Doomtints

We have seen Dozier for enough years to know that he will warm up and atone for his slow start. We haven't seen Morrison for a long time as Twins fans but we can see by his stat sheet that he was never consistently good and was often consistently bad. Garver has been slowly getting better which everyone has somehow failed to notice and/or acknowledge. The Twins have the pieces to have a good bullpen but aren't using them. The starting staff is good enough, and would be better with better support. OK, those are the facts.... But the most important facts are: Buxton and Sano are in the minors. Twins management has given up on this season and are looking to the future. This is probably why future cornerstones of the bullpen are also in the minors. But this also means the Twins will be selling off veteran talent this year. The team we are talking about right now won't be the team that finishes the season, so going down the rabbit hole and talking about assets at this point is a waste of time.

I disagree. Baseball is a team sport with individual metrics. This is a disconnect more than anything else.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/

Plus this is all before the Twins trade talent away and Cleveland does the opposite.

Baseball is a team sport. Everyone stumbles and it's OK. The others lifted him up like they are expected to do.

Vargas is better than Morrison.

Don't forget (I've been saying this for nearly a year now) -- last year was an unusually down year for the AL. We shouldn't read too much into the Twins performance last year, nor the lack of performance this year. The Twins hitting right now is similar to what it was two years ago, and last year many thought the ball was "juiced." The Twins are on pace for 72 wins, and this is before pieces start being sold off. Didn't most of us have them pegged for around that many wins last year?

Twins fans' obsession with catching is a bit cray-cray in my opinion. Every year it's the same discussion. Falvey actually did what the fans clamored for and grabbed the flavor of the month catcher, and it turns out those resources were wasted. Shocking surprise! Just bring up a catcher who can play defense at the plate like he is supposed to and put the money and effort to upgrade/improve somewhere else. The Twins have top defensive catchers in the farm system, and that's what a smart GM wants from his catcher. Hitting is nice but it's not what catching is about. No one even knows what "pitch framing" actually means, either, or what its impact is.

New SP inconsistencies aside, the Twins would have been fine this year if the people who were expected to hit the ball had actually done so. Morrison was a terrible pick-up, which was obvious all along, but no one expected Dozier, Sano and Buxton to be terrible (maybe one of them, but not all of them). Also no one expected to be without Polanco for most of the year. No one expected Castro to be as bad as he was either, nor Garver. This is the second year on Molitor's watch where the hitting took a nose dive, and yes this team could actually do the unfathomable and lose 100 games again. Sure the front office made a blunder or two (Morrison? Really?) but the front office wasn't wrong to expect half of the hitters on the team to simply perform as they had performed before.

The Twins gave up on Murphy after *one year.* It should be noted that Murphy is hitting and defending better than any Twins catcher this year.

Which modern baseball writer has seen either of those two play? No writer would make that comparison. I bet if you think real hard you can remember one contemporary superstar player that Buxton *was* compared to every time his name was brought up.

In any other time period, the GM doesn't gut the outfield and can bring up Hicks at the right time. Hicks then sticks around long enough so that Buxton can be brought up at the right time too. For everyone who, at the time, saw Terry Ryan's first moves as re-GM as being so bad to as to cause years of frustration in the OF and at P, kudos to you.

And there *was* an abundance of absurd hyperbole being thrown around when it came to Buxton. You can do better than pick on someone's word choice. The spirit of what he said is 100% true. If you managed not to see the buzz at the time, you are either incredibly young or you weren't following the Twins much back then.

But baseball "eras" aren't defined like that. And if they were: - You had to omit one year in the 70s to get that result (cherry picking). - If you want to omit the best season in the 70s, lets omit the worst one too. After doing that, the team is .500 for the 70s. - Without cherry picking any years, the Twins were under .500 in the 80s, 90s, and 2010s (so far), with the 2010s being on pace to be the worst decade of the franchise in MN (and it's not close). - Overall, the Minnesota Twins are under .500 since 1961. If we can roll W-L totals into arbitrary decades, we can roll up the entire shebang too. In any case, the Twins were at .500 or above six times between 1971-1979. That is *not* a bad "era." The actual bad eras are: - 1981 - 1986 (High water mark: .500 (once)) - 1993 - 2000 (High water mark: .481) - 2011 - Present (High water mark: .525 (at or over .500 once))

"Celebrities" can do whatever they want in our culture. The OJ Simpson verdict should have been a wake up call.

Nah! 1972: 77-77 1973: 81-81 1974: 82-80 1976: 85-77 1977: 84-77 1979: 82-80

I know this is a little off topic, but I like talking about it. The Twins were built to have a dynasty in the late 60s which never materialized, but they were close. In today's playoff format they would have probably won a championship or two. The Twins weren't bad throughout most of the 70s. If Griffith were alive today, he would tell you there were three things that killed his ability to run the team: - The AL adopting the DH rule. Griffith said the stats used to sell the DH rule were bunk, but he only figured that out later. Griffith later contended that the DH rule hurt more teams than it helped and he regretted casting the deciding vote. - Leaving the Old Met to go into the Metrodome. - Free Agency. I would throw in the following: - The player's strike in 1981, which sank attendance until 1984, the year he sold the team. - A weird loyalty to Billy Gardner, a terrible manager who could not manage relief pitchers. - Griffith was masterful at building teams with top tier infield defenses which became worthless after moving into the dome, especially with the original turf. (The Twins, particularly Hrbek, figured this out, and began hitting balls directly to the ground, 10 feet in front of them, and watching the balls sail another 200 feet over the heads of the middle infielders after the bounce. However, this took a couple of years to figure out and exploit.) What sank the team under Griffith? The dome. Griffith didn't like free agency, but FA was one of the minor factors. The Twins held on nicely throughout the 70s until they moved into the dome in 1982. Griffith is on record as not liking free agency so people focus on it, but the reality is that the Twins went from a "Near Dynasty" to simply "A bit above average (in an era of some VERY good teams)." The team didn't sink down to nothing until leaving Met Stadium a dozen years after their last year in the playoffs.

Seems like reality set in for the players on this team.

The Dodgers are a better team. Dave Roberts has the problem of getting all of his good players on the field. Paul Molitor has the problem of trying to field a team that can win games. Without looking, I would wager the Twins profile of games started by player is more normal in the MLB. Most teams are closer to the Twins than they are the Dodgers when it comes to talent.

Yes. Historically, the Twins Way has been to get young guys and older guys, but fully miss that time in the middle when the player is actually above average. Many Twins fans follow that ideal too, not sure why. I can fully buy into it that Gibson is a late bloomer. It happens. He doesn't look that different on the mound, he's just pacing himself so he doesn't run out of gas in the 4th or 5th! If the Twins have a teamful of Gibsons, yes, by all means, trade the guy. But: - all but one of the starters are worse than him - all but two of the starters won't be around much longer - many of the starters are older than he is - he is a bargain at his salary. There's just no good reason to trade him.

This is why we can't have nice things.

Balls fly when it's hot and humid.

Cool Senators logo bro.

Maybe, but it's the Twins way. A certain Twins GM lost his job for this very thing.

Looking at the box score, it doesn't look like he had to bother to throw it hard. I wouldn't read into this without hearing HIS opinion. Molitor wasn't there.