Unwinder

I hope they don't do a spoon bridge and cherry thing for the City Connect uniform.

Considering Minnie and Paul are wearing baseball uniforms and holding baseball equipment, I think it's reasonable to assume that they are intended to represent baseball players. If they change one of the guys in the logo to have darker skin, and somebody publishes an editorial saying that the new logo isn't inclusive enough because both figures are male, I will send you ten bucks.

obviously we need to expand playoffs some more.

I'd say the obvious difference here is that about half the players on the Twins' 40-man roster are not white, while none of them at all are women.

Gonna be in the minority here, but I think the Twins (and most teams) actually SHOULD tweak their core color scheme. There are already way too many red white and blue teams. I realize that baseball is all about tradition and nobody wants to see teams with neon yellow or hot pink accents, but just using traditional colors like red, blue, green, white, gray, beige, black, orange, maroon, gold, purple, and brown (not to mention lighter and darker shades, powder blue is very distinct from navy blue) you can make over a hundred unique two-color combinations. Expand that to three colors, and there's no reason that more than one team should land on red white and blue. Currently there are at least 19 teams that use red or blue as one of their main colors, and ten of them have a main color scheme that includes red white and blue, Whenever I watch the Twins on TV, if one of the teams is wearing a blue or red uniform, I have to look closely for a while to figure out which team is the Twins. You should be able to identify your team at a glance, even if they have half a dozen variant uniforms. Differentiating the teams should be more important than team traditions. I never have to look twice to figure out which team is the Vikings.

I think that dropped fly ball was more of a no-brain problem than a no-heart problem.

I like Ohtani better and think that what he's doing is more special, but both are very good. Historically good. Since MVP is voted on and doesn't have standardized criteria I'm actually OK with it being awarded to Judge simply for the sake of variety, considering both have earned it.

I've decided that while I loathe the Yankees, I don't have anything against Judge specifically. He's going to either leave the Yankees, depriving them of their best player, or he's going to absolutely gouge them for an obscene amount of money. Sure, he's not going to bankrupt the Yankees, but they can't have him on their terms, and that's enough for me to not root against him. Would love to see Arraez destroy him, of course.

I agree totally, the Twins have Mahle, Gray, Ryan, Ober, Varland, Maeda, Winder, and a recovering Paddack. I think that improving on this would take a much bigger splash than they're likely to make, but rolling with these guys is going to require a revamped bullpen with guys who can cover more innings.

Yeah, I wouldn't say that I'm enamored of the front office right now, but also I think it's weird that everybody assumes that if they stay on, they're just going to do all the exact same stuff all over again. Maybe there's someone else out there who's better for the job, but even in the most menial jobs I've had, the dumbest employees have had some ability to adapt to failure.

Nothing left for me to look forward to this season except going to see Shohei Ohtani.

I have now given up on this season. I was a holdout and I give up.

I do feel like it's fishy that the Twins seem to be suffering disproportionally so many injuries over multiple seasons, but I have no idea who, if anyone, has dropped the ball. Are they drafting and trading for more risky players than other teams? Is it poor conditioning? Are players not being trained to play in ways that minimize injury? It seems like it's a too much to attribute to just bad luck, but I'm not totally convinced that it's a problem that requires tearing down leadership and starting over. People love to assume that Falvey, Lavine, Baldelli, etc. are completely set in their ways and can never fix anything wrong with any part of their system and I just don't have the depth of knowledge to know if that's true of this problem. This year they did try pretty hard to avoid injuries with the off days, and we wound up with another very bad injury year. Does this mean they're out of ideas and we can't get any more ideas without getting new management? I have no idea. As for the Mahle and Paddack trades, I don't have complete information, but I still view them as risks worth taking that did not break in our favor.

I haven't tried this myself, but isn't it also now possible to put in an order for snacks or beer or whatever on some sort of app and they bring it straight to your seat? I feel like I saw this advertised somewhere.

Looking at it from a different angle, we've reached a point where teams are convinced (though many of you obviously aren't) that the most competitive winning strategy is one that results in a low-action, high-strikeout, no-small-ball game. At this point, I think we have to choose one or the other: A game that looks and feels approximately like the baseball we're familiar with, or a game that has the same rules as the baseball we're familiar with. We can't have both. Teams aren't about to start bunting and stealing bases just because it's fun to watch.

I don't understand how so many people are so sure that hitters' inability to "hit it where they ain't" is a failure of hitters' work ethic or coaches' willingness to teach hitting. Pitchers' work ethic seems to be just fine since velocity and stuff keep improving. It seems odd that this epidemic of unmotivated, undercoached players could be limited to position players only. Hypothetically, let's pretend it could be proven without a doubt that today's pitchers have stuff that's just too good for a human beings with human reflexes to hit with the level of finesse needed to send the ball to the part of the field where they want it to go. Would you want them to restrict infield shifts then, or would you still want the rules to stay the same?

I feel like Ryan, Mahle, Gray, Ober, Winder, Maeda, Varland, and Paddack (though he'll be coming in later) make up the best starting point for a season that I've seen in a while. Don't see any room at all in there for a bargain-bin reclamation project. Obviously this isn't bulletproof since we have all these guys now and a bunch of them are injured, but if I'm the front office I'm spending my 2023 Happ and Shoemaker money on some relievers who can pitch more than one inning to make up for all these guys who are only going to cover five innings.

Love to go into extras in the first game of a double-header.

Yankees fans on Twitter are complaining that this is basically the AAA squad.

Beautiful inning for Louie

Looks like the equation has suddenly changed. Do you think he might end up just getting called up as the 27th man for the doubleheader now?

Sadly this FO treats position player pitchers as fungible. I knew this would happen when they let Astudillo go.

That ending was chaos. Madness. I'm not even really mad they lost because it was so wild.

I'm always interested in reading articles about Baldelli, but more than any subject in baseball, I need to skip the comment section for the sake of my sanity.

I think Correa's chances are limited by whether history views the Astros sign-stealing scandal as unforgivingly as the PED era.