Dave The Dastardly

Whiff Stuff. I'm thumbing through the thesaurus...

You mean they actually play? I thought the purpose was to watch the commercials.

I have that problem every now and then.

That's the second slowest national anthem I've ever heard.

You mean like goat barbecued in bourbon?

There's this woman that keeps calling my cell phone...

The ability to take a pee outside without the neighbors watching was a big factor in purchasing my 12 acre hobby farm. No more quick zipper accidents.

Relax guys, I removed the Yankee curse last night. I burned an old Yankee pennant that my son bought at a Twins-Yankee game back in 2003 when he was too young to know any better and a dead goat (you know how hard it is to find a dead goat?) in a backyard bonfire. With the smell of barbecued hairy goat meat in my nostrils, I poured what was left of a bottle of bourbon over the flames. I no longer have any eyebrows, a picnic table or a back wall on my house. I may no longer have a wife either. Damn Yankees!

I'm torn between Dozier and Mauer. But I lean Dozier for lighting a fire when the FO made those mid-season moves. There were a lot complaints on this site this past spring that the Twins needed veteran leadership. Dozier stepped up to the plate in more ways than one. Loved the Mauer resurgence. Buxton's play in the field has been inspiring for fans as well as teammates. Nice that we actually have so many good candidates. That says we have a "team".

Agree. Not having a purpose in life can be fatal. But there's no reason for not having a purpose. Take up a hobby or two, get a part-time job doing something you always thought would be fun or exciting, audit some classes, volunteer, write a book, read a bunch of books, be a handy man for your kids (the new generation has no idea what tools are for - if they can't do something with their thumbs they can't do it) spend your days on TD sharing your wit, wisdom and pithy prognostications while improving your math skills, vocabulary and baseball knowledge... Okay, maybe I'm going overboard on that one. Retirement for me isn't about not having to work, it's about not having to work for someone else. Your time is your own, squander it watching the grass grow, or the waves rolling in, or use it well. I've been "officially" retired for thirteen years now and I'm often so busy at times I've threatened to get a job so I can get some rest. Fortunately my wife has never taken me up on that. Though there are times when she gives it serious consideration. But that's the purpose of a shared bottle of wine. Like I said, purpose is good. Hey! How 'bout them Twins!

I was productive once... but I never let it happen again.

Agree. Sometimes it is not the size of the victory, but only that you were victorious. As Brian mentioned, Rome wasn't built in Bulgaria. And it wasn't built in Minneapolis either, but I think this year the Twins may have laid a new foundation. I always celebrate when doing some laying. So should the Twins.

Not quite. What I'm trying to say is the goal of every team is to win games. (Unless of course you're the Cleveland Browns.). So if a team is winning games, using attaining the playoffs as a measuring stick, and the Twins make the play-offs, why would the FO want to replace the manager that is responsible for making the play-offs? Because he didn't use analytics to win? That's the tail-wagging-the-dog thing I mentioned. IF the FO wants to make the team more analytic intense, there are other options other than replacing a manager to accomplish that goal. Give your manager more training in that department for example. But that's not newsworthy. Replacing a manager is newsworthy and there's only one part of the organization that will get the press, good or bad, for that decision; the Front Office. Therefore if the FO replaces Molly for the reason he doesn't utilize "enough" analytics, and his replacement is touted as an analytics-focused manager but the Twins don't make the play-offs the following year, the FO (and analytics) is going to take it on the chin from the fans. But if the new analytics-focused manager gets the team further into the play-offs in the 2018 season, the FO will be revered for their wisdom and their guru status will be carved in stone. So we're looking at a 50/50 proposition with the FO benefiting the most IF the replacement is more successful than Molly. But 50/50 doesn't favor reward over risk. That's why I suggested, as others have, the FO may want to bunt. In other words, take themselves out of the limelight (not going for a homerun) by convincing Molly to publicly retire for some sort of concocted "personal" reasons. They are then free to hire their analytics guy with no baggage. If the guy fails to improve the team the FO can shrug and say they would have preferred Molly but the guy retired on us, taking themselves off the hook for his departure. And on the other hand if the new guy takes the Twins to new heights, they're back in guru status. Win/win for the FO. This my long-winded conclusion as to why I believe if the FO replaces Molly for a publicly stated reason of not being "into" analytics, they are more concerned about proving the worth of analytics, and their own standing in analytics, than they are in improving the Twins for improvement sake. Obi Wan is calling. I must pause now for further navel reflection.

Interesting comments on both sides of the question. Obviously a lot of intelligent baseball guys on TD. Except for me of course. Having thrown myself on the Sword of Ignorance, I still have the temerity to make two observations; if the FO wants to replace Molly because he doesn't worship at the Altar of Analytics, they are letting the tail wag the dog. If their goal is to win games. On the other hand if their goal is to prove themselves gurus, Molly's toast. Secondly, if the FO is taking everything into consideration, not just the use of analytics, they have a 50/50 chance of hitting a homerun or striking out regarding Molly. Careful analysis may tell them they need to fake a bunt. My choice has always been Dougie. But that bridge has been burned.

What's an OP? Offensive Person? Otherwise Pusillanimous? Obdurate Personality? Odiferous Piscator? Just your basic MC. (Merely Confused)

I take my whuppings like a man; I run to the nearest bar and cry in my beer... maybe beat up on a pygmy... though they're in short supply.

I'm probably the TD resident expert on Hills. I've been there twice. Both times at night. There wasn't much to see. Legend has it that a couple of Scandinavian settlers named the town. They were out wondering around the flat prairie for a couple of weeks looking for a place to settle when one of them spotted a rise on the horizon. "WTF is that?" Ole asked, pointing at the rise. Lars scratched his, uh, tender parts and answered "Hills?" Truth be told, Hills-Beaver Creek was the home of one of Minnesota's winningest (sp) high school basketball coaches, Hugo Goehle, selected for the the MN Coaches Hall of Fame back in the late 1980's. Hugo completely changed his offense and defense every half. So opposing coaches came in with a game plan for the first half and a prayer book for the second half. Besides being a master strategist, Hugo was a class act and a real gentleman. I've never been whupped by a nicer guy. Hard to find coaches like that anymore. By the way, it's a little known Wikipedia fact that Hills' racial breakdown includes .01% Pacific Islander. Somebody must have really hated the ocean.

Wait a minute. I don't want to be divisive, nor do I want to subtract from the discussion, but I don't think all these numbers add up. Go forth and multiply if you need any proofs.

Thank you, thank you. Thank you very much! Elvis is now leaving the building! But like MacArthur once said, "Why couldn't you have pulled the damn boat all the way up to the beach?" Somehow the press changed that to "I shall return!" Ditto.

What's In A Name? In the best tradition of the Dastardly family, I was in Tampa once. There’s a lot of places that I’ve been once. The key number is “once”. Yeah, okay. I know “once” ain’t a number, but it’s close. I mean you got a “o” an “n” and your basic “e”. Ignore that “c” for a bit and you got “one”. One’s a number. What the dickens (I have no idea what a “dickens” is but I’m trying to be in a family way here - no, not that kind of family way), if you can call the first day of the month the... wait, I guess I already gave that one up. Okay, if you can call the second day of the month the... crap! Did it again! Let’s just say you get my point about words and numbers and leave it at that. Anyway, the main point is my visits to baseball cities tend to be singular. The implication here is the Dastard becomes persona non grata (that’s Latin for a pain in the derriere - which is French for rear end - which is Gumpian for buttocks) and is forthwith invited to never return upon pain of death. That’s not quite true. I usually get a “if you ever come here and do that again” speech first. Then they go to that pain of death thing. Getting back to Tampa, figuratively, not literally, because there’s that pain of death thing hanging out there, myself, the Little Woman and the Last Born (my son) once traveled to Tampa during one of Minnesota’s cold winters. Yeah, I know. They’re all cold, but this one had been cold enough that every city north of St. Cloud had been abandoned for weeks. So I’d taken a couple weeks vacation, hitched up the sled dogs and the Dastards had gone south to warm up. It was 80 degrees when we arrived in Tampa. But the temperatures plunged to near freezing overnight and it barely managed to climb back into the low 50’s the next day with a windchill south of Antarctica. Wonderful timing on my part. However 50 degrees above zero was still about 80 degrees warmer than it had been when we fled Minnesota. The Floridians, suspicious lot that they are, were in search of a scapegoat, someone to blame for the falling temperatures when the Dastards, totally unaffected by the cooler weather, walked into a restaurant dressed in Twins jerseys and shorts, throats parched... okay, it was my throat that was parched. The Little Woman and the Last Born were merely hungry. Whatever. The Twins jerseys were like targets on our backs. Dressed as we were I was soon engaged in witty repartee with a pair of Rays fans who apparently had arrived with the same affliction as myself but were now well on the way to recovery. We parried, we thrusted (that sounds worse than it really is and not to be confused with thirsted -which was what we really were), the goal for both parties was to score a few linguistic (not to be confused with linguini which was what the Little Woman was after) touche’s while avoiding a fatal stabbing. One thing led to another and I invited the two Rays fans over to our table and plied them with a sociable beer or two, hoping to wheedle an as-of-yet-undiscovered miserly way to take in spring training because my oldest two daughters had already tapped out my life savings for their college educations and with one daughter still in college and of course the Last Born who was already harboring dreams of college life, “Cheap” had become my nom de guerre, oftentimes with “A$$” attached as a surname. I preferred “Frugal”. But what’s in a name? “Don’t go to spring training,” the Rays fans advised. “It's a rip-off. You want to see some good major league baseball, cheap, just come here to St. Petersburg in April and take in a Rays series.” And here all this time I thought St. Petersburg was in Russia. Imagine my shock to discover that the Tampa Bay Rays aren’t in Tampa! But what's in a name? Certainly not a location. “And why, pray tell, would I want to do that?” I inquired with less than diplomatic aplomb. Though I didn’t really say “pray tell” as that might have alienated the Floridians who seemingly required instructions for removing a twist-off cap without chipping their teeth. In truth, since I had already amply quenched my thirst I believe I might have substituted Whiskey Tango Foxtrot for “pray tell”. An error on my part as the Floridians became moderately incensed. Keep in mind these were the days when the Rays had this identity crisis. They weren’t sure if they were still the Devil Rays or just the Rays, you know, like sunshine. Though they still sported a Devil Ray as their logo. I suppose because no one had figured out how to turn a ray of sunshine into a logo. Maybe they should have considered an orange. Anyway, our new friends told me the Rays were lucky to pull in 10,000 fans per game and it wasn’t uncommon to find unwanted tickets laying on the sidewalk outside the stadium come game time. You can’t get baseball tickets any cheaper than that. Unless they mail ‘em to you. You know, like credit card offers. “So you get the spring training feel for nothing, plus motels are much cheaper after all the snowbirds go back north to thaw out their water pipes,” the duo explained. A practical lot these Floridians. Perhaps even kindred spirits. With both the Twins and Rays hoping to earn a wild card spot before the snow flies, I doubt if free tickets will be available for this series, but there’s always a chance my old “new” practical friends could fix this Cheap A$$ up with some nearly-free tickets, you know, because of the wonderful memories we shared together so many years ago. If only I could remember their names... Let see... I believe they were Bud Light and Coors... Lesson #179 From the Dastard’s Book of the Painfully Obvious: Sometimes what sticks in our minds isn’t glue. The impactful Colon, 6-10 ERA 6.25, takes the mound for the Twins tonight hoping to bind up the Rays while the Rays send out Jake "Smelly" Odorizzi, 7-7, 4.85 ERA, both teams hoping they don't stink up the place. So settle back in your favorite chair and grab yourself a screwdriver. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

I drove my 1946 hippie school bus across North Dakota back in 1970. Drove for hours on the interstate without seeing another vehicle. Or maybe it just seemed that way. Things were kind of hazy in the bus even though we had the windows open. Passed a cowboy sitting on his horse alongside the freeway. He shook his head in disbelief as we zoomed by at 45 mph. Guess he'd never seen a hippie bus with smoke rolling out the windows before. Or maybe he'd just never seen a bus, period. Got to Teddy Roosevelt National Park and the ground was smoking! Like blew us away, dudes! We expected to see North Dakotans running around sniffing the park fumes but I guess all fifty-five of 'em were in church or something. I always wondered why Teddy bailed out of New York and went ranching in North Dakota... I guess it was a natural high for him. We had no trouble finding our way back to Minnesota. If you stood on the bus roof you could see Fargo from the park's entrance. Which was good because there was no one around to ask directions from. We got half way back to Fargo and the cowboy was still sitting on his horse in the same spot. That's when we realized he was North Dakota's highway cop and he was running a speed trap.

Way back when my wife of 33 years and I were still living in sin and able to travel extensively we found ourselves in Yellowstone wandering aimlessly down this path populated by many other tourists, some undoubtedly of questionable intelligence as they were eating sandwiches and dropping crumbs like Hansel and Gretel, we came to a sign that warned us that grizzly bears frequented that same path. Which of course rattled the Little Woman, her being all of 4'10.5". Which of course made her an excellent appetizer for a hungry bear. "What are we going to do if a bear shows up?" she asked me. She, you see, had not yet known me long enough to realize I don't have all the answers. Though I was able to fake it for a few more years. "You see that guy ahead of us on crutches with a cast on his leg?" I asked her. She nodded apprehensively. "We grab his crutches and run like hell," I replied.

You Can Never Go Home Again (Thomas Wolfe) I don’t know if Tom hit that nail on the head with that one. I thought home is where the heart is. So if we can’t ever go back where our hearts are what’s that make us? Zombies? I’m grasping at straws here for a lead. That makes three cliches already. I’m sounding like a professional athlete. Time to step up. Pull together. Swing for the fences. Take one for the team. Leave it all out there - well maybe not that last one. Sounds more like something a pervert might encourage. Maybe Dorothy, a Minnesota native and she of the red baseball spikes, said it best; “There’s no place like home.” Okay, enough dithering. I was in Toronto once. It’s not my home so I don’t ever have to go back there. Which, fortunately, fits nicely into my plans and should make both Tom and Dorothy happy. Believe it or not, I was in Toronto because I wanted to avoid driving through Chicago. Let me rephrase that, I wanted to avoid crawling through Chicago and pitching coins out my window like a carney rat. So I thought I’d avoid all that hassle by going north around the Great Lakes and driving through Toronto instead. The difference between driving in Chicago and driving in Toronto is about 80 miles per hour. Not that Toronto has an official 80 mph speed limit. For one thing the Canucks are into kilometers, not miles. For another thing, nobody there pays any attention to the posted speed limits. But ignoring all that and subtracting Chicago’s unofficial speed limit of 0 mph from Toronto’s unofficial limit of 80 mph you get your basic huge life-threatening discrepancy. If you don’t believe me take your mini-van up to Toronto and try merging. So what’s their hurry? The official Toronto tourism center lists these ten things as the most popular activities in Toronto; CNE - Not to be confused with CNN but is actually some sort of not newsworthy amusement park. And I thought it difficult for Canadians to be amused. The Beach - Curious as to how you can sunbathe or even swim in parkas and mukluks but if anyone would know how to do it it would be a Canuck. Or a Siberian. Outdoor Movies - Doesn’t say where these movies are shown. Maybe on the side of an igloo? We call them drive-in movies down here, but then we’re going slow enough we can actually watch them. The Big Feastival - apparently organized for gluttons. If they’re not too slothful to attend. Winery Visits - Now you’re talking American! Or more likely French. Shakespeare in High Park - I guess a park is as good a place as any to listen to Shakespeare. Personally, I always believed Shakespeare was a little squirrelly anyway. Maybe because I only speak English and nur ein bisschen Deutsch. ROM - I thought ROM had something to do with computers but I forget. Maybe it has something to do with whales. Beer, Bourbon and Barbecue - Now the Canucks are really talking American! Another food and drunk, uh, drink festival. Not a bad idea and undoubtedly very entertaining. Maybe after a schooner or two and a couple shots of bourbon the participants can understand Shakespeare. If they can find the park. Street Performers - I thought they only worked Hennepin. Who knew. Patios - I guess they’re hard to find in Toronto. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. Noticeably absent on the top ten things to do in Toronto; attend a Blue Jays game. Which comes as a surprise since the Jays are ranked 6th in average game attendance with 35,519 average fans showing up per game. They don’t say how many below average fans attend. Maybe because they’re at the Beer, Bourbon and Barbecue. I’m assuming the above average fans are in the park with Shakespeare. The Twinkies by comparison are ranked 25th in average game attendance with approximately 27,000 fans in the stands. Maybe that’s why metro traffic speeds are slower than Toronto’s; there’s no worry about getting a walk-up ticket to Twins home games. There’s lots of baseball connections between the Jays and the Twins. The Twinkies eliminated the Jays in the 1991 ALCS before Jack Morris stifled the Braves in Game 7 and the Twins went on to win the Whole Enchilada. Jack then stiffed the Twins and moved to Toronto, even though Toronto wasn’t his home. The Jays then took the World Series in back-to-back seasons (1992 and 1993) with the help of native Minnesotans Jack Morris, Dave Winfield and Paul Molitor. Molitor was named the World Series MVP after hitting .500 in the 1993 series. So we need to keep in mind that Twins Manager Paul Molitor once starred for the Jays and maybe that’s where his heart still is. But Molitor also needs to remember he can’t go home again if his team drops this series to the Jays. That kind of makes this series sort of a homestand for both teams. The only question left is whether Molitor is going to be more like Tom or like Dorothy. Here’s hoping he’s wearing his red baseball spikes. On the mound for the Twins, The Giblet. Gibby is still trying to nail down a permanent baseball home with an ERA of 5.76 and sporting a 7-10 record. I see a U-Haul in his future. The Jays are throwing Joe Biagini back into the fire. At 3-8, 5.11 ERA Biagini might want to talk to Gibby about sharing that U-Haul. Line-ups to follow. If I'm not busy swearing at the Vikings pre-season game.

Anyone who has ever stumbled into a park lawn or sidewalk covered with goose crap will agree with the nuisance rating. I say round 'em up in the fall (saving some for breeding stock), slaughter the blighters and donate the food to old folks homes, veteran's hospitals, soup kitchens, etc just in time for Christmas. Better to feed humans than foxes.

Social faux pas! Everybody knows burgers are best washed down with a brewski. And an after burger burp is mandatory. Cabernet, unfortunately doesn't provide the necessary explosion. Brush up on your etiquette, please!