LaBombo

His fans would rightfully insist that he had several other good songs, but I've wondered if we might ever wake to the UK Guardian headline 'American Die: Angry McLean fans rip singer limb from limb when he fails to perform hit'.

Well, there are worse ways to go, I guess...

Basically anything that means not looking at the present is good.

"Steve Sax and his run-in with the law, Ken Griffey's grotesquely swollen jaw... Talkin' Dozier, Ozzie and The Straw" http://www.sportsonearth.com/assets/images/8/2/0/90622820/cuts/simpsonslead_8menzpi5_iqg0r5na.jpg

Hughes fastball = http://bsc.omg-squee.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/homer-in-candy-land-300x230.jpg

AKA the on deck circle...

A good Division II team would be teeing off on him at this point. The home run and double to left just now were particularly batting practice-y. It's all well and good to show up to spring training vowing to improve on a career year. It's entirely another to sh!tcan most of what made that career year great in the quest for improvement.

That was ultimately a disappointing run of years, to be sure. It's also nearly three more years than the combined tenures of the three GMs who you feel have accomplished nothing so far. In that shorter time span the 'unaccomplished' GMs you named have as many playoff series wins as Ryan's teams did '02-'10. It's also interesting that you apparently see those years as primarily Terry Ryan's failure. Ryan assembled two almost entirely different 90+ win cores in those years, and yet only in Gardenhire's rookie year, when he inherited a veteran team from Tom Kelly, did the Twins win a playoff series during those 9 years. Following that win, Gardenhire went on a run of playoff futility of epic proportions. His teams not only lost badly, they simply failed to show up and compete, and Gardenhire's managerial decisions were skewered in the national media. So given a choice between the notion that Ryan assembled two almost entirely different groups of playoff choke artists and the idea that maybe an otherwise good manager is mostly to blame for multiple 90+ win teams being almost entirely unable to win a playoff game, let alone a series, I'm forced to go with the latter choice.

Your "facts" appear to be saying there's one good GM who wins the World Series and 29 equally failed GMs who didn't. If GMs who turn losing teams into playoff contenders didn't "actually accomplish something", then we just have radically different ideas of accomplishment, I guess.

If by "clarify", you mean 'grotesquely distort', then well done, I guess. The Cubs are the best team in baseball dating back to the 2015 opener. The Dodgers won their division last year and are among the N.L.'s top 5 in run differential this season. Friedman has had fewer than two years on the job and inherited some of the worst contracts in baseball. He previously took the Rays to 4 postseasons and a World Series despite being in the toughest division in baseball and having roughly the budget of a high school class presidential campaign The Diamondbacks are below .500 at the moment but improved by 15 wins after just one year of LaRussa at the helm. Just a suggestion, but if you're going to try to sell those records as failures, you might find a more receptive market among fans of a team that's not en route to averaging 90 losses for six consecutive seasons or, for that matter, one that has more than one postseason series win in 25 years or more than zero in the last 13. The ideal candidate would also be on pace for fewer than 113 losses this season. Ideally.

There's a moment in the movie version of Moneyball where Art Howe insists that Billy Beane postpone an off season meeting with scouts and work with him on a new contract. In refusing, Billy points out that "At this moment, if a grounder is hit to first, nobody's gonna be there to stop it from rolling". At this moment, the Minnesota Twins lack a person to stop their baseball operations failures from rolling past first and into right field. That person is not Jim Pohlad. That's a problem, to put it mildly, because as things stand today, Jim is the only person empowered to make a change at the top of the Twins' baseball operations chain of command. Despite that, when pressed by Chip Scoggins about the team's struggles and the possibility of taking a new direction at the top, Pohlad responded with an acknowledgement of "total system failure", followed by what amounted to a shoulder shrug and a 'Waddaya gonna do?', as if he were merely an ordinary disgruntled fan. That person is not Dave St. Peter. While Mr. St. Peter may be a big Twins fan, his exchanges with the media make it clear that he's simply not knowledgeable about the baseball operations side of the equation, and that he is not trending upward in that department. That person is not Terry Ryan. Terry Ryan is too busy figuring out how to fix the Twins to have either the time or the distance from the problem to figure out whether he should be the guy fixing the Twins. As a franchise, the Twins are flailing like Byron Buxton in the majors. They connect occasionally and show signs of promise, but the results overall are now objectively, undeniably bad. If Dave St. Peter really is good at sampling bratwurst and cajoling cable execs, let him keep doing that in a more narrowly defined role. But Jim Pohlad needs to find somebody else to really run the Twins, without a single precondition of retaining ANYONE in their current role. Otherwise that 90-loss ground ball is going to just keep on rolling as long as momentum carries it.

Might want to go with 'didn't work as intended'. That would explain both the end of the win streak and some very strange and messy goings on in my utility room this afternoon: http://www.blastr.com/sites/blastr/files/images/SorcerersApprentice-thumb-330x234-12052.jpg Oh well, that's what home owner's insurance is for. The utility room, not the broken win streak. They'll need a new incantation for that.

Yup. Dostoevsky was the drummer after Chad Channing. But then he committed a crime. There was punishment. Dan Peters took over.

The poor man is in shock. He's gotten to call more good plays for the Twins in this game than in the previous games this month combined.

And Kubrick directed. It's hard to imagine him saying 'Hey, that's a little too trippy for the kind of movies I make, Jack'.

Not sure if referring to mild knee sprain tonight, or... http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/12089630/images/1284526412078.jpg ... .658 OPS this season.

Could be worse.

Felix Hernandez's pitching ability was siphoned away by a small, mangy alien parasite dangling from his chin. Pat Dean channeled Dean Chance. Mauer went deep. Danny Santana briefly exceeded the speed of light while chasing a ball in the gap and sling-shotting through Planet Sano's gravitational pull. You know. The usual.

Sleep well... http://www.aplusfirearms.com/images/angry-mob-left.jpg

Schwerve is just Yiddish for getting a room at Treasure Island and Pon Farr is Vulcan for... god knows what, so.... we're good here, right?

Mauer goes deep: the Pegasus wingman to the Dean > King Felix unicorn.

It might be a bit of an insight into why Vulcans only get their Pon Farr schwerve on once every 7 years...

I guess, but I thought of it more like... Dr. Rollins, the dormant phase before he morphed into Mr. Henry at the next gig. http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/JekyllAndHydeLXE_2780.jpg

Just a regular 6-2 lead has a kind of surreal Twin Peaks quality to it. 6-2 Twins with Dean outdue... out-whatevering Felix Hernandez, well, that's some serious Spock on a Unicorn $#!t right there... http://img06.deviantart.net/fdea/i/2012/016/2/d/spock_on_a_unicorn_by_hobo_style-d4mjquq.jpg