Sound the alarm! The Twins pitchers currently lead the league in team strikeout percentage! I know, I know, we’re talking about three games in March. This sample size hopes one day it will grow up to become a “small sample size.” That said, Jose Berrios and Jake Odorizzi each struck out 10+ batters in the Twins first two games, something that only Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling have ever done before. As an encore, Michael Pineda and Martin Perez teamed up for 11 strikeouts in 7.2 IP in game
With the announcement that Marwin Gonzalez signed with the Minnesota Twins, there was optimism in the Twin Cities. Optimism that he could be the missing piece. Hope that he would fill in the gaps on the roster. But he failed. No, I’m not talking his fielding or his hitting. I’m not talking about a need to improve the pitching staff. Heck, I’m not talking about baseball performance at all. I am talking about numbers. No one is wearing the number 4. Gonzalez selected to wear the #9 that he
Johan Santana is the only unanimous Cy Young Award winner in history to be benched on Opening Day. In 2004, Johan Santana won the AL Cy Young Award for the Minnesota Twins. He received a perfect 28 of 28 first place votes, breezing by Curt Schilling and Mariano Rivera. His 228 innings pitched was second most in the American League while his 2.61 ERA lead the AL among qualified starters. He struck out 30.1% of the batters he faced. Pedro Martinez, the next closest in the American League sta
UPDATE (March 4): Jose Berrios has been named the Twins 2019 Opening Day starter The “Opening Day starter” distinction means more than it matters. It is an honor given to a team’s best or longest-tenured starting pitcher, and it is treated by players and managers as just that: an honor. Whether a pitcher starts on Opening Day or in the second game of the season doesn't matter much when it comes to the team's record over a 162-game season, and yet we see a barrage of press releases and qu
Everyday Eddie Guardado has spent a lot of days in the Twins bullpen. Twelve of Guardado's 17 major-league seasons were spent playing for the Twins, and he added an extra four years as their bullpen coach under Paul Molitor's regime until he was let go this past fall. At some point during his first 11 season with the Twins, he picked up the nickname "Everyday Eddie". A quick search shows that the oldest online reference to "Everyday Eddie" is from a March 2001 Peter Gammons article in which he
Everybody loves a good record chase. Whether it's Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa's asterisk-fueled home run battle of 1998 or the very non-asterisk-fueled Kansas City Royals challenging the record for most consecutive innings without scoring a run last season—a record chase is compelling. There's a fine line, though, between fun facts and records. Fun facts get mocked (rightfully) for having more qualifiers than valuable information. “He has the most infield singles on Tuesday night home games be
On March 21, 2010, the Minnesota Twins locked up Joe Mauer to an 8-year extension. They also locked up Joe Mauer's face. The "Face of the Franchise" or FotF (as no one calls it), is an oft-cited, nebulously-valued sports phenomenon. It’s hard to say with certainty that there actually is value to having a FotF, but even if we all agreed there was value, how much value a FotF adds is impossible to quantify. Does having a specific player's face plastered on banners and billboards around town
I really hold back what I would like to say about then payroll arguments here. The fact that people don't accept the amount taken in dictates the amount going out requires one of two things. Extreme financial ignorance or fanatical bias that prevents the acceptance of something some basic. I did not change the argument. It's the same idiocy over and over. Do you really want to be on the side that suggests revenues does not determine spending capacity?
At this point in the pre-season, I’m just so happy to be seeing games again, I don’t care about the Twins record in 2023. I think they’ll win it all, unrealistically speaking 🙂
I really hold back what I would like to say about then payroll arguments here. The fact that people don't accept the amount taken in dictates the amount going out requires one of two things. Extreme financial ignorance or fanatical bias that prevents the acceptance of something some basic. I did not change the argument. It's the same idiocy over and over. Do you really want to be on the side that suggests revenues does not determine spending capacity?· 0 replies
