Doomtints

Biology is also low-hanging fruit, even if it's unexpected.

I agree, there are many plausible reasons the Twins didn't do more than they did. Most of us disagree, but we are biased as we have been wanting more pitching for a very long time. And if the Twins don't come home with rings this fall, we can all predict the conversation.

If you look at runs allowed, there are 4 teams better than the Twins in the AL and 5 in the NL. One of those AL teams won't make the playoffs, and one of the other three will drop in the wild card game. In the NL, the only team the Twins could face with worse pitching is the Braves, but there's some DH run deflation going on the NL. I'm not saying the Twins did enough to bring in more pitching -- almost all of us agree they didn't -- but I can understand why the team may have been looking at spreadsheets and decided they didn't have to do more than they did. They looked at "being better than most of the league" instead of "being the best." If they believe the future Twins offense will be even better than this year's record-setting offense is, their decision makes sense. However, I think most of us realize this is unlikely.

vlookup is something you will see as a minimum requisite for most Excel jobs, but if you really push Excel you gave up on vlookup and moved over to index/match instead (someone should tell the job recruiters). Microsoft is adding xlookup, which looks like it works like index/match does and Microsoft claims it's faster. Time will tell if that's true (it's almost certainly faster than vlookup). The drawback: Only Office 365 will support xlookup, which means many of us will stay away from it because so many people (and businesses) out there won't be able to use our workbooks properly if we use it. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Excel-Blog/Announcing-XLOOKUP/ba-p/811376

We should not judge how "good" anyone on the team is doing over the past couple of weeks considering the competition.

I think the Twins will finish the season on an upswing. As for the playoffs, this team might be flying so high from smashing so many power records they might just barrel over everybody in the AL and get challenged for the first time in the WS. If this happens, baseball will truly enter a new era, if it hasn't already, where teams chase power and pitching is a mere afterthought. But, more likely, the competition in the playoffs will be largely unimpressed by the power and will shut down the Twins offense.

Cool article. It would be fun to see which defensive plays were most important too.

May has had good runs before. In my eyes he's gotta do this for a full year before I can believe a new approach helped.

Ouch. My wife, her sister, and her mom all have this. Her mom had her colon removed in the 90s, the others struggled with it until they went to a gluten-free diet. Now, if they accidentally have gluten (typically from a restaurant), it comes back with a vengeance but at least it passes after a day or so. There are drugs that can help this, like Humira, though Humira is very expensive. Humira essentally keeps the lights on at Abbvie, a company that employs over 20,000 people!

It's well known that when people have fevers, they sleep poorly and have bad dreams. Sleep in a hot room and guess what will happen? If you have a lot of bad dreams, your bed or bedroom is too warm! Bad dreams are your mind's way of waking you up quickly. It's not difficult to imagine that having bad dreams night after night is probably not good for your mental health. This isn't just bad advice, it's potentially dangerous advice.

The sale price gives us some insight into the baseball business. When buying a corporation, buyers consider the future NET PROFIT value of the franchise for the next four years. Using standard models, a $1,000,000,000 sales price today means the Kansas City ownership was took a profit of $150,000,000 over the past year if you assume a rather ridiculous 10% growth rate. With lower growth rates, which I would assume is the case in the calculations, the Royals took even more profit for the team to be selling at a billion. Most of us would not debate that the Twins take in more cash than the Royals in a typical year. Enjoy!

The Twins are faring well against these teams now that they are "doing what they do" instead of sleepwalking.

It's interesting how quickly people forgot how the Twins played in the early Terry Ryan II years after the starting outfield was traded away. The Twins could only win games when Aaron Hicks was out there, and that wasn't because Hicks was hitting the ball. He was simply the only person the team had who could play defense. If that era did not teach us the importance of CF defense, it is utterly hopeless that we will ever learn anything. Personally I got sick of watching opposing teams beat the Twins by hitting chip shots all day long and I know you can't overvalue having the best CF in the game out there.

New to the thread? What's the fallacy for wanting to cut the guy and calling him worthless in spite of his great performance this year? By the by, there are plenty of top defensive teams who won championships, and none of the top home running hitting teams have one. I have been saying for a long time this year that the Twins need to play defense if they want to go deep in the playoffs, it's a shame that so many people think hitting dingers will alone will get it done.

Learns what? The Twins are 57-25 with Buxton and 23-26 without him. It would be great if he could play 150 games but if he plays 100 the Twins are still coming up ahead, no? Perhaps its fans who need to learn.