LaBombo

And the Bert as well...

Duffey still looking good for that 170 pitch CGSHO.

Because stats be damned, he LOOKS like a ballplayer! Rob Antony's hunches are like gold when it comes to player valuations...

Raise your hand if you'd have been shocked if this Twins outfit had saved its most exciting comeback win for one of a dozen games that's not on TV this year...

Taking the needless out is bad enough, but getting 'out-managed' by Dusty 'walks are bad' Baker... ouch. http://www.famousbirthdays.com/thumbnails/baker-dusty-large.jpg

Get drunk, dress a pet like a hotdog, and pass out? http://statsstylescore.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/hank.jpg Never mind, I was thinking of my central MN relatives...

Agreed, although it's a font of reason and accountability compared to a reliever getting a vulture W for giving up a one pitch rocket lineout to CF after a starter who pitched 8 innings of a scoreless tie gets a pat on the head.

The Twins may not perpetually lead the league in player days lost to the DL, but if there were stats for performance lost to playing through injuries the Twins would have to be near the top of the heap.

Not mightier than the sword today. An object lesson in the near-irrelevance of reliever ERA...

Like music Late in the Evening, the magic of xFIP is finally seeping through in the second half... http://www.geetarz.org/reviews/misc/paul-simon-late-in-the-evening-front.jpg

Four letter's perpetually obnoxious Steven A. Smith called it "The weakest move by a superstar... evah! ". Knowing what many people think the 'A' in Steve A. Smith stands for, I'm sure Durant was curled up on the bathroom floor in the throes of a massive anxiety attack after hearing that shot. Have fun getting rocked like an inflatable Bozo punchy, rebuilding Lakers!

Yup. And now it takes over a hundred questions on the Voight Kampff to ID Kepler as a replicant, up from 20 or 30 when he arrived from off-world. Nexus 6, baby! http://www2.pictures.zimbio.com/gi/Max+Kepler+jFCN7TCMm0Qm.jpg

The higher his trade value becomes with improved play, the more indispensable Terry Ryan will regard him as. http://progresoweekly.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/alan-arkin4-catch22.jpg Catch Twenty Two. http://www.majesticathletic.com/store/ProductImages/details/13307_home_b.jpg

Well played. On a related note, I imagine that Buxtion and his agent are thrilled beyond words that Byron will no longer be patrolling center field next to a guy whose name probably translates in some language to "charging bison".

Would it be ok if the Twins keep that Sano in RF thing in a secret compartment in the heel of their organizational shoe instead?

So now Sano is going to play the position he's been playing and improving at since his professional debut, instead of the position where the Twins had arguably the only logjam of actual present and future talent in the organization and where Sano looked entirely out of place. And all it took was a discarded journeyman hitting like Frank Thomas for 30 games and the sudden maturation of a 23 year old player who grew up in a country where baseball is only a little more commonly played than it is on the moon. The Twins WayTM! I can be happy with how the Twins played this one in exactly the same way that I can be happy with my dog for randomly darting across a busy road without getting hit: by focusing only on the result.

Same for me, for the most part. Put another way: it seems that it's not subtracting an Arcia that's hurting the Twins as much as the lack of a rational, repeatable math that can reliably tell the Twins that subtracting Arcia is the right answer.

Agreed. The Red Wings are in first place in the IL North and don't need a Buxton dragging them down. And the more Grossman plays the more likely we'll know the exact second that his Faustian bargain expires.

Don't sell Danny short, no pun intended. He compiled that team-worst WAR in less than half a season's worth of at bats! Gotta respect that kind of efficiency.

Nick wrote a thoughtful, well-written article that raises some valid points. Arcia is still a very one-dimensional player. He hasn't done much in his past two (extremely limited) looks in the bigs. And he's often been plagued by absolutely ridiculous hair styles (ok, maybe Nick didn't mention that one). And probably when Nick wrote the passage below, he was speaking in broader terms about the game in general rather than just the Twins and Arcia. But as the kids say, O... M... G...: Merit ?!?! The 2016 Minnesota Twins are a virtually merit-free zone! They are empirically and indisputably the most merit-less team in baseball as measured by W/L record. If merit were rocket fuel, the Twins wouldn't have enough for a manned mission to Walmart. Oswaldo Arcia batted .231/.300/.452 and compiled a defense-hobbled 0.9 WAR in 410 PA's. He was the best power hitter on that team. It was enough to earn him exactly 65 more plate appearances in 2015 - two weeks' worth. I can think of half a dozen Twins who did less than Arcia did in 2014 yet somehow 'earned' far more of an opportunity to play through their struggles.

Yeah, I thought about excluding the word 'playoffs' but figured that including it was a way to be fair to Gardy and at least indirectly credit him for putting the Twins winning enough to be in a position to be crushed in the playoffs. But yes, at this point the only good thing about the Twins' ongoing concession of the 21st century to the Yankees is that not having them in the Central has prevented the Twins from claiming the Cleveland Spiders' worst record throne.

The best thing about Nick's article is that it makes no attempt whatsoever to argue that Santana has done more to earn a roster spot than Arcia. Danny Santana is not an infielder. He's just the first non-infielder off the bench if you need an emergency infielder until a replacement from Rochester arrives. Danny Santana does not even hit like a backup, unless you're talking about a backup AAA player brought up for 15 days regardless of readiness. He was the worst non-catcher hitter in baseball last year and remains near the bottom this year. At this point Danny Santana is Byron Buxton minus some of the defense and almost all the potential. The most significant difference in their game at the moment is that Danny's switch hitting means he has two utterly dreadful approaches at the plate to fix instead of one.

Since World War II, there have been only two ways to keep your MLB manager job after just three consecutive 90 loss seasons: work for an expansion team, or work for Terry Ryan. Gardenhire was let go after four clunkers because even the Twins eventually needed to hold someone accountable for a terrible product. And you're right, we'll never know how the 2015 Twins would have performed with Gardy managing, but the point is that NO team would know, because as a matter of unerring historical trend they would have fired him after 2013. Molitor has been an enigma and an occasional source of consternation (bunt-o-rama offense, 'Wheel of Misfortune' bullpen) in his brief tenure, but i can't imagine how anyone could be so put off by him that they would miss a guy who any other team in baseball would have canned a year before the Twins did. When I think of Gardenhire, I think of a good yet frequently exasperating .500 manager who lost to the Yankees in the playoffs a lot and then lost to everyone in the regular season a lot. Time will tell how Molitor is remembered, but my bet is that it won't be as 'the guy the Twins should have never hired instead of keeping Gardenhire'.

How many MLB managers with 4 consecutive 90-loss seasons get a chance to manage ANY team again, let alone the one with which they amassed nearly 400 losses in less than half a decade? Gardenhire returns if 1.) Molitor loses control of the team. AND 2.) Ryan doesn't want an interim manager to come from within. AND 3) Pohlad doesn't want Ryan to select a manager on more than an interim basis because Ryan is gone at the end of the season. In other words, Gardenhire, his 82 win regular season average, and historically bad postseason record aren't coming back. Great pot stirrer topic, though. How about a thread? Don't forget to bring up the idea of Gardy bringing back Ullger!