formerly33

Now this is another sister's Miniature Schnauzer. Back before we got him, she and I were fiercely campaigning to see who deserved the honors of getting a dog. As it turned out, she won because she was eight years my senior and therefore more responsible. She picked Shadow because she wanted his cute and cuddliness, but she wasn't committed to training him how to be cute and cuddly. I took it upon myself to train him for her. Guess who was more responsible! She got off easy that time ... http://images4.ravelry.com/uploads/ThirdGrace97/243834505/DSCF2782.jpg P.S. I even trained him how to be cute ... my sister had some sort of Little Lord Fauntleroy dilemma about his hair, but he was so hideous before I started giving him haircuts. After I got Clover she stepped in and did it herself. It was hard convincing her that he was cuter with short hair, though.

Riverbrian has turned this into National Twins Daily Dog Day. I'm going to post pictures of our other dogs ... I try not to inundate you guys with posts like I used to, but in this instance I'm going to post the pictures separately because I'm curious to see who likes what kind of dog. My sister's German Shepherd, Willow ... the self-proclaimed queen and protector of the family, afraid of nothing.* *Popping hardwood floors are nothing.

It used to only Sano in winter ... now it Sanos in summer too, and Houston is not immune!

Blame ChiTown, not Riverbrian. I'm sure she's the one who said "yay". Tsk, tsk ... 3 1/2 years in the system and you still can't tell your moderators apart.

<Points proudly> That's Clover!!

Houses and pancakes, fingers and bats ... go right ahead and flip. In my humble opinion, the bat flip is even better than the homerun promenade ... but if you combine them both, that's perfect. Florimon's was actually a little cooler than Ortiz's - not that I have anything against his bat flip, but it was more reminiscent of a walk than a moonshot, if you know what I mean. And if you hit one out, this is what you should do: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5WtuR1RmG9M/UC8W-BMCDxI/AAAAAAAAEVI/-uSMXvQKeS8/s1600/EE-Bat-Flip.gif And to expand a bit on the general theme, if pitchers want to come off the mound pumping their fist and/or swearing into their glove, I think they should be prepared for the occasional bat flip following the home runs they allow.

Yeah, I was so busy reading Dostoyevsky I didn't even find out about the Twins fans' antics until I saw this article on TD. Now, to be totally honest I wasn't at the game, but my nose was buried deep in my book at the time.

The wave is dumb. It doesn't bother me as much as some people ... it's more of an embarrassment that I just have to let slip off my shoulder ... but if someone wants to rant about that, I'm all with them. If you're upset about something, go right ahead and rant away. I guess the reason I'm bothered by the wave is because it paints Minnesotan sports fans out as what they are: passive followers of their team. Then 29 other teams' fan bases can point their righteous fingers and laugh, and what can I say in defense? If fans really feel the need to do something together, why can't it at least be game related? Shouting "Rookie of the Year!" every time Sano came to the plate would probably annoy a lot of people, too, but at least it would have something to do with the game on hand. Show some love for your players instead of Dave St. Peter. And hey, don't rip Chelsea Dagger. It's a great song. Really. If you hate it that much, there is always a volume adjuster on your TV, and no doubt you'll never be forced to go to United Center against your will.

http://www.pedagogy-inc.com/Home/Resources/IV/Avoid-Nerve-Damage.aspx

From what I've been reading in the news, I was under the impression that we were 61-63 in games we should've lost. I guess I should listen to Mark Twain more often. http://img.pandawhale.com/post-7420-If-you-don-t-read-the-newspape-i723.jpeg

If you want to post a joke, make it good plz.

That's because you've never experienced the joys of staying up until the wee hours of dawn. I literally experienced that three times last Sunday ... minus the "amen" part ... still, I gotta seriously rethink my sleeping hours.

I guess this is just going to have to do for tonight.

Sorry I'm late to the party - made later by my valiant (and I might add successful) attempt to catch up with ya'll - but I think Cap'n Piranha was referring to Mrs. Yogi.

Give him a break, guys. Doug isn't saying that Arcia will never succeed; what he's saying is that now is not his time in the majors, and to be honest, I couldn't agree more. What you see is a left-handed power hitter, but what I see is a batting swing-and-misser who is doing terrible against worse pitching than what the guys up in the majors that Arcia-advocators are complaining about are facing. Arcia has run into some kinks that he needs to work out before being called up again. I'm sure the time will come, but for now it would be fruitless.

Purple = Red + Blue. I hate to say this, but at least one part of your argument was groundless.

Would it be too much to ask for May to get the save as well as the win?

You think. I know.

He didn't specify which Clinton ... gotta pay attention to these small details. In fact, I seem to remember hearing that Bill was quite the pitcher in his day ... I believe the story goes that he was attending a baseball game and the stands were watching in eager anticipation as he approached the mound with his wife and daughter at his side. As the excitement grew and fans debated whether he could throw a strike, Bill picked Hillary up and hurled her towards the plate. During the subsequent moment of shocked silence, his chief of staff thundered, "NO!! I said throw out the first PITCH!!!!" ETA: Okay, my bad ... there was no pitcher whatsoever ... oh well, maybe Bill has given Hillary some lessons since then.

Everybody loves a good Yogiism. Over the years, I'm pretty sure I've spent hours surfing the internet for new Yogi Berra quotes during fits of boredom, and I never tire of seeing the same ones over and over again. The best thing about it is that just when you think you've seen his magnum opus, you run into another that somehow surpasses the last.One of my favorites, though I'd never call it his best or even necessarily close to holding that status (which says a lot for Yogiisms in general), is "You wouldn't have won if we'd beaten you." The blatant obviousness is just so appealing to me - though of course it's that very perspicuity that makes a Yogiism a Yogiism. http://theblogdaysofsummer.weebly.com/uploads/5/3/9/7/53971721/3034247_orig.jpg I got to thinking about it. Obviously it's true; as long as there are no ties in baseball, somebody has to win. But I wondered vaguely if it would be possible to argue the truth in that simple yet significant observation, and while I won't try to go there with this post, just for fun I decided to reverse the meaning and see how that came out. This is what I came up with: "We wouldn't have lost if you'd beaten us." I was immediately intrigued by that phrase. At first glance it may seem a little silly because according to theory you either win or lose; however, there is a philosophical side to this statement. Let me paraphrase it a bit: "Even if you win, you can never beat us." Suddenly it begins to make a little more sense; if spoken truthfully, this can definitely be a perfectly correct statement. In fact, I think that it should be every teams'sslogan that they live and die by. You can lose a game by numbers, but you should never lose in spirit. That reminds me of another quote I've run into time and again: "I never lose; I only learn." To be honest, I am easily irritated by people telling me that I need to stop being so passionate about baseball since according to them, "It's just a game." In spite of that, I am beginning to marginally understand the word "just" in that terse, irritating remark when I look at it this way: In baseball, losses are inevitable. It's part of the game; the losses are what keep us following as much as the wins are. If a team wins 20 of 30 games, they are considered hot, even though that ultimately means 10 losses in little over a month. So just because you lose doesn't mean that you need to consider that game a failure. That would be like going 2-3 in your major league debut and thinking that you were a failure in your first at-bat, though chances are you hit a bullet that just couldn't get through the opponent's incredible defensive infield. That, though, is barely scratching the surface of what I'm trying to get to. There are those games where a mistake is made. It could be an erroneous play by anyone - a bench player or a superstar contending for MVP alike. It could be a throwing error, a fielding error, a mental error. It could be a base running mistake, and you could either blame the player or the coach. It could be a bad pitch, or merely the wrong pitch for the given situation. Someone could have swung at a pitch in the dirt with a full count. Maybe the manager called for the hitter to bunt when any nitwit recently introduced to the game could not only tell you but explain why he should have been swinging in that situation. Or maybe he swung when it would have been better to bunt. Maybe it was a bad call by the umpire. Maybe it was a fan interference that messed up the momentum and completely changed the outcome of the game. It could even have been the general manager's fault for trading so-in-so for so-in-so and so-in-so and sending down so-in-so to make room for so-in-so on the roster. Or if we're talking about an extended period of time, maybe it was somebody's fault for refusing to play with pain and getting put on the DL for the pettiest of reasons … or perhaps he was playing through an injury when he should have accepted the fact that he was hurt and stopped sacrificing the team's best interests to satisfy his own inflated ego. The possibilities are positively endless, and that's why we all know those games so well - the games when everybody from the insignificant fan in the bleachers to the obnoxious owner agree that "We should have won that game." As a fan I know how devastating these losses can be, yet I rarely step back and try to assess the big picture by putting myself in the players' shoes and imagining the demoralizing effect these games must have on them. As professional athletes, they need to go out there and play game after game, and it's not just any old game, either; it is a game that involves emotions and romanticism as much as it does statistics and tenaciousness. Yet oftentimes teams bounce back and give a phenomenal performance after one of these losses. How can they possibly do this? I can tell you that it isn't because they let a bad game get them down. Yes, there are players who get discouraged by having a bad game, and they find themselves sinking deeper and deeper into a slump until they have absolutely no belief in themselves as an athlete who can perform at a big league level. The effect can be calamitous, and sometimes a whole team goes down with them. This is all a result of them allowing themselves to be beaten; not intentionally, of course, for they still fight to win those games for all they are worth, yet they lose game after game numerically because they have already lost psychologically. They have lost the game before it's even started. Judging from my personal experience, it takes an incredible effort at times to not let certain games get to you. If a player walked out on the field feeling the way I often do at the beginning of a game directly following an especially disheartening loss, how can I expect him to perform well? And if he doesn't perform well, how can I expect the team to win again? It's when I look at sports this way that I realize that there is much more to the game than statistics. But if you have an attitude that says, "You didn't beat me. You might have won this game, but you can never beat me. Don't forget that tomorrow's another day - my day," you can never lose. You can use an especially terrible game to analyze past mistakes that have been repeated all season long like a little, ticking time bomb, yet were never obvious enough to draw your attention, and finally, after weeks of underlying presence, exploded, resulting in one of those the-world-is-coming-to-an-end (at least if you allow yourself to look at it that way) losses. The game is lost, but that is in the past. What matters now is the future, and the players and managers who never lose focus on the mistakes from the past and concentrate on eliminating them so that they perform better in upcoming games, tend to win. That's why a team can lose one game 15-3 and the next day come back and slam the team 21-0. They didn't lose - they only learned. A lot of people, admittedly myself included, try to stigmatize these types of players by attributing to them a word that they think is defaming or even vilifying: cockiness. Yet it is this very cockiness that leads a team to the playoffs, this very cockiness that helped them go 20-10 earlier in the season. And the very fans who would besmirch their character are more than happy to take those wins. I am by no means calling out any such fans or even trying to put myself on a pedestal - I am of a kind and far too often find myself frustrated beyond words over "just a game." To let a little secret out, almost like Brad Pitt frustrated. The only thing that keeps me in control is the fact that I live on an even tighter budget than him. When you allow yourself to fall head over heels in love with your team, you sign a contract that has an often overlooked disclaimer in fine, black print at the very bottom of the tedious monotony of the document: "Love is blind." Over time you inevitably learn, but I never knew what I was getting myself into when I (rather subconsciously, I'll admit) developed a passion for baseball. Passion...there is no other word worthy of attribution to this feeling we all have for baseball. Regardless of all my best intentions, though, I often find myself in yet another funk over a bad loss or a bad series or a bad week or month or year. I try to justify it by saying that it has no effect whatsoever on the team, and while in essence that is true, I rarely stop and think about how the players, coaches, managers, front office - and yes, even owners - have to deal with the same problem as I do, except on a far greater, far more significant scale. It is unfathomable to me that a team can go out on the field after being swept by a particularly terrible team who should have been on the other end of the winning-losing spectrum and proceed to beat up the hottest team in baseball, all because they refused to lose. Players and teams can have all the talent in the world, but there's one crucial ingredient that is prerequisite to any winning team or MVP type player: belief in oneself and, to put it simply, the will and ability to never, ever lose. With this attitude, it doesn’t have to matter if your team doesn't have all the big names like the neighbor out east. It's this attitude that keeps baseball so unpredictable. It's this attitude that keeps baseball sentimental. In part, it is even this attitude that makes the statement, "Baseball statistics are like a girl in a bikini. They show a lot, but not everything" (Toby Harrah) true. It is this attitude that keeps me following baseball. I will never cease to be amazed by these players' and teams' ability to refuse to lose, defy all odds, and achieve the impossible. Most people have a hero, and as often as not, that hero is an athlete. My hero will forever be the athlete who never loses. Seriously, how can you not be romantic about baseball? Click here to view the article

How about a system where you can click the report button to notify the moderators, who will at there discretion hand out warning points? Yet another way the Twins could follow TD's example ....

Everybody loves a good Yogiism. Accumulatively, I'm pretty sure I've spent hours surfing the internet for new Yogi Berra quotes during fits of boredom, and I never tire of seeing the same ones over and over again. The best thing about it is that just when you think you've seen his magnum opus, you run into another that somehow surpasses the last. One of my favorites, though I'd never call it his best or even necessarily close to holding that status (which speaks a lot for Yogiisms in general), is "You wouldn't have won if we'd beaten you." The blatant obviousness is just so appealing to me - though of course it's that very perspicuity that makes a Yogiism a Yogiism. http://theblogdaysofsummer.weebly.com/uploads/5/3/9/7/53971721/3034247_orig.jpg I got to thinking about it. Obviously it's true; as long as there are no ties in baseball, somebody has to win. But I wondered vaguely if it would be possible to argue the truth in that simple yet significant observation, and while I won't try to go there with this post, just for fun I decided to reverse the meaning and see how that came out. This is what I came up with: "We wouldn't have lost if you'd beaten us." I was immediately intrigued by that phrase. At first glance it may seem a little silly because according to theory you either win or lose; however, there is a philosophical side to this statement. Let me paraphrase it a bit: "Even if you win, you can never beat us." Suddenly it begins to make a little more sense; if spoken truthfully, this can definitely be a perfectly correct statement. In fact, I think that it should be every teams' slogan that they live and die by. You can lose a game by numbers, but you should never lose in spirit. That reminds me of another quote I've run into time and again: "I never lose; I only learn." To be honest, I am easily irritated by people telling me that I need to stop being so passionate about baseball since according to them, "It's just a game." In spite of that, I am beginning to marginally understand the word "just" in that terse, irritating remark when I look at it this way: in baseball, losses are inevitable. It's part of the game; the losses are what keep us following as much as the wins are. If a team wins 20 of 30 games, they are considered hot, even though that ultimately means 10 losses in little over a month. So just because you lose doesn't mean that you need to consider that game a failure. That would be like going 2-3 in your major league debut and thinking that you were a failure in your first at-bat, though chances are you hit a bullet that just couldn't get through the opponent's incredible defensive infield. That, though, is barely scratching the surface of what I'm trying to get to. There are those games where a mistake is made. It could be an erroneous play by anyone - a bench player or a superstar contending for MVP alike. It could be a throwing error, a fielding error, a mental error. It could be a baserunning mistake, and you could either blame the player or the coach. It could be a bad pitch, or merely the wrong pitch for the given situation. Someone could have swung at a pitch in the dirt with a full count. Maybe the manager called for the hitter to bunt when any nitwit recently introduced to the game could not only tell you but explain why they should have been swinging in that situation. Or maybe they swung when it would have been better to bunt. Maybe it was a bad call by the umpire. Maybe it was a fan interference that messed up the momentum and completely changed the outcome of the game. It could even have been the general manager's fault for trading so-in-so for so-in-so and so-in-so and sending down so-in-so to make room for so-in-so on the roster. Or if we're talking about an extended period of time, maybe it was somebody's fault for refusing to play with pain and getting put on the DL for the pettiest reasons … or perhaps they were playing through an injury when they should have accepted the fact that they were hurt and stopped sacrificing the team's best interests to satisfy their own inflated ego. The possibilities are positively endless, and that's why we all know those games so well - the games when everybody from the insignificant fan in the bleachers to the obnoxious owner agree that "We should have won that game." As a fan I know how devastating these losses can be, yet I rarely step back and try to assess the big picture by putting myself in the players' shoes and imagining the demoralizing effect these games must have on them. As professional athletes, they need to go out there and play game after game, and it's not just any old game, either; it is a game that involves emotions and romanticism as much as it does statistics and tenaciousness. Yet oftentimes teams bounce back and give a phenomenal performance after one of these losses. How can they possibly do this? I can tell you that it isn't because they let a bad game get them down. Yes, there are players who get discouraged by having a bad game, and they find themselves sinking deeper and deeper into a slump until they have absolutely no belief in themselves as an athlete that can perform at a big league level. The effect can be calamitous, and sometimes a whole team goes down with them. This is all a result of them allowing themselves to be beaten; not intentionally, of course, for they still fight to win those games for all they are worth, yet they lose game after game numerically because they have already lost psychologically. They have lost the game before it's even started. Judging from my personal experience, it takes an incredible effort at times to not let certain games get to you. If a player walked out on the field feeling the way I often do at the beginning of a game directly following an especially disheartening loss, how can I expect him to perform well? And if he doesn't perform well, how can I expect the team to win again? It's when I look at sports this way that I realize that there is much more to the game than statistics. But if you have an attitude that says, "You didn't beat me. You might have won this game, but you can never beat me. Don't forget that tomorrow's another day - my day," you can never lose. You can use an especially terrible game to analyze past mistakes that have been repeated all season long like a little, ticking time bomb, yet were never obvious enough to draw your attention, and finally, after weeks of underlying presence, exploded, resulting in one of those the-world-is-coming-to-an-end (at least if you allow yourself to look at it that way) losses. The game is lost, but that is in the past. What matters now is the future, and the players and managers who never lose focus on the mistakes from the past and concentrate on eliminating them so that they perform better in upcoming games. That's why a team can lose one game 15-3 and the next day come back and slam the team 21-0. They didn't lose - they only learned. A lot of people, admittedly myself included, try to stigmatize these types of players by attributing to them a word that they think is defaming or even vilifying: cockiness. Yet it is this very cockiness that leads a team to the playoffs, this very cockiness that helped them go 20-10 earlier in the season. And the very fans who would besmirch their integrity are more than happy to take those wins. I am by no means calling out any such fans or even trying to put myself on a pedestal - I am one of a kind and far too often find myself frustrated beyond words over "just a game." To let a little secret out, almost like Brad Pitt frustrated. The only thing that keeps me in control is the fact that I live on an even tighter budget than him. When you allow yourself to fall head over heels in love with your team, you sign a contract that has an often overlooked disclaimer in fine, black print at the very bottom of the tedious monotony of the document: "Love is blind." Over time you inevitably learn, but I never knew what I was getting myself into when I (rather subconsciously, I'll admit) developed a passion for baseball. Passion...there is no other word worthy of attribution to this feeling we all have for baseball. Regardless of all my best intentions, though, I often find myself in yet another funk over a bad loss or a bad series or a bad week or month or year. I try to justify it by saying that it has no effect whatsoever on the team, and while in essence that is true, I rarely stop and think about how the players, coaches, managers, front office - and yes, even owners - have to deal with the same problem as I do, except on a far greater, far more significant scale. It is unfathomable to me that a team can go out on the field after being swept by a particularly terrible team who should have been on the other end of the spectrum and proceed to beat up the hottest team in baseball, all because they refused to lose. Players and teams can have all the talent in the world, but there's one crucial ingredient that is prerequisite to any winning team or MVP type player: belief in oneself and, to put it simply, the will and ability to never, ever lose. With this attitude, it doesn’t have to matter if your team doesn't have all the big names like the neighbor out east. It's this attitude that keeps baseball so unpredictable. It's this attitude that keeps baseball sentimental. In part, it is even this attitude that makes the statement, "Baseball statistics are like a girl in a bikini. They show a lot, but not everything" (Toby Harrah) true. It is this attitude that keeps me following baseball. I will never cease to be amazed by these players' and teams' ability to refuse to lose, defy all odds, and achieve the impossible. Most people have a hero, and as often as not, that hero is an athlete. My hero will forever be the athlete that never loses. Seriously, how can you not be romantic about baseball? --- Read full entry here: We Wouldn't Have Lost if You'd Beaten Us

ROSARIO!!!!!!!!! BAAAABYYYY!!!!