until someone points at it and admits it isn't acceptable. It's not. You can't win by striking out this much. You just can't. Not going to happen. Not in a million years.

It's not just angst for Twins fans. Fact is, Twins are a boring team. They don't come through in the clutch, neither on offense, nor in relief, nor on defense. Who wants to watch a team that leads the league in Ks? Can't run the bases? Don't build rallies? Fiind ways to lose games against good teams? Best just to read the box scores the next day then go through the inevitable disappointment of watching them underperform in real time.

If Cuzzi were consistent, Thompson gets called out and they play on. That's the beef here, Cuzzi fundamentally decided the outcome of the game. Maybe over the course of the season, that evens out. In reality, the level of the miss here is so egregious that it will never even out. The Twins never got evened out on Cuzzi's call in New York in the playoffs in '04. In my mind, I still see the cameras zooming in on the exact spot where the ball landed: you could see the imprint on the fair side of the dirt portion of the line -- Mauer's double becoming simply another foul ball; Gardy in the dugout oblivious to the awfulness of the call.

Who knows who won the trade. All I know is that, in that one day the Twins had Kiner-Felefa, I was reading through the thread here at Twins Daily and an intrepid poster said something to the effect: That's such a weak trade, you would never see a team like the Yankees settle for a weak-hitting shortstop like Kiner-Felefa, no matter how much defense he can provide. All those games later, the Yanks still have IKF. And the Twins have Correa. Hilarious.

Yeah, never as bad as you look on your worst days; never as good on your best. Remember when the Twins rocked the Yanks for 9 runs in the first. Was that last week? But, heavens, their hitting is profoundly lost right now. If I were Popkins, I would keep my resume up to date.

The real issue here is that the Twins should have, like the Yankees always do, when they used Headrick for three innings on Wednesday, sent him down and had someone else on a plane to Boston to be the long man, if needed. It's just modern roster management. Welcome to the Bigs Minnesota, where one game can completely ruin the best made BP plans.

If the pitching holds, this team will be more than fine. Games are going by fast, so the lack of offense seems glaring, but, in the end, baseball and its endless rolling through of chance occurrences dictate that good things happen when you limit the other team's offense. It took longer than we wanted, but the Falvine system, brought over from Cleveland, good starting pitching with lots of young horses in the minors, that system is now up and functioning.

Little known fact: the derivation of the name "world series" was from the New York World newspaper which was a popular paper in its day. They sponsored or at least the series was named for that newspaper -- not because the series was a "world-wide" event. One of the biggest mis-impressions in sport IMHO.

Losing money is a relative thing. At 45% tax rate, every buck "lost" is only .55 cents -- if one has enough money that is making money in financial instruments. The way that club owners make money is the value of the franchise, which at a value of $1 billion, an increase of 5% a year would make them $50 million on paper. Sure, you roll the dice on trying to make a playoff run, which would bring in significant revenues, but otherwise, you take your paper losses in stride and wait for the ultimate payoff of selling the franchise. In any case, you don't get into owning a sports franchise without having several hundreds of millions in spare cash. Don't feel sorry for these people. They make out well no matter what.

MLB bullpens are the easiest piece to remake during the season. Individual performances vary quite a bit year to year. No need to put together a perfect bullpen for the beginning of the year. If your team is in it in July, then you go out and add.

There are many, many outcomes in baseball that are worse than striking out. Many. Including pulling a hammy running out a DP ground ball. Remember: the worst outcome ever in my recent memory for a Twins AB was when Michael Cuddyer hit that ground ball in Toronto in 2011 (or whatever year that was) and Morneau took a knee to the head, altering his MVP trajectory, the entire Twins season that year, and the eventual future of both Morneau and the Twins. That was the single most destructive AB in Twins' history. Devastating! If he had just struck out, our Twins' history would be completely different. The one true judgment for Gallo, like Correa, like Buxton, like Baldelli, like the entire Twins organization, like every baseball team in MLB, is their Win-Loss record. I am glad that the Rooster is here to help with that. Go Twins!

One of the few games I went to last year, maybe against the Tigers?, Celestino fielded a ball in fairly deep center running away from the play, and heaved it all the way home on the fly, where Sanchez tagged a runner out. He does have a good arm. Mental mistakes can be fixed, but not length on throws. That Ben Revere, when he came up, I was like, "How can he possibly make it in the big leagues? No length to his arm or his bat." Put some more power in Celestino's bat and he could be a keeper. It's a big diamond in MLB, Christian Dior big, and you have to make plays involving great length. That takes a MLB body.

Good insight on what makes a team click. I call it having a "career year". Multiple players in the same year. Every time a good team makes a run into the playoffs and the World Series, you look at their team and what do you see? Guys having one of the best, if not the best year, of their career. That's what makes a team click. Hitters or pitchers, Check their stats and put those up against their career numbers and you will see that a predominance of players on a team had very strong years. Throw in a talented rookie and some unusual contributions from fringe players and suddenly you've got a clubhouse that is having fun, is talented and makes a deep run into the playoffs. I tried to get excited about the Twins this year, but you look at their individual numbers in June and it's like: Who is going to carry this team? What four or five guys are having good years? There was no one there. Nobody pushed forward with a great season. You look at that and you know right away that there was no chance, there never was a chance, because no one was having a career year. Look at Cleveland. They had a rookie having a great year, Rosario -- career year, Ramirez -- very strong year, Naylor -- career year, Gimenez -- career year. Bunch of fringe guys step forward, you don't need much when you have five guys out front pulling. Boom, a couple clutch hits, a great pitching staff, especially the bullpen, and it never was close to being the Twins' year.

Now that's a metric that is easy to understand. Thank you!

Writing police: you can't be a "former" top prospect. If you were once a top-prospect, that can never be taken away. It's not like you graduate from that status. "Former University of Minnesota graduate becomes millionaire."

Forgot about Jax. Well, Twins have a strong bullpen now.

Duffy and Pagan get the 6th. Thielbar and Megill in the 7th. Fulmer and Duran for the 8th. Lopez for the save. Twins can go two full games without needing to use the same guy, except maybe Lopez. I would pair Maeda on Archer's starts and get a good 7 innings. Rocco's bacon has been saved by giving him an actual bullpen.

What a relief....

Twins FO: Do not bet the farm to extend the Major Sports League all-time playoff losing streak. We ain't that good this year.

Yes, I would trade Correa, if and only if he does not commit to coming back to the Twins. Look, it's business. Not only would the Twins save in the range of $15M for the just under half the season they would be paying him, they would presumably get some pretty valuable pieces coming back. As in young/controllable pitching. We got shortstops up and down the system. The Twins are going to wither and die on the vine this last half because they have inadequate pitching. So, it's lose-lose-lose if they don't trade him. But, I have to think, Correa signed in Minnesota for a reason, and whatever those reasons are, they are probably still operative. He's a Boras client, who will try to maximize his value for sure, but in the final analysis the only sure way the Twins win this negotiation is to pull the trigger.

I don't follow prospects closely but it sounds like we got a Bregman-type in the 1st round, (maybe more when you factor in the switch-hitting), and a Pedroia-type in round 3. And now we have like 3 or 4 tall, hard-throwing lefties coming up through the Minors. Never forget my first trip to Target Field in 2010 and watching Pedroia stand next to Mourneau at 1B on a beautiful Spring Day -- just glad to be outside again after the dark years of the Metrodome. Both guys were All-Stars and MVPs, but man, totally different body-types and players. In the immortal words of Ryan Jeffers, "Sometimes, baseball just baseballs." Pretty hard to measure the heart of a great player.

I figured there was no way the Twins could lay an egg on offense for three-four-five games in a row, so I bought tickets. Yeesh. What a yawner. Celestino though, his catch in right center field and his throw home all the way on the fly after running down a two-hopper.... two "wow" moments. The DP that Correa hit into, the ground out by Celestino in the 8th, and especially the check swing ground out by Miranda with no strikes in the count, pretty tough to handle. Baseball is a hard game, I get that, and Baltimore threw the ball well, but, there is such a thing as making your own breaks, whether taking a walk, bunting for a hit, or not lining out to the left fielder five different times.

Twins don't win a lot of games when they score 3 runs or fewer. I think the magic number is 5, where they actually win more games than they lose. So, yeah, can't get one big hit, score three runs and hope it turns into a win. Users of this site run screaming from the room when the bullpen lets one get away, like its the worst thing ever. Reality is: if you can't stand to have your heart broken during a 162-game season, find some other team or sport to spend your days emoting over. Baseball ain't for wimps.