AceBee

Seems like Twins like to trade for players who random go-ahead HRs against them (as their only career highlight) ..John Ryan Murphy anyone?

Should have added him in the conversation with Duran deal itself to get better prospect haul...seems like ALL MN teams are pretty awful when it comes to landing decent returns.

Any chance they would flirt with the idea of seeing Prielipp in short bullpen bursts later this year or would they play conservative with his injury history?

When you manage to get Buxton into a double play (with second fastest runner behind him at the plate), that should tell you how this team hits. Following the hitting pattern, the batter would no doubt put a shallow popup or K if the runner was in the scoring position. We lose to teams playing good solid, fundamental baseball (like Rockies did) and opponent pitcher ERA has no relevance with general ineptitude of our lineup. Ty France is turning into CJ Cron when he was with twins (bunch of lazy popups in RBI opportunities)

May be an unpopular opinion, but I wouldn't mind twins trading Royce Lewis and sell high (if he maintains yesterday's 2HR game for another week or so). At this point, I would rather have a solid everyday player than tantalizing and flashy talent who for one reason or the other causes agony to the fans every time he is on the field. Albeit, I wouldn't be surprised him playing a solid 140-odd games in a full season for the the team we trade him to.

It is frustrating for sure. I wish they had managed to be creative and somehow keep Sonny Gray in the rotation last year even working with the financial constraints, Instead, last two years have seen FO follow same pattern in early 2010 days where nondescript pitchers the key FA additions. Wonder how much of the frustration should extend to other support staff who for some reason failed to see signs of injuries to traded players (like Sam Dyson or Mahle) and also in terms of managing injury-prone players. Royce Lewis looks like a bobblehead figurine who is trying his hand at sprinting and inevitably getting every time he runs bases when 'healthy'. What's more concerning is that this philosophy extends itself to playing philosophy on the field itself where we keep doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results.

Agreed. They should have also tried it in second game of Seattle series (probably the start of their downward spiral) in the extras with Clemens at the plate and also on Saturday in a tied game after Buxton got HBP followed by a walk with Castro at the plate (I am pretty sure there are other instances but this two come at the top of my mind). As a fan, this has been my frustration over last few years - for some reason or the other, Twins are not inclined or willing to try and manufacture runs. Its annoying when we get beat in a close game against teams (Guardians would be the prime example here which made our commentator wonder aloud how the Twins regularly lose in 8th and 9th inning in Cleveland) who walks, steals base, gets advanced to third, and come home on a sac fly. I would put 'not bunting', 'not advancing the runners via a productive at bat', and 'reluctance to steal' all in one big bucket of frustration. It is anecdotal that the Seattle game earlier this month I mentioned above was preceded by the thrilling extra innings win a day before where the Twins seemed to follow the philosophy of being aggressive and try to score runs only to be followed by same passive approach waiting for streaky lineup to piece consecutive hits together or hit a HR. 'Do not want to give the opposition a free out' seems to be the common reasoning behind unwillingness to bunt but that logic fails when most of our home runs seem to be of solo variety (need to confirm stats on this) and/or our free runners wait on the bases only to watch batters strike out, pop up, or GIDP. It is not at all surprising that Twins set record of 10+ extra inning losses a few years back and in general seem to be fish out of the water in extra innings games with ghost runners.