ohiotwinsfan

Makes me wonder who does better than that. Clearly, if everyone turns only 5 top 5 draftees into passable players, how does anyone ever field a decent team. Someone must be successful at drafting and/or developing their own players in order to have enough players to fill a league full of 26 man MLB rosters. If you don't do a good job of identifying available talent in other organizations, this strategy won't work, either. The Twins have done a fare job of identifying a few players like that, Joe Ryan leaps to mind. But, a lot of the other pickups of late have been dreadful, too.

My only opportunity to follow the Twins for most of my life has been through AM radio. Living in Toledo, once the sun went down, I could pick up WCCO 830, "the nighttime neighbor to the nation" or 1100 or something close out of Des Moines. Unfortunately, I live in the Columbus, OH area now, and there's a local station on 820 that bleeds over and I can't get 'CCO. A couple summers ago, I was driving around Upper Sandusky after dark and picked up 'CCO pretty cleanly until I got to about 25 miles outside of Columbus. By the way, I'm "only" 67.

No Bob Allison or Jim Perry? There should be room for at least 4 starting pitchers on the team. Perry was an All Star in 1961 and Allison in 63 and 64. How about Mudcat (Jim) Grant in 65? That was an incredible decade. In those days, a lot of the relief pitching went to a starter who had a short start a couple days before he appeared. The rest of the the bullpen were probably retreads or guys who weren't good enough to be a starter. Pretty much any starter probably did a few relief appearances. Allison could be your DH, if there had been such a thing back in the day.

The Orioles had an amazing pitching staff in that same era. In 1970, they had three 20 game winners and in 1971 they had 4. Imagine 4 20 game winners, that's 80+ wins with those pitchers alone. In 1970, Jim Perry was the only Twin to win 20 games. The Orioles won 108 games that year. The Twins "only" won 98. That's a buzzsaw kind of team. Jim Perry was one of my favorite Twins players. I saw him hit a homerun in Yankee stadium in 1968. It was right down the third base line and landed about 1 row deep right where the wall abruptly angles towards homeplate. I think the sign there said it was 197 feet right down the line. They wound up winning the game and Mickey Mantle had an o-fer if I remember right. Perry also threw a 4 hit, complete game shutout in that game. It was a great game to see.

I remember this. We'd say we were riding a motorcycle as it made a sound something like a motorcycle. Obviously nowhere near as loud and motorcycles were pretty rare. So, there wasn't much to compare against. When we played, we seldom had anywhere near enough guys to play full field. Like one of the other comments, we'd play pitcher's hand out and pick your field to hit to as the hitter. If it didn't go to center or your field, it was a foul ball. We shared gloves if someone didn't have one. It wasn't uncommon when you got to 3 outs that most of the kids handed their glove to a player on the other team as you went out to the field. Same with bats. Most of our balls were a nice earth tan color. We tried not to use the ones where the stitching was falling apart. A little bit of stitching problem wasn't too bad. I got an Eddie Matthews bat at a "bat day" at Milwaukee County Stadium when we lived in the Milwaukee suburbs somewhere around 1966. I did use it some when we played, but I didn't want to ruin it. I think it's still around somewhere. You don't see bat day with real bats these days. You might get a 12 or 18 inch long pseudo-bat; probably not even that these days. In Milwaukee, we had an empty lot next to a watertower in the neighborhood that was a pretty good size for a bunch of 8 to 10 year old kids to play baseball. We also played 2 on 2 or 3 on 3 football there in the fall. Of course, that was Packer country. I collected baseball cards, but there were, and still are, so many baseball players that Topps had something like 12 or 15 series of cards in a season. I don't think we ever saw the last few series even hit the store shelves. I never got more than maybe 70 or so different cards. It seemed like you never got any from your favorite team or favorite player. A kid down the street from our house in Richfield gave me and my brother his baseball card collection. It was in a shoebox. He was about 5 years older than me, so he had older cards than I had. Those disappeared over the years. I wonder what players I had in there. As we moved around the country, I could frequently pick up the Twins on WCCO, "The Nighttime Neighbor to the Nation" after dark when the clear channels had to be cleared for the high powered clear channel stations like WCCO, WJR (760) in Detroit and WMAQ (670) in Chicago. Here in Columbus, I can't get WCCO because there's a low power station on 820. I used to be able get WCCO pretty well after about 9:30 PM EDT in Toledo. When we were visiting the Grandparents in North Dakota, Grandpa always listened to the games on KSJB Jamestown. If we were lucky, we might see a game on TV while we were there. Not many were telecast in those days.

I would agree that the teams from 1965 to 1970 were consistently excellent. In 1965, they had the best record in the AL since there were no playoffs. They went to 7 games vs. the Dodgers in 1965 and lost the final game to Sandy Koufax, 2-0. Koufax was a juggernaut. They had great pitching and fearsome hitters. The team was practically a who's-who of the Twins all-time great players, except that Rod Carew wasn't there yet until 1967 All through the late 60s they were in top 3 teams in the AL except 1968. You had to win a 162 game season against the entire league. There were no wildcards. A few names off the top of my head that played most of that era: Harmon Killebrew Tony Oliva Rod Carew Jim Kaat Earl Battey Bob Allison Camillio Pasqual Cesar Tovar Jim Perry Jim Mudcat Grant It sure was fun listening to those games on AM radio.

At least there's a pitch clock to speed to the end.

The Atlanta announcers on TBS were saying that Gallo, over his last 24 games has struck out 46 times! That is an astounding number, even for Gallo. Over a 162 game season, that works out to 310 strikeouts all by himself! Now, maybe he only plays in 100 games, but that would still be 191! Good Grief. Very Charlie Brown-ish, except for the occasional home run.

As bad as this offense is, it's too bad that they can't DH all of the field players with pitchers. Back in the non-DH days, most pitchers hit somewhere around .150 to .200, and a few, like Jim Kaat, were decent hitters and occasionally pinch hit and even pinch run. Most of the Twins games, they hit like a bunch of pitchers.

One would think that the data right in front of your eyes that Correa and to some extent Buxton for the last 2 months have not lived up to the needs and expectations of a top of the lineup hitter. And, that they should be moved down and someone with better production over the last 2 monts moved up. A week or two slump is a blip. 2 months is a long term trend.

Maybe they should see if Jim Kaat can still swing a bat. He had a higher batting average than half of this team. Maybe one of the current pitchers can break the Mendoza line.

What a great interview. I loved Matt as a player and I love the way he interacted with you. He's got a great laugh that one would probably ever know without hearing it like this. He was a really good, all-around player in his day. It's good to hear from him.