Dave The Dastardly

Wait, you mean your college students stayed awake during class?

Well now that's reassuring.

Considering where the Twins are in their rebuilding project, this is the Wright guy.

I chewed enough for both of us. Our family dentist retired early with my college money, I tended bar nights in order to pay my tuition and my mom threw out my baseball cards. Another of life's success stories.

Just got in after enjoying a beautiful Minnesota day outside here in our little valley. First thing I did was check to see if tonight's lineups have been posted. Here you go. Twins Dozier 2B Mauer 1B Sano, 3B Kepler RF Grossman DH Castro C Buxton CF Rosario LF Adrianza SS Mejia, P Mariners Heredia CF Smith SS Cano 2B Valencia, 1B Seager 3B Motter, LF Gamel, RF Zunino C Ruiz DH Gallardo P

On The Cutting Edge. Anybody remember the original “The Cutting Edge” movie? D.B. Sweeney, Moira Kelly, Roy Dotrice? I guess it’s probably considered a chick flick, but its got enough good laughs in it that a guy can sit through it without wanting to slash his wrists. And if you snuggle up to your wife during the entire movie, maybe make the popcorn, she just might feel like doing something other than slicing onions (sticking with our “cutting” theme) when it’s all over. Anyway, in the movie the father of this female figure-skater is looking for a “go-to-guy” to help his daughter win Olympic gold. Sweeney, playing the part of an ex-hockey player turned figure skater, tries to prove he’s the guy. Like I said, decent movie, and unlike a lot of chick flicks, watching it won’t be like that Chinese thing; Death by A Thousand Cuts. 
Speaking of dying from a thousand cuts, that’s kind of like being Twins fan. Last night’s debacle was a good example. There’s a reason drugstores won’t sell Twins fans razor blades. Death By A Thousand Cuts however was not invented by long-suffering Minnesotans. It’s a Chinese thing. They invented it along with gunpowder. You know, so they could shoot people trying to steal all the rice at the supermarket. The problem is getting shot is like a one time, uh, shot. That means it’s too easy a death for a guy who steals all the rice right before you sit down to orange chicken and fortune cookies. So the Yellow Horde came up with this "Death by a Thousand Cuts” thing. You know, to make sure you suffer longer. Like sports fans in Minnesota. But I’ve often wondered about that thousand cuts thing. I mean counting to one thousand is like a lot of counting. And if you’re doing something while you’re counting... well, a guy could get distracted and lose count. Couldn’t you? So I gotta wonder, who’s responsible for keeping count? The cutter or the cuttee? Do they use one of those wristwatch type things like you use to keep track of your golf strokes? Not that my golf strokes have ever gone as high as a thousand, though they have flirted with triple digits, but you know the Chinese are pretty inventive when it comes to cheap gadgets. I could see them coming up with a cut counter... maybe something with a blood red wristband... 
And what happens if whomever (is there a Chinese word for “whomever”? I mean it’s tough enough to say that in American) is responsible for keeping count loses track? Do they start over? Or do the cutter and cuttee compare notes and come up with a compromise figure? 
And what if the cuttee goes to that Big Bamboo Hut In The Sky on say, Cut Number 879? Does the cutter guy keep hacking away until he hits the required 1,000 cuts in or does he wash his hands (think about that one) and throw in the towel? Is there a penalty clause in the cutter’s contract if the cuttee expires before taking the required one thousand cuts? Does failure to inflict a thousand cuts go on the cutter’s permanent record? A prospective client would want to know that, wouldn’t he? I mean who’s going to hire a Death of a Thousand Cuts guy if he can’t get his cuts in? 
And you gotta wonder, since we’re talking about a Chinese thing here, is there a Chinese knock-off for a discounted Death of A Thousand Cuts listed on Amazon? You order it and a midget shows up with a pocket knife? So what’s all this got to do with the Twins? Two things, who on the Twins’ pitching staff is their go-to-guy and secondly, who is there in the Twins line-up that we know is always going to get his cuts in? When we for sure know the answers to those two questions will the Twins then be on the cutting edge? And at that point do long-suffering Twins fans get a carton of band-aids? You know, for those thousand cuts... 
Lesson #149 From the Dastard’s Book of the Painfully Obvious Man who does a thousand favors for his wife never has a dull sword.

Well, we're only down three after one inning. I can go to bed now knowing we're not going to get blown out.

Sauerkraut, chopped onions, ketchup, mustard. One beer to wash it down. Second beer to wash down the tums. Wipe mouth on sleeve, hands on pants leg. Burp loudly, but politely. Take wife's elbow to the ribs with a smile.

I don't know about this optimist-pessimist thing. Seems no matter which I am on any particular day, I usually get kicked in the ol' yin-yang, where the sun never sets, before the sun sets. Best to be indifferent; a state I can reach with a couple bottles of Schells Light and a massive Twins lead...

Gibby must have read my earlier post regarding how to go after Pujols. A man has to take credit when he can.

Line-Ups Twins Dozier 2B Grossman DH Mauer 1B Sano 3B Kepler RF Polanco SS Gimenez C Rosario LF Buxton CF Gibson P Angels Simmons SS Calhoun RF Pujols DH Escobar 3B Valbuena 1B Maldonado C Revere LF Espinosa 2B Young CF Ramirez P

I gotta wonder... how did you recognize the guy as a porno actor? Was he just hanging out?

“Well I’ve never been to Heaven... but I’ve been to Oklahoma...” Apologies to Three Dog Night, but that could be me. I’ve been to Oklahoma lots of times but my chances of eventually being in Heaven are like the old baseball adage, “slim and none”. I’ve never been to LA either. In fact I’ve never set foot, or any other part of me, in California. At least not that I remember. Three dog night - that’s how the Aussies post the weather forecast Down Under. Apparently they judge how cold it’s going to be by how many dogs you have to sleep with in order to stay warm. Quaint. Though with the price of dog food today, it might be cheaper to buy some thermometers. Or an electric blanket. I’ve slept with a few dogs in my life. Take that as you will, but keep in mind I live in Minnesota. A state that put the capital “C” in cold. Just ask Omaha. And the reality is there aren’t enough sled dogs in the state to keep us all warm. Anyway, our oft-beloved and occasionally-maligned Twins are out in La-La Land for today’s game. That means the equipment manager didn’t have to pack the fur-lined cups the players wear for outdoor baseball in Minnesota. They packed speedos instead. Which causes me to point out that one of the items near the top of my “List Of Things I Don’t Ever Want To See” is Sano in a speedo. So I’ll catch this game on the radio in case the Big One hits and the players’ uniforms start shaking off. In that event it would be a “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On” for Sano. Now I have to apologize to Jerry Lee Lewis. Probably to Sano also. But I have gone through life on my knees, groveling, begging forgiveness. So I’m quite accustomed to apologizing. No big deal. But here’s hoping Sano gets a Big Hit out there in La-La Land instead of getting hit by the Big One. Which reminds me... I owned a 1976 Chevy pickup way back in... well, the 70’s. GM used Chinese steel to build that particular model and Chinese steel had a little problem; it rusted rapidly. Which meant I had a major problem; my truck came down with leprosy. It ran like a clock, but the hands kept falling off. By the time the decade rolled into the 80’s there wasn’t much left of the truck body, but on the plus side my miles per gallon kept increasing. My brother and I, both gainfully unemployed at the time, which is a diplomatic way of saying we’d both been dismissed with prejudice from our respective jobs, which is a nice way of saying we’d been rendered the proverbial boot in the gluteus maximus, were painting houses to supplement our unemployment checks. Which income of course we didn’t report lest we lose out on the government dole (don’t worry, we’re way past the statute of limitations on that one). Anyway, we’d drafted the Leper Truck into our larcenous venture for hauling ladders, paint cans, various and sundry brushes, tarps, empty Mountain Dew cans, bags of sunflower seeds and the occasional useful tool to and from job sites. A couple weeks into the painting game we’d grown accustomed to having a paint can, a brush or two, and the occasional tool “disappearing” from the holey (no, not that kind of holy) truck bed while slowly driving to work in the morning, or racing home from work at the end of the day. As long as the ladders didn’t fall through the truck bed we figured another day without the necessary tools was like a day without sunshine; which in the painting business means you didn’t have to work. Then one fine morning while bumping across the railroad tracks on our way to a job, the Big One hit the Leper Truck and a mysterious two-foot hole suddenly appeared in the cab floor and my brother’s feet that had been resting comfortably on fast-food bags, used sunflower seeds and paint rags were suddenly dangling in mid-air. This was no small feet (little play on words there) as Brother Jim wears the same size bib-overalls as Sano. Addressing the situation with our usual aplomb, we exchanged a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot glance, then unceremoniously began spitting our morning breakfast of sunflower seeds directly through the Mysterious Hole to the passing pavement below, thus eliminating the middle man. It seemed we had solved the problem of occasionally cleaning out the truck. However the newly ventilated truck cab did prove rather, shall we say breezy, on cold (remember this is Minnesota) mornings, thus overwhelming the heater whose blower fan had ingloriously passed away from exhaustion the previous winter. Our usual morning shivering-with-dread was now enhanced to near palsy state by the even lower temperatures inside the Leper Truck, which didn’t inspire our clients as we wobbled up thirty-foot ladders, paint cans in hand. On one particular unseasonably cold morning Brother Jim, whose dangling feet were bearing the brunt of the unwanted breeze, in a demonstration of the sort of resourcefulness that has plagued our family for generations, grabbed up his “clean” (read that as not yet spattered with fresh paint) cast-off jeans from his duffle and stuffed them into the Mysterious Hole. Problem solved. It was only later when it was time to change from our freshly paint-splattered clothing into our “clean” clothes did we notice that Brother Jim’s “clean” cast-off jeans that he’d shoved into the Mysterious Hole were no longer traveling with us. They’d bailed out as it were. Probably somewhere over Normandy. Which caused Brother Jim to ride home in his underwear, his, uh, equipment flapping in the breeze howling in through the unplugged Mysterious Hole. Which mental picture brings me back to the dizzying vision of Sano in a speedo and finally, you breathe with a sigh of relief, to reaching a denouement, a climax if you will (no nexus to the earlier statement regarding sleeping with dogs) culminating in Lesson #213 From the Dastard’s Book of the Painfully Obvious: You can’t permanently plug a hole with cast-offs. Not entirely coincidentally, the offered lesson applies as well to bull pens as it does to leperous trucks. Tonight’s Line-Ups To Be Posted As Soon As Molly Wakes Up

I'd give him a little chin music first, hoping he'd throw out his back while dodging the bean ball. Then I'd give him heat away, hoping the sore back shortens his reach. Unless of course he attacks the mound with his bat in hand after that first pitch. In that case I'd ask him to sign my cast. Which I could probably sell on e-bay for a gazillion dollars, which of course I would have to give to the doctors who put me back together... Maybe I just walk the guy.

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.

I attended a Catholic school until the Powers That Be decided it would be best if I pursued my educational opportunities with the heathens at public school. I do not begrudge that conclusion as in retrospect I have to admit I was an incorrigible free spirit who chafed under the burden of the cross. One of my many pranks that forced the Hand of God involved the OCD paranoid nun who strove to teach us algebra. She labored under the supposition that all thirty of us miscreants cheated while trying to work algebraic problems in class. She wasn't far off the mark. Maybe half right. Anyway, in a failed attempt to curtail the presupposed cheating she would send us simultaneously to the blackboards that circumscribed the classroom and carefully line us up so that the left-handed suspects were not adjoining the right-handed suspects and thus easily able to steal the other's work with a mere undetectable shift of the eyeballs. This alignment process would consume a good ten minutes of class time, for which we all rejoiced. The fly in the holy ointment of her plan was the fact that I am ambidextrous. For those of you never forced to learn Latin, that means I can write with either hand. So after the Lady in Black was content with her alignment and dictated the first problem, I would switch hands and quickly solve the problem. This caused the Lady in Black a good deal of consternation. Not only was her suspected prime cheater done first, therefore logically unable to copy, he was also out of position, writing left-handed in the right-handed section, and thus disrupting her previous ten minutes of alignment. The solution; reshuffle the blackboard assignments. Again we rejoiced. Once realigned another problem was dictated and I would again switch my writing hand, thus forcing another realignment. And more rejoicing on the part of the miscreants. It took the Lady in Black half the year to figure out the prank, by which time I had saved my classmates countless minutes of slaving away at the blackboard. Though I did not save myself from persecution. What tipped my hand, if you will, is I forgot which hand I was supposed to be using while solving a particularly difficult problem and switched writing hands in flagrante delecto; which is another Latin phrase that means getting caught in the act. And thus is the Word of the Dastard from the Dastard's Book of the Painfully Obvious: The right hand must always know what the left hand is doing.

Jeez! i was just typing away when my computer screen went blank. When it came back there was a message on it saying I've bet hit by that virus that's been going around. The hackers offered to pay me $300 if I stop sending posts to TD. Any you other guys get that message?

I just turned on Gameday to get some stats. They had Bundy listed on the cover page with a 2.87 ERA but no innings pitched. How does a guy do that? I mean if he hasn't pitched, how did he give up earned runs? Even the Twins bull pen can't do that. They also list him as a brother to Bobby Bundy. Okay, that's two Bundy's I hadn't heard of. The only Bundys I've heard of are Ted the serial killer and Cliven, the whacko rancher who believes he doesn't think he should pay to graze his cattle on our land. Now before you get your Bundys in a bunch, keep in mind I don't get out much so I might be missing something. If they wouldn't keep the key to the rubber room on the other side of the door I'd get out more. Do you know why they can't find Waldo? They think he's a cereal killer.