Kanonen80

I'd rather regular season games end in a tie than have them decided by a groundout-sac-fly competition

Look what you did. ?

Radio Broadcast says Arraez had "upper GI discomfort". Not COVID related and they claim not related to what Buxton has.

I wasn't listening at the time - did Kepler get hurt or did they just wanted to let Garlick play too?

I stumbled across a really neat baseball YouTube channel that focuses on history and stats. "Outta Here Baseball" had an interesting breakdown of Graterol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRso_YBzBA8

Would be interesting if someone had the time and went back through all the fly-outs, looked at their launch angle and exit velo, compared to in-season batted balls with the exact parameters, and then compared to the dimension of the parks the ALDS games were in. Would be interesting to see how many more HRs the Twins and Yankees could have had, and if that would have made the series any more entertaining (or if it would at least make us feel a little better about the team's ALDS performance )

Is Rooker okay? He took a line-drive to the groin in the OF, right? If he's not been heard from since July, I worry something terrible happened...

Have they said on the broadcast what Pineda is doing with his pitching hand? Seems to be shaking it out and stretching it a lot between pitches.

I think after serious head injury, it's possible there were complications (blood clots, etc).

I wonder how feasible it is to just bump Perez (or Pineda) to the bullpen. Would they try to use them as a conventional RP at that point? Or would they take the place of Thorpe/Smeltzer of pitching several innings? Because normally 'converted starters' can't work back-to-back right away, right? Wonder if they could have Thorpe/Smeltzer open and pitch once through the order, and then bring in Perez or something like that.

Do we know what they are doing right now? Does the front office? Right now the bullpen is: Taylor Rogers Tyler Duffey Ryne Harper Trevor May Cody Stashak Carlos Torres Lewis Thorpe Devin SmeltzerHalf of them are rookies (and/or starting pitchers) or Carlos Torres - which means they are all pretty much supposed to be used in lower leverage situation, one would think. Are they forcing Rocco to use Rogers/Duffey/Harper/May as his go-to guys in close games? Were they just trying to stop him from using Magill/Parker/Morin in high leverage situations? If so, they picked a bad time to hamstring bullpen depth and paid the price. On a positive note, you gotta think this means they are GUARANTEED to be bringing in multiple arms to help in some capacity. While we might be worried they thought Magill and Parker would be 'good enough' down the stretch and in October, I feel pretty confident they don't think the bottom 4 guys in the current 'pen are good enough for a playoff hopeful team in a knife fight for the division title. I'm thinking they are looking to at least add two arms to the bullpen. So maybe down the stretch it would look like: Taylor Rogers MLB Veteran Set-up Trevor May MLB Veteran LHP Tyler Duffey Ryne Harper Cody Stashak AAA Express Fresh-arm-manNot super exciting and would need one of May/Duffey/Harper to go on a run, but would be an improvement over what they've been working with up until this point... Of course, this is assuming Rogers wasn't ruined over the last two series. When they DFA'd the three guys before the Oakland series, but then only replaced them with Stewart and Thorpe, I had a thought that maybe they thought they had a deal in place for some arms, but then something happened at the 11th hour and the deal fell apart. Why else would they DFA those guys and only have AAA SP as replacements?

My interpretation of that was that they might get a SP a little better than Perez/Pineda, and then move one of them to the bullpen. Hope I'm just being pessimistic. I'm wondering if they struck out on getting established RP (asking prices to high, etc), so now they are trying to convert starters into relievers on the fly. They already seem to be doing that with Stewart, Thorpe, Littel. So maybe they are going to pick up a mid-level SP and put him in the bullpen or something...

Did anyone else ready the headline as "Twins Trade Rumor Recap: Team Pondering Selling" and get concerned for a split second? Or was that just my pre-coffee brain?

Yeah, my follow up researching looking at his 2009 values seems to support that it maybe doesn't have as big an affect as I first thought. But now that he's no longer otherworldly on pitches in the zone it looks to me like maybe he needs to make some adjustments to shore up a weakness. I mean, that's easy to do, right?