PDX Twin

Chief no doubt remembers?

I'm liking Mr. Hughes's Opus a lot better than Mr. Holland's tonight!

"leave a runner in scorning position" I like this! Our pitchers need to scorn those runners more often!

Looks like the *real* Twins are back. It was nice to watch the imposters for a month, though.

Wow, those are the ugliest uniforms I've ever seen. My first thought looking at the picture was "recycled breakfast."

Sorry. Guess I had the Rhone answer. But just Saone...

He was in Seine!

On the MLB.TV feed, they just showed Sanó getting to his position and writing something in the dirt with his finger. Does anyone know the story?

If you are really interested, Microsoft provides language-based keyboards that give you exotic things like the caron on top of the c, but for simple Spanish accents over vowels just hold down control while you type the apostrophe, then type the letter. I can't leave the Slovak keyboard on because the č key takes the place of the number 4, so I'm forever trying to type numbers and ending up with +šáľťčí or something similar.

If it were Slovak, it would probably end in č, not c. And on that subject, I'm genuinely pleased that MLB has started putting the appropriate accents on the Spanish-surname players' jerseys and in the box scores. (And they are ahead of the New York Times and the other U.S. newspapers I read on this.) I've always felt it was an insult to leave them off. And it leads to perpetual mispronunciation: How many players named Pérez have had the accent placed incorrectly by announcers on the second syllable?

The box score says 2-1 on the Ft. Myers game, which matches the text, but the scoreline on the article is 7-3...

The top level of English football has successfully introduced goal-line technology in the last two years. The referee wears a watch that shows whether or not the ball fully crossed the goal line inside the frame of the goal. Easy, quick, and it keeps the referee in charge, but augments his personal vision (and that of the assistant referees) with a new tool. The home-plate umpire could have such a device and use it as needed, perhaps only on close calls.

Yup. Do you have a connection to the "little red schoolhouse"?

I'm on my Windows laptop with Xfinity broadband over wifi.

Mine seems OK.

Good omen today: At our Sunday breakfast place a young couple came in with Twins ... and they weren't wearing white socks!

Today is National Walking Day. I hope that the Twins' pitchers don't over-celebrate! (The Royals obviously celebrated early on Monday!)

Ha! The Communism part didn't work out so well, but the others are going strong!

I'm a newbie to posting but have been following since the beginning of the site. I grew up in Wadena and have been married to my high school sweetheart for 42 years (and counting), though we've never lived in Minnesota as a couple. For the past 28 years we've lived in Portland, Oregon, where I am an economics professor. (Avatar = college mascot.) I have been a Twins fan since opening day of 1961, when I abandoned my father's beloved Cleveland Indians to root for the home-state team. For the last decade or so, the only sports I follow are baseball and European football. I watch at least part of nearly every Twins game on MLB.TV, though there is usually a dinner interruption in about the third inning given the time-zone difference. I went to my first Target Field game last summer with my Minneapolis brother (and got to watch the Twins give up 15 runs to the Red Sox). My favorite players have to start with Tony Oliva, but there are lots of others. Puckett was a class act (on the field at least). Killebrew of course. Earl Battey was a personal favorite from those early years as well. I've always thought that Mauer is a classy player who gets a lot of abuse he doesn't deserve. I love watching the youngsters come through the system and, at least sometimes, turn into good major-league players. The Twins AAA team was in Portland for the first 4-5 years we lived here, so I loved watching the likes of Chip Hale, Scott Leuss, Paul Sorrento, and Pedro Munoz, as well as career minor-leaguers like Bernardo Brito and Kelvin Torve. I check in with TD early every morning over my first pot of tea as I settle into the office for the day. Thanks for providing us die-hards with a daily fix of Twins, even when there isn't much to talk about.

And they refuse to use salt to melt the ice. Great for preserving your car, but not so good on the two days a year that it snows. Good luck making it to the city, Mike! MAX might be running...

The other way of looking at this is that they are taking money that could be spent on playing staff and spending instead on office guys in suits. But in this crazy, upside-down industry the guys in suits make a pittance compared with the "production workers," so maybe the opportunity cost of these extra staffers is negligible.

This is a nice gesture. As an economist in real life, I'd be really curious to hear how this turns out. Will you tell us in a few months how much people voluntarily paid, how many more/less copies were "sold," and how much revenue was earned this year vs. last?

This is the problem. It is very easy for us to sit at our computers and say "trade this guy" or "trade that guy," but none of us really knows what is on offer for any of the Twins' assets. I'm sure that the Twins' front office (old or new) is listening and talking and bargaining and dealing. But sometimes you just never get a deal that makes sense and you end up keeping the asset instead of selling at a cut-rate price (e.g., Suzuki in July, Plouffe both in winter and in July, and probably a lot more guys that we didn't know they were considering trading). Without sitting in the GM's chair and knowing what the true, available options are, it's pretty harsh to criticize him for not making a deal. Of course, if we didn't do that it would make this site a lot less interesting, especially during the close season!

Thanks for all the great work you do on this site. It's my first click in the morning and has brought me much closer to the Twins in the last few years.

You could have voted for Eduardo Escobar. He had the best ERA and WHIP.