Dave The Dastardly

Okay, let's look at it this way; we don't know where Los Angeles of Anaheim is and game time is way past our bedtimes so if the Twinks fail in their mission we can disavow all knowledge of their assignment. Just like the Front Office, the coaching staff, the bull pen and Mr. Phelps. This post will self-destruct in three seconds.

Dude! Sounds like your beer stein is half empty. Ask any old dairy farmer; if you constantly skim off the cream all you'll have left is 2% milk.

All good points. However if accepted frameworks aren't delivering, perhaps they need to be altered.

I agree with your basic premise, but there's nothing magic about pitch counts. Even the guy who's responsible for the mythical 100-pitch limit says it was never meant to be a limit. I've been a baseball fan long enough that I can remember when starting pitchers lasted 8 or 9 innings regularly and did it with 4-pitcher rotations and nobody counted pitches. The guy pitched until the other team started slapping him around whether it was 5th 6th, 7th, 8th or 9th inning. Now a complete game is a fluke. But we religiously count pitches and still wind up with more and more pitchers on the operating table undergoing TJ or things like thoracic nerve surgery. Something stinks in Denmark. And I believe the smell is coming from the weight room. "Saving bullpens" is an oxymoron; a tail wagging the dog sort of thing. Relievers have one purpose in life, saving the starter when he runs out of gas. If a guy can't handle throwing a couple dozen pitches every other day he's more of a dead weight than a reliever. He needs to get in shape. Not lifting weights shape, but conditioning and flexibility shape. In any case being a good reliever is more of a mental trait than a physical trait in my amateurish opinion. Okay. Now that I'm done ranting... for now, I agree with you; we need better pitchers at the back end of the rotation to take some pressure off the bull pen. But we also need a better bull pen. And we need to better develop both starters and relievers in the minors. And "better develop" doesn't mean leaving them to languish in the minors until they're old enough to collect Social Security... Use 'em or lose 'em.

Reads like a list of surgical ward patients. Maybe the Twins should automatically schedule their pitching prospects for TJ as soon as they draft them.

Your 6-hour comments reminds me of the time Sting told an interviewer that he and his wife could make love for 8 hours. Several days later he clarified that by adding, "that includes dinner, a movie and 4 hours of begging". Yesterday the Twins missed both both dinner and a movie, but they did get in 4 hours of begging. Unfortunately they still didn't score.

""The rotation is productive from 1 to 5 and not one of them has an ERA over 3.82. The bullpen hasn’t been leaking either." Can someone translate this for me? I know that I can't... Maybe somebody else... A little help?" I think it has something to do with the prostate gland.

Let's not get carried away. Most of us would have been plumb tickled to death if the Twins were not at the bottom of the division at this point in the season. The fact that they're overachieving our expectations doesn't mean we should get all giddy and start wheeling and dealing. Shopping for prospects in another team's organization is a "grass is always greener on the other side of the fence" fantasy. A small market team has to build from within, not from without. A rebuilding team has to put its own "prospects" to the test. Otherwise they'll never know if they can successfully draft and develop quality players. Or accurately determine their own roster weaknesses. Tell me how this Wilk/Haley thing is working out. The only thing worse for a rebuilding team than shopping elsewhere for "available" prospects is trading for an aging veteran. In which case we give up prospects; which amounts to trading the future for the past. We're either building for the future, or we're not. Renting an aging veteran for a year or two is not rebuilding. My less than humble opinion is the Twins should plug Berrios and Mejia into the rotation for the remainder of the season and ignore any ups-and-downs in performance. Let 'em take their lumps. Move whoever you have to move to keep them in the rotation. Give away players to make room if you have to. Keep Santana as their rock. By season's end our stats and data guys will be able to determine without any doubt if either or both Berrios and Mejia are part of the Twins future. Don't worry about offensive production from our catchers this season. With a young rotation stability behind the plate is more important than a couple more singles. From what I've read on TD we have a couple of decent prospects at the position. Push them with the goal one will be on the Big Team next year, the other in AAA. Our outfield is set. Let those guys play. If we do turn up another quality outfielder in the organization, think about moving one of these guys to first base. Infield is adequate to better-than-expected. The only real question here, if we're rebuilding, is who's going to replace Mauer at first base. That should be the question every scout and minor league coach has to think about now. Two years from now, when we're past the rebuilding stage, we don't want to be experimenting with replacements. That can't be a "hole". Find that guy now. If it's going to be someone like Kepler, start giving him more time over there this season. If the guy is the minors, start pushing him hard. Test him at all levels. Don't wait for two years and find out he's still at Double A learning how to tie his cleats. Whoa, my fingers are getting tired. Time to stop and mull.

Here's what I think I know; the older you get the more you realize there are few black-and-white decisions, they're all clouded in gray. And the more important the decision, the grayer it becomes. It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. And the more time available to make the call, the more agonizing it becomes. So eventually you just say the hell with it and flip a coin. Let the chips fall where they may. But our new front office is supposedly made up of stats guys, including a pitcher swami. The college guys are going to have more stats to justify their selection than the high school player simply because they have more experience. My call, the swami goes with the stats and takes a college player. By the way, Sports Illustrated is better at selecting Swimsuit models than it is at selecting athletic talent. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing...

Thank you. It helps to be warped. And I have been shanghaied. Debut June 2 if they let me out of the rubber room in time.

Apologies to Sir Bleecher but you got it all wrong. You see they used to play these games in sheep pastures and as anyone who has ever stepped in sheep turds knows sheep bleat. So one day they had this pick up game going and all these sheep were standing on these boards watching 'cause, you know, sheep get tired of stepping in sheep turds, too when Old Man Ruth (Babe's dad) got a hold of a 3-0 fastball and hit it into a cornfield somewhere near Lackawanna, which is a city that has everything it wants except wannas. Anyway, the mighty blow so impressed the sheep that they all bleated simultaneously, startling everyone in the grandstand. So one drunk says to his buddy, "Where did that godawful noise come from?" And his equally drunk buddy said, "Over there. From those bleaters." Only being drunk his speech was slurred so the first drunk, whose hearing was slurred, thought he said "bleachers". And so they were christened. The boards, not the sheep. Now if you want to talk about grandstands...

I had a 20-year old fan that went negative after I fixed it. It sucked. Personally, I've always been positively negative. That way my low expectations are always exceeded. That can almost turn a guy into a Pollyanna. Well, not like a sex change turning. Just, you know... attitude, outlook on life. Speaking of which, you ever wonder there wasn't a movie about a guy Pollyanna? What? They only interviewed sports fans for the part and couldn't find a guy whose beer glass was always half full?

"Just like the warning on Preparation H “Not for Oral Use”, you know that warning is on the packaging because someone did just that and then probably complained to the company after. “Dear Preparation H… I ate almost the whole tube and it did not cure me. I seriously question your product. I tried to call and complain but my mouth is so small that I can’t speak so I am writing you this letter. I would like my money back”." Manufacturer's Reply. Stick it up your a$$.

Yeah! I do remember that now that you brought it up. We got our first TV when I was in kindergarten. I recall coming home from school and sitting on the floor in front of this big box that showed nothing but "snow" while the TV guy was up on the roof rigging up the antenna when all of a sudden the snow disappeared and Axel came on. I thought the TV guy was the Wizard of Oz. My mind's been blown ever since.

The Lone Ranger's problem was he never read John Donne. If he'd had he would have known that no man is an island. But then what kind of macho ranger wanted to be seen packing poetry books in his saddle bags? Whoosh! Image right out the teepee window. Can you imagine the hard time the bad guys would've given him then? I'm old enough to remember listening to the Lone Ranger on the radio. For you young'uns out there, radio's in those days were these big wooden boxes full of tubes that glowed. Radio's pulled magic out of the air and stimulated the imagination of its listeners because you had to picture everything in your mind. Which is why us oldtimers vividly recall walking uphill both ways to school, snow up to our lunch boxes, eyelids froze shut from the bitter howling winds. Yeah, really. They hadn't invented soccer moms with mini-vans yet. So if anyone out there is still walking to school... well, don't feel like the Lone Ranger.

Yeah. He obviously threw his arm out. I wonder how close it landed to home plate.

Okay. What the hell. Send me a list of open game dates and I'll run it be the Small Council (I've been watching Game of Thrones reruns).

Can I do it incognito? I was actually in a bar once called "Cognito". I won't tell you what I did there because you won't be able to prove it...

I was pathetic in my youth. Come to think of it, nothing's changed much.

Mostly by my college professors.

Cheap beer does have its place. When a college student and too young to buy beer in Minnesota, a car load of us would throw our pocket change on the bar in Sioux Falls (again with the thread) and if we could come up with $1.99 we could buy a case of Bubs. Another $.29 would net us a roll of Rolaids, which proved to be a nice chaser. There's a lot of good things I could say about Bubs beer, but I can't remember any of them. It had the consistency of karo syrup, which gave you plenty of time to upright your beer if you accidentally tipped it over, and tasted like No. 2 diesel fuel cut with ammonia (don't ask me how I know that) but it got you where you wanted to go. The problem was by the time we finished the Bubs we no longer knew where we wanted to go. Or which one of us had the Rolaids. I often wonder how I managed to graduate from college.

Is there any responsibility involved? 'Cause I've been trying to avoid responsibility for the last 13 years. Getting pretty good at it, too. Though my wife claims I've been mostly irresponsible for that last 33 years. I don't understand where she's coming from. I gave her four kids to take care of.

I have a niece named Shy Ann.

I do have a keyboard. Pulse has been optional lately.

I knew that about South Dakota - about it being tilted to the southeast. I tried driving from Minnesota out to the Black Hills once and my car (it was a 4 cylinder Renault) kept rolling backwards. Some said it was because I didn't set the parking brake. But I couldn't see the advantage of setting the parking brake when I was trying to do 60 mph down the interstate. I finally gave up at the Corn Palace, got on the east-bound (and down - little play on words there if you remember the movie) lane, put the Renault in neutral and coasted all the way back to Sioux Falls. Which proved two things; French cars do get great mileage when they're going down hill and life is mostly uphill and full of reverses. Speaking of reverses, I once tried climbing the Big Horn Mountains in a 1946 6-cylinder Chevy hippy school bus. The bus came to a dead stop in the middle of the highway about half way up, even though I had it in super low and the accelerator to the floor. Had to back down the switchback highway for over a mile before I could find a shoulder wide enough to turn around. I didn't get a lot of love from the cars trying to get around me. But I did get a lot of birds. Of course once I managed to turn the hippy bus around without dropping it off the edge of the mountain, it rolled all the way back to Sioux Falls without using any gas. Which was good because us hippies didn't have any money anyway. There's another life lesson in there somewhere but I'm not sure what it is. That time period is kind of hazy for me. Sort of like whether or not the Twins will get in a ballgame today. Long way to go for a baseball connection... but it was fun getting there.