Doomtints

I cried three times last week too. Each time Belisle took the mound.

If we need a shortstop, let's call up the Smalley family. Which one are they on now, Roy Smalley IV or Roy Smalley V?

I agree the players are responsible. But when it's most of the team? Managers (in any field) have to solve these types of problems.

I'm responding to your post that because the Twins had 90+ losses this justified you being triggered. When it was pointed out that the Twins weren't going to lose 90, you said 85 then. They didn't lose 85 either. The Twins only dropped 7 games from last season. What really happened? OPS+ 2017/2018: 104/95 ERA+ 2017/2018: 97/98 The pitching stayed roughly the same compared to the rest of the league and the hitting got a lot worse. We already know why the hitting got worse: Buxton Sano Mauer Dozier Polanco Castro Morrison Only one of those players was picked up during the offseason, and ZERO of us expected all of these players to take a nosedive (or be out, in Polanco's case). The only person who can truly be blamed for 2018 is Molitor. It's his job to figure out how to get the best out of the players. This isn't the first year under Molitor that the hitting took an unexpected dive.

They lost 84 games.

The Switch is a good platform. The Spider Man game is very good from what I have seen. Raft is a fun game with friends.

Escobar will be too much $$$. I don't anticipate much of a market for Dozier if the Twins want him back.

You have to be consistently good over the course of an entire season to finish with over 200 strikeouts. If anything, this has proven the idea of him not being good this year is vastly exaggerated.

200 Ks is a really big and important milestone. Pretty cool for Berrios.

I didn't say Ryan gave him the contract.

Terry Ryan almost certainly thought the contract was debilitating, and for a while it was only his opinion that mattered. Dollars are simply incompatible with that guy. I think the contract did hurt the team, but only because I have no question that Ryan's overreacting to the contract hurt the team.

Gibson he has to play just as well next year to prove he is a "late bloomer." Besides, calling him a late bloomer discredits his good pitching in 2014 and 2015. For now, let's just see if he can continue his success next year. I imagine he can, but I'm not putting any money on it.

Hildy is very feast or famine. I bet if we take the time to look at the matchups we will see the reason why. Molitor should give that a try.

Good article. For a team that kept promising rebuilds through the draft, they sure do whiff a lot at drafting, don't they? I don't like calling draft picks "busts" or "flops" because so few draft picks in baseball ever work out anyway. This is just part of the business. And anyway, the Twins don't seem great at developing players. It's hard to blame the draft picks alone if they are being taught bad habits.

He was a general sports columnist at the Augusta Chronicle for 3-4 years before moving to the South Florida Sun Sentinel for 14 years to (mostly) be a beat/deadline writer (not generally covering sports). He's kind of only been a Twins writer for the worst years of the franchise. I'd leave too. He's a good journalist and he will do well.

Dozier debuted and grew up during this time, he wasn't a staple of the team nor were people expecting much from him. Morneau, well, we know how that played out. Worley is on the spectrum and the team didn't know how to handle that (too bad, how often do people give up on spectrumy people? Too often). Willingham was cooked and couldn't play defense.

The Twins won't lose 90 games this year and they last lost 90 games when Terry Ryan was running things.

After Lou Holtz did good things with the Gophers and moved on to Notre Dame, so will Berardino.

They were 4-2? Wow, doesn't feel like it.

I wish. Mauer, who won't be around much longer, is batting leadoff. They're not auditioning jack. Dude should be batting 8th or 9th. No one auditions for the bottom of the batting order and he's not hitting well enough to be at the top.

This is on management.

I don't know why minor league seats would cost $40 when you can get into Target Field for less than that. The problem is how do you define a "minor league team" in this instance? There are many minor leagues, and many more minor league teams that are not affiliated with a major league club. Are non-affiliated teams really under the jurisdiction of the MLB? The MLB has plenty of cash to make this work if they want to, but what would they get out of it? Why spend time, money, and effort on teams that don't feed the MLB?

I disagree. The Twins had no foundation back then. Now they do. They have some pitchers who can pitch, they have some people who can play defense, they have a couple of people who can hit. At this point it's all a matter of filling in the gaps. Last year the approach to filling in gaps was, "Let's beat Cleveland." This year they can focus on how to beat everybody. It will probably work out better.

The skeptical side of me thinks this is all a matter of access. When one group lets you sit on the sideline and another doesn't, well.... It's just a reminder that we are not impartial journalists around here. We are fans.

The Cubs had a lot of winning seasons in the past 20 years. The Cardinals just had their number. The level of suck Twins fans endured has been bigger, it just gets less press. Cubs fans today are saying the Cubs have proven that the tear down and rebuild model -- which the Cubs had been doing -- has been proven bunk. As they watch other teams ebb and flow, they take pride in now being one of the teams that has sustained success. Cubs fans tend to be very savvy about baseball, mind you, putting us to shame in a lot of ways. I often call them a cult.