Doomtints

did the twins win yet

What about in cooler areas of the country?

Cooler weather favors pitchers. Don't read too much into what happened yesterday.

The Twins had a LOT of player churn in the 00s and I don't remember anyone accusing them of tanking.

All of the past Twins teams that were good had trouble getting up to 95 wins and this team has nothing on them. If the rest of the division collapses (and the Twins don't collapse too), 88-89 wins is possible. But also ... who cares? This team isn't built to win in the playoffs. Beating up the division isn't good enough anymore. Now that I read it more closely, "95 win upside" does not mean 95 wins. Who knows what the heck that means.

They said: "Robert Mueller is a PROFESSIONAL EXPERT who will leave NO STONE UNTURNED!" Mueller's report said: "Eh, there maybe have been obstruction of justice. Who can tell?"

Duffey has two pitches. How many does Harper have? (I'm asking, I really don't know).

No sense swinging like that in an exhibition game. I hope he gets back to it soon.

We are saying this was a brilliant move by the Twins ... but the Giants were absolutely desperate for an outfielder. The Giants cut Maybin after he had a DUI and Joyce for not being good enough. Adding Joyce was a desperation move they made just a couple of days ago. They since added the grandson of Carl Yastrzemski in a move that is more to create a buzz than to field a great outfield and traded for Michael Reed. The Twins could have gotten much more here. Spring training is about to end and the Giants had no outfield! The Giants are the winners here a thousand times over.

This front office doesn't do anything predictable. The bench players could be almost anybody at this point.

I think overall this team will do well but will be sunk by a long losing streak or two.

There are many very good baseball coaches from the US working in Germany in the little leagues. The military has set this up for the kids very nicely. Most of us assume the competition is worse in over there, but I would not be surprised if the median little leaguer there is better than the median little leaguer here. Sure, the top team in the US could probably beat the top team in Germany more often than not, but for every very good little league team in the US there are a hundred teams that aren't good at all.

Germans love making compound words for conceptual things that are 20 letters long. "One who bats leadoff in baseball" would certainly be in the wheelhouse for such a word. I believe the term we would want in this case would be der Zuerstenschlagmann.

I expect the three batter rule to fail miserably and the owners will ditch it as quickly as they threw it on us.

Buxton is dominating spring training. What are those other guys' names again?

The dollar amounts here are misleading. The players are paid for half a year of work but this is throwing around "x per year" and "y is the poverty level." Yes these salaries suck but the only players making this much "per year" are the ones who don't work jobs over the winter. Personally I don't know why my ticket to Target Field has to cover minor leaguers being able to play video games all winter.

Gibson is one of the "very slow to develop" players that defines the Twins teams of this decade. I always thought he had promise, yet I had to watch him fall on his face a few times anyway. Maybe this year is the year. Wow, we have turned into caricatures from the film Major League.

Martin Perez was never as good as Sanchez was before Sanchez's good year last year. So will Perez be two full ERA points better than his average this year? Nah. Perez is too young to be completely out of gas (probably), so he should be back to his old form (i.e., a #3 / #4). He will slot in nicely with all of the other #3 / #4s on the team to give the Twins the predictable year they are looking for (build for .500, hope for more).

Both of those examples ARE strikes. The downward motion of the ball continues after the ball passes the batter, making it look like maybe it wasn't.

It's a big wound now because it had to be opened up to remove infection and dead tissue. When I was 7 years old, I stepped on a nail which produced a tiny wound but it got infected deep inside. It had to be opened up to cut the infection out and only at that point did I need stitches. There was no chance for me to clean the wound as it was a puncture wound and the infection was not on the surface. I can buy his story that a cleat caused what seemed like a minor wound which turned into an infection. If this had not happened to me, I too would be skeptical. However, I know from firsthand experience that this can happen. As for Sano, yes he has made more than his share of bad decisions but the Twins have made bad decisions for Sano too. Twins fans shared an opinion that Carlos Gomez wasn't smart enough to play baseball and he proved us wrong. Not only did Gomez have some great peak years but he turns out to be a very nice guy who does a lot for his fans. I think the Twins should trade Sano not because of Sano, but because of the Twins. The Twins don't know how to work with him. There is a long history of the Twins not knowing how to harness raw talent, with the Twins either breaking players by trying to change them or the Twins setting them free for a pitiful return.

I'm surprised so many people -- heck nearly everybody -- like these rule changes. They all feel very "un-baseball" to me and minimize the ability for good managers to make smart decisions to give themselves an edge. I also don't see how these changes help someone like Tyler Austin. I think they help the players at the other end of the spectrum-- it will give the old players another roster spot to stick around a little longer. We hear complaints about how we have moved to a "participation medal" culture, and it feels like these rule changes make it easier for crappier teams to compete. Casual fans aren't going to understand what's going on with a lot of this rubbish.

It would be very cool to be able to hide topics that we simply don't want to see. For example, I never want to see this one ever again: http://twinsdaily.com/topic/32382-recent-comments-by-buxton/ It's very rare, but there have been a couple of other threads in the past where the OP keeps them alive forever. I don't care if others want to keep talking about something, but I'd be happier if I could just hide a topic and forget about it.

Garver certainly improved over the course of the year in 2018. His hard work and increased playing time is paying off. If the Twins want to emphasize pitch framing, maybe they can adjust the backstop at Target Field to save runs from all the passed balls and wild pitches against that are going to happen.

Not so fast. Yes that's the narrative as most of us understand it today, but the reality is European countries decided to dump off their worldwide lands and rather than simply hand them off, they decided to make these arbitrary new nations. The plan to create Israel predated WW2. Israel was created around the time England created Pakistan out of thin air, too. Most of Africa was carved up in bizarre ways as Europe pulled back. All of these areas now suffer from the same strife.

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