PDX Twin

Yup. Every once in a while, a bad call goes OUR way! (But notice it's not in a close game where it would actually be useful.)

If the home-plate dirt is going to be shaped like home plate, I think the pitching dirt should be rectangular like the pitching rubber.

What with the rain delay, this game might end about the same time as the average Yankees-Red Sox game.

I still wonder how much of Jose's mind is at home in PR. I feel sorry for him having all the pressure of pitching in NY on a night like this.

That said, I wonder what his mental state will be with Maria pounding on his homeland. My head wouldn't be in it.

Let's hope that Hurricane Jose (Berrios) destroys New York tonight!

"@Twins' DJ Dozier spit a few rhymes after a win over Toronto" Really? DJ Dozier? That goes back decades to when I watched pointy-ball and the Vikings!

Except for about 15 minutes in the Twilight Zone when he couldn't throw a strike, Gibby has been decent.

At the rate we're going, we can even afford for Donaldson to bat again, maybe even with a man on base.

I like this Rowley guy. Can we get him to pitch batting practice more often?

An outcome much to be desired, no?

Yeah, but Boshers and Duffey in the pen?

Going for the third homerun with the bat instead of the ball?

If he was just a good enough pitcher to rack up the innings and get people watching, Gibson could be a Gold Glove winner. He's really a good athlete.

Max smoaked that one.

Fixed it myself.

You can't help but be impressed by the pure quality of major-league pitching.

His pants are still clean...

Gibby's ERA is back over 5. Will he get it back under before the end of the season? Will he get a chance to get it back under before the end of the season?

How about a high and inside pitch to get his pants dirty?

And the lineups: Blue Jays 1. Ezequiel Carrera ( L ) RF 2. Josh Donaldson ( R ) 3B 3. Justin Smoak ( S ) 1B 4. Jose Bautista ( R ) DH 5. Michael Saunders ( L ) LF 6. Kevin Pillar ( R ) CF 7. Ryan Goins ( L ) 2B 8. Raffy Lopez ( L ) C 9. Richard Urena ( S ) SS P. Joe Biagini ( R ) Twins 1. Brian Dozier ( R ) 2B 2. Joe Mauer ( L ) 1B 3. Jorge Polanco ( S ) SS 4. Eddie Rosario ( L ) LF 5. Byron Buxton ( R ) CF 6. Max Kepler ( L ) RF 7. Eduardo Escobar ( S ) 3B 8. Jason Castro ( L ) C 9. Robbie Grossman ( S ) DH P. Kyle Gibson ( R )

Today it’s the Blue Jays again, as the Twins try to scramble their way over the finish line ahead of the Angels and the rest of the chasing mob. And the Angels are now breathing down their necks. (Do angels breathe? They sing, so they must breathe, right?) With a tough road trip ahead and on the heels of two total duds against the Jays, this looks like a pretty important game; it’s probably a really bad time for a game-thread author whose record so far is 0-2… The all-knowing Internet tells me that there are ten species of jays in North America. Toronto had a nice choice of colors: they could have chosen to be the Gray Jays, Brown Jays, or Green Jays. The Gray Jay is also known as the Canada Jay, maybe because “gray” isn’t a word in Canada. It seems like that would have been a more obvious choice for a mascot. Jay, of course, is a word that is also a letter. When I started thinking about it, I realized that there are an amazing number of these in English: eh?, bee, see/sea, Gee (as in Dillon), aye, jay, oh, pee, queue, are, tee/tea, you, why, and probably a few that have slipped past me. There are also a few single-letter words: “a,” “I,” and, at least for Shakespeare, “o.” The last time the Twins played meaningful September games I was living in Slovakia (where the evening home games started at 2:10am the next day, local time). Among the unusual properties of the Slovak language, at least unusual to an American monoglot, is an aversion to letters we know as vowels. My personal theory is that when L’udovít Štúr created the modern written version of Slovak in the mid-19th century, he couldn’t afford to buy vowels from Vanna White’s local distributor. That led to words like “vzbľknuť” (which is pronounced like it looks and means “to ignite”), to sentences like “Strč prst skrz krk” (which means roughly “put a finger through your throat”), and to names like Hrbek. Once you get accustomed to it, the absence of useless vowels seems not only reasonable but downright economical. I mean, why do we need four letters to spell “pull” when “pl” would be perfectly satisfactory? Let’s all pl for the Twins today! Another quirk of the Slovak language is lots of one-letter words, and whereas all of the one-letter English words seem to be vowels, some of the Slovak ones are consonants. “A” = “and,” “i” = “also,” “k” = “to,” “o” = “about,” “s” = “with,” “u” can be almost any preposition in appropriate context, “v” = “in,” and “z” = “from.” When I first saw the name of the university at which I was to teach, Ekonomická univerzita v Bratislave, I thought the v must be an abbreviation. Nope, “v Bratislave” just means “in Bratislava.” One final Slovak anecdote: One of the great joys of Bratislava is the Slovak Philharmonic, which plays in a lovely old building in the center of the city and for which the most expensive ticket was around $15. At one of our first concerts, we were expecting a Tchaikovsky symphony, but the (only Slovak language) program described a work by Čajkowsky. It seems that the Slovak spelling of his name does not start with a “T,” but it does start with a “tea,” because “čaj” is the Slovak word for tea. Twins Daily favorite Kyle Gibson (10-10, 4.97 ERA, 1.56 WHIP) gets the ball today against Joe Biagini (3-10, 5.07 ERA, 1.36 WHIP), who has lots of vowels in his name. Lineups to be posted when available.

About shifting: I assume that they base their defensive positioning and shifting on average batter tendencies. But are they taking into account the propensity and ability of the batter to change his tendency when the shift is applied? It seems like there must be players that, even though they hit to the left side most of the time, shouldn't be shifted because as soon as you shift they will hit the ball to the open position. Imagine what Rod Carew would have done to a shift...

Twins' shift looking like it shouldn't have an "f" in it.

Well, that two hits this inning that wouldn't have been hits if infielders had been playing where God intended!