Dave The Dastardly

1. Summer - Two cubes max. Winter - naked, uh, neat. Or neat and naked ... depending on companionship. 2. Beer cold, women hot. To err is human, but if you mess this one up you'll have neither friends nor a long marriage. 3. Grotesque - unless used as a desperate backup when home alone and you've consumed too much of No 1 or No 2 to drive to grocery store. 4. Both major annoyances. 5. Yes.

Put me down for the 23rd.

I can do either July Twenty-Threeth or Twenty-Fourth if one or the other is still open.

Unfortunately not. I've heard tales that the Corveland vs Gelderland tournament was a real joust.

Does that Nap Time stuff work on school board members?

The seats are hard-wired to the speaker system and come with headphones. Plus, the seats are actually potty chairs in order to cut down on the running to the bathrooms. Oh, and Wally the Beer Guy hands out GAS-X with each brewski. Other than that its pretty much the same as the rest of the seating.

Sorry. It's a refrigerated pistachio dessert. It's to die for.

My wife's brothers always eat dessert first. And they don't care what sort of dessert it is other than being plenty. I've seen each of them eat a whole row of Green Death, then follow that up with a couple 1/3 lb hamburgers. I've seen cows pass out from fear when they see my brothers-in-law drive by. Reminds me of the two bulls standing out in the pasture during a January blizzard. One turns to the other and says, "Brr, it's cold out here! I think I'll go back to the barn and slip into a jersey."

Great looking steak! Gonna have to try that. But you lost me on that "bottle" of parmesan cheese. Is that "bottle" like what Grain Belt comes in? I thought that stuff came in a cardboard tube, but then I'm more of a colby man. 2nd question: I thought grillmeisters' favorite on-the-job beverage was a brewski or two, or three, you know, something you can sip while you stand by the grill pretending you know what you're doing so the wife doesn't get on your case about not burning the steaks; even though my Little Woman prefers steaks the consistency of shoe leather. So what you're saying is that's it's okay to hit the Jameson while slaving over a hot grill? Man... my steak won't be the only one that'll be fried. Hey, I heard there's a game tonight. That means nacho cheese chips for a warm-up then grilled burgers and asparagus for supper. Gotta love those Twins!

Who better to plug a hole at 2nd than the Turtle?

Three fingers of Jameson

Sa - noooooooooo!

Got a call from the blonde sister-in-law. She's in Boston. Wants to know why there's nobody at Fenway. I told her the game is blacked out.

Whoops! I'd better call my blonde sister-in-law. We could be meeting in the wrong city...

The Twins are coming! The Twins are coming! I was sitting at the computer one afternoon, hammering away at my baseball novel (doesn’t everybody have a baseball novel they’re writing - you know, for the last decade or so?) when my blonde sister-in-law called. “When did we get married?” she demanded in frustration. “I got nothing.” Okay, before you start thinking I’m involved in some sort of kinky relationship, let me explain. My wife and I were married the same year my sister-in-law and her husband tied the knot. And my sister-in-law was at work trying to fill out some family health insurance form and drew a blank when the form asked for the year of their marriage. So why am I telling you this? Because I’m supposed to be writing some witty yet informative game thread for today’s clash of titans between the Red Sox and the Twins. And I got nothing. You could say I’m witless and not be too far off the mark. So in the absence of clever word play, let’s take a peek at some dull, dry data. (Hey! unintentional alliteration! Maybe I’m warming up!) If we group each team’s hitters according to qualifying At-Bats we can isolate the nine most-likely-to-play batters for each team. For the Twins, the top three batters with the highest OPS in that group are Garver (1.058), Polanco (.952) and Kepler (.917). For Boston we have Martinez (.936), Bogaerts (.927) and Devers (.863). Gotta give the edge to the Twins. Then if we sort the pitching staffs by Innings Pitched, ignoring the starters because we won’t see all of them in this one series, and compare WHIP for the most likely relievers we get Harper with a 1.0 WHIP and Rogers and Parker both at 1.20 for the Twins. Doing the same for the BoSox we get Workman at a 0.98 WHIP, Brasier at 1.08 and Barnes with 1.16. Gotta give the edge to the BoSox bulls. But if we look at the combined Win-Loss record for the top three relievers we find the top Red Sox relievers with a 10-5 W/L and the top Twins bulls at 4-3. What does that mean? I don’t know. Maybe it means the Boston starting pitchers have been struggling to put away their opponents, or maybe the Boston hitters put on a lot of late inning rallies while the Twins relievers just keep games from getting away. My call for the series? The Twins jump out to early leads, the Red Sox put on late inning rallies when the Twins go to the bullpen and the question becomes whether or not the Twins can hold the lead, every game turns into a nail-biter and the team with the best defense wins. Okay, I’ve covered my fanny. Time to get back to the novel… wait a minute, my phone’s ringing. It’s my blonde sister-in-law. Wants to know which motel we’re going to meet at this coming weekend… Throwing bullets tonite: Twins: “Bad Man” Jose Berrios 8-2 ERA 3.01 84 K BoSox: Rick “Porkchop” Porcello 4-6 ERA 4.69 66 K

Seattle Slough I went through Seattle once. Maybe a few other towns out that way, too. Mind’s not that clear about that trip, uh, journey, but I don’t recall seeing any sloughs. So I never could figure out why horse people get so excited talking about Seattle’s sloughs. Imagine what all that water could to a horse race… But this is about baseball so let’s talk about baseball people. You know who I’m talking about… those little round guys dressed in faux horsehide and leather gloves. They’re a little unseamly (went a long way to get that one), but once you get to know them you realize they’re often well grounded and only occasionally fly off the handle. For God’s sake stop me! Mariner is another word for sailor. Comes from the French, marinier, with lots of mayonnaise, which in turn comes for the medieval Latin marinarius, who often ate their words with a lot of marinara. No matter where it originated, mariner still means sailor, as in And that’s been Seattle’s problem; they’ve been around since Bud Seeling pulled a fast one and moved the Pilots from Seattle in the middle of the night and had them rebaptized in Milwaukee as the Brewers, that was about, oooh nineteen-and seventy-seven, and Seattle fans have been looking for a good time ever since. So much so they’ve become Sleepless. Probably why the Mariners are one of seven MLB teams that have never won a World Series and one of two MLB teams to have never even played in a World Series! And that’s despite posting the winningest (is that really a word?) American League regular season ever, 116 wins in 2001. So the Mariners are sailing into town today, hoping to tie an anchor around the Twins’ necks, but if the Twins sink ‘em for three straight those hapless bluejackets will only be streamlining the Twins yacht for the playoff regatta. And in that case those Seattle sailors will still be looking for a good time. Sorry, Kelly. Maybe you should check out the Minnesota farm boys instead... especially the older ones... who live on a hobby farm... in southern Minnesota... whose name means "beloved"... Like we always used to tell one of our appropriately named college buddies when we got up from the bar for a trip to the bathroom On The Bump tonite: Twins: Martin “The Marauder” Perez 7-2 ERA 3.72 60 K Mariners: Mike “The Radiator” Leak 5-6 ERA 4.30 56 K

The Dread Pitcher TBD is ubiquitous and has started games for different teams all over the league. Inconceivable! However I hear he's mostly dead.

I think there was thick fog rolling through a lot of Twins fans' man caves last night. Cue Boris Karloff.

When you got a lot of horses in the barn you gotta get 'em all a chance to run.

Vern Gagne?

"Willians Astudillo hasn't been hitting the ball well at all" The Turtle is slowing down?

https://sports.yahoo.com/early-homerun-surge-has-some-thinking-the-baseballs-might-be-juiced-again-152411641.html https://mlb.nbcsports.com/2019/04/18/mlbs-juiced-baseball-is-juicing-triple-a-home-run-totals/

I actually have this very print, "Not A Man Wavered" by Dale Gallon hanging on my office wall. Pick up a copy of Richard Moe's book, "The Last Full Measure" to put real meaning to Gallon's print. The book follows the correspondence of two brothers who actually fought at Gettysburg. I highly recommend it.

Partially disagree. Red Sox and Yankees get disproportionate media coverage because they're "major market" teams; ie, millions of local fans because of their population centers, not necessarily out of "respect". More followers begets more ad money, more ad money begets more media coverage. "Respect" by the way is about the most overworked word in the major league sports world. Some players are always whining about being "disrespected" no matter how well, or poorly, they or their teams are playing. I suppose to fire up their fans, but it sounds pretty lame to me. Sounds like they're spoiled brats that think they should be anointed to priesthood or something similar. Of course I'm from a generation when athletes were polite, composed, complimentary of their opponents and let their playing on the field do the talking. Guys like Killebrew, Carew, Tony O, etc. You know, what we used to call sportsmanship back in the Good Ol' Days. So take my opinion with a grain of salt. As long as you don't "diss" me. As far as the Twins and national media coverage; like some have said, it won't happen until they're in the playoffs and playing before a national audience. Because they're suddenly "respected"? I suppose to some degree. But more likely because more viewers means more ad money and all these "unknown" Twins players will suddenly be "discovered".

Memorial Day Weekend My dad, “Ten-Cent” Harry and Gib “The Mutilator” took me and two of my brothers and two of the Mutilator’s boys to our first Twins game at Metropolitan Stadium way back in 1961. “Ten Cent”, who’d acquired his nickname by always betting ten cents whether he had a good poker hand or not, was one of my many uncles and “The Mutilator” was one of my dad’s WWII Army cronies. He’d gotten his nickname because of his penchant for mutilating the English language. The eight of us packed into the Mutilator’s 2-door Ford and made the two-hour drive to the Met, us young’uns bouncing around like pinballs in the back seat, seat belts hadn’t been invented yet, repeatedly smacking our baseball gloves and loudly arguing over which of us would be the first to snag a homerun ball. The Mutilator was lucky he’d served in the artillery because that made him a little hard of hearing so he wasn’t bothered by the backseat noise. Ten Cent, a railroad man accustomed to hearing that lonesome whistle blow, was also a little short on decibels, but the Old Man… well, he’d been wounded at the Bulge coming to rescue the 101st Airborne and though he’d heard plenty of explosions directed at him during the war there was nothing wrong with his hearing. He could hear a kid coughing up a flight of stairs, down a hallway and through a closed bedroom door. I could tell the commotion from the backseat was making the Old Man edgy but he never told us to quiet down and behave as he normally would have. We somehow made it to the stadium without any kid getting gagged, tied down or chucked out the window. We had left field bleacher seats, and the cost for those had been hard enough for my dad to swing as he had seven mouths to feed on a mailman’s salary, but I took off after a couple of innings along with my shadow, the Great Goose, a year younger than me. We were playing the White Sox and I wanted to see my two favorite infielders, Nellie Fox and Luis Aparicio, as up close as I could get and the view wasn’t that great midway up in the left field bleachers. I played shortstop, like Aparicio, and used a Nellie Fox bat so these guys were like my baseball heroes and I at least wanted to see their faces. So we took off to get a better view of the infield and wound up sitting right behind home plate for an inning or two until the ushers asked to see our tickets. Being small town boys we thought an empty seat was just something waiting to be occupied. Couldn’t understand why the ushers wanted to keep those empty seats empty. Somewhat chastened, my brother and I drifted back to the left field bleachers to sit with our dad, just in time to see Bob Allison (might have been Jim Lemon) put a ball into the seats just a few rows short of where we were sitting. None of us got the ball. Never forgot that day. And it wasn’t until I was a father myself and took my son to his first Twins game that I suddenly gained an appreciation for what my dad had put up with just to get his boys to a professional baseball game. That’s what I remember on Memorial Day. And that’s one of the reasons why I love baseball. Today’s Pitching Matchup For the Twins: Jake “The Skunk” Odorizzi 6-2 ERA 2.38 52 K will be trying to add to his shutout innings streak. For the Sox: Dylan “The Dead Man” Covey 0-3 5.31 ERA 7 K will be trying not to cough up a half dozen homers to the homerun happy Twins.