D. Hocking

When you consider your peers - 70 is not really that old.

I wonder if I still have my maroon toughskins. Everything comes back in style at some point, including pants with reinforced knees to protect you when you fall of rusty money bars to the concrete below or you get impaled by a jart.

I saw a comment recently that Mauer is going to be 40 next year which made me realize, I am older than forty and did not make me feel young. Damn.. on the challenge.

and you can always draw on the seasons 2011 to 2015 or so for material. Pitching Rotation Massacre.

I am not sure how I missed you were from Frostbite Falls. Does that mean Chief is really Boris?

I did not realize Squirrel was blind. I do remember one season she had a really creepy Eye avatar.

I forgot we were supposed to positive through the weekend and was anticipating the half inning ending in a bit of a disaster and crooked number action.

WCCO radio -- the Twins mothership, 830 AM.

WCCO works on my smart speaker.

Is it too much to hope it is Bert's old fart T-shirt?

At least on the radio -- the music as they announced the line-up sounded like a mix of polka and 80's techno pop.

He was on their first album that did not sell well. He played cowbell, and when they decided to focus more on horns, and they traded him.

Not a fun game or season, but this stands out to me: On May 20, 2012, Butera pitched the eighth inning of the Twins 16–4 loss to the Milwaukee Brewers. Butera pitched a scoreless inning, issuing a walk and striking out Carlos Gómez If I remember correctly, he pitched to Mauer who was visibly laughing after the strike-out. Sadly, I did not find the video, but found one where he pitched an inning for the Dodgers as well.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kKqJxO0w_A&t=1s

I am guessing Mauer once he is eligible (is it five years off of the team?). I don't have an issue with any of the inductees, but they are going to run into some dry years, and as someone mentioned above, I wonder if they should have spread them out over three years..

I don't have cable, so do not have ESPN etc. Is this being covered heavily there? Maybe I have missed it, but this seems to be hardly covered in the regular news, and spring training is not that far away. If this was football, I feel like it would be a bigger story outside the sports channels.

Who knows what really went on behind the scenes, and a player bears responsibility for his bad play, but I remember thinking at the time that Zimmer was not the best person to deal with a rookie like Dan Carlson having a shaky start. Perhaps for a while, that might have just been dealing with kickers in general. I have a feeling Zimmer does not have a lot of patience for things that are not in his wheelhouse. Didn't someone, and his father, take a parting comment about how Zimmer treated players a couple years ago? Not that you don't have to take comments like that with a grain of salt, but the comments today are not totally out of the blue. I think the coach often gets blame for things beyond his control, but I don't think there are too many people, maybe even Zimmer himself, that did not feel it was time to move on.

I am going to be positive for now and not overanalyze and say -- 2022 World Series MVP -- hopefully he negotiated some sort of bonus for that.

If I remember correctly, they occasionally went off topic...

Fun can increase exponentially with this team quickly.

I bet Ken Burns is debating about holding off on releasing his revised Baseball series to add a chapter to spotlight the 2021 Twins and Tigers teams.

I got home around 9:30 last night, debated about listening to the game, checked the score, where I believe they had a 5 to 1 lead in the top of the 9th, so I decided just to watch the Olympics - that chicken dinner was being prepared across Twins Territory. What were the chanced that the bullpen would blow a lead at that point?

A lot of chickens have had their lives saved by the Twins this season.

Sadly, with this season, I think the "something worse" will always have the potential to just be a game down the road.

I was out watering and remembered the game so I checked my phone -- and thought 13 - 0 in the third inning has to be some sort of phone glitch. I then took the dog for a short walk and checked again -- and then checked how half glass full vs glass half empty the game thread was and realized - the score was not an error with my phone.

I just caught the tail end of the conversation, but Provus and Gladden were talking about this and that it was league wide. Something about last year's short season contributing to it. It might have been that people were not as conditioned because of it or they took it easier in spring training this year because of it. Baltimore broke the game open around that time and for some reason I had to turn off the radio.