Sucks to not win after a perfect start, but the Yankees are pretty good. Wanted that win so badly but it was a fun season. Future is bright etc.

Was most definitely not the perfect start. We left runners on 2nd and 3rd with 1 out in the first; big difference between 3 and 5 to start a game.

We lost this game when Santana gave up the 3 runs right back in the bottom of the 1st. He holds there, we keep the momentum, and the Yankees start pressing instead of the Twins. I blame Santana.

Santana had a great year and was as responsible for being there as any Twin. Yankees are the better team and just played better. Oh well

Santana just didnt have good stuff last night. That happens.

Wonder if the Twins will ever have good pitching. Our lineup can keep up with anyone (with Sano in there). Not only did this organization not get any relief help at the deadline, they traded away their closer, lol.

Odd stats:

This year the Twins used 52 different players. That is more than any other season in their history. The 2nd most was last year: 49 different pitchers.

That is because this year the Twins used 36 different pitchers. That is WAY more than any other season in their history. The 2nd most was last year: 29 different pitchers.

Despite this, they allowed almost 101 fewer runs than last year.

Trading for relief help (at least the twins version of it) is usually a losing play imo. If you're going to do it you need to get dominating players like Andrew Miller, Aroldis Chapman, David Robertson, Joe Nathan, that caliber of player. Trading any real assets for guys like Matt Capps, Brandon Kintzler etc. (merely decent relievers with some closing experience) is counter-productive because all teams already have a bunch of guys of that quality and they're not worth very much

Well they were 50-53 and looked out of it. Then Buxton and others went on a huge hot streak, and all the competition for the 2nd wc failed miserably.

They were probably 5% to make playoffs on Aug1, not a bad idea to aim for next year at the deadline.

Due for a bump. What are your guys thoughts on the team this year? I think we end up slightly better than last year, possibly even taking the division.

Wtf Polanco? No one cares if you do PEDs; I'd snap do them if I quite couldn't make the majors and knew a 1/3 of league does them. Just don't get caught. How can they be that stupid to get caught?

Sucks to lose Polanco but sucks less than losing maybe any other starter

Odorizzi for Cy Young.

Buxton w/ a stolen base on 100% of his hits so far this season.

Fun to talk about baseball happening. 6 innings down, 1,452 or so more to go!

I feel like with how valuable 25 man roster spots are these days (because of the relief pitcher revolution) more teams should have position players pitch in blowouts. This position player-pitcher should be someone who

1. has little to no defensive value so if he ends up with arm fatigue it doesn’t matter.
2. Probably is not one of your best hitters just in case there’s some goofy injury or lack of focus that results
3. Ideally plays DH a lot since you can just drop the DH and slide him into the pitcher spot without using a bench player any time he’s in the lineup as a DH.
4. Is able to throw 80 mph strikes with very little physical effort.

I don’t know if Logan Morrison has pitching skills but if he did he’d be the fit on the Twins. Or, like, Albert Pujols on the Angels. If you did it right you might be able to eat 30-50 innings a year without losing any more games - and you could potentially carry one less pitcher

Is any team gonna be in enough blowouts that a position player could get to 30-50 innings? Seems like a stretch. Also points 2 and 3 seem at odds with each other, altho Pujols does match the profile.

My thought was that you could potentially get 3-5 innings out of him in a blowout. If it’s one inning at a time it’s not really worth much.

Of course with the 10 day DL these days you can essentially rotate your borderline pitchers and effectively get extra roster spots that way, which decreases the value of my suggestion pretty significantly

Lol Twins. Back to back sweeps. How is Rodney not only in the league still, but a closer?!?

Rosario not making the All-Star game is insane. He has better numbers than every reserve outfielder.

Time for a bump on this... best team in baseball?

We're in the mix. If we can add a good pitcher or two, that might put us clearly on top.

I think their performance thus far has been pretty clearly the 2nd best behind the Astros. Sano replacing Marwin makes them better, but probably not enough to make up for Cruz and Gaver going to the DL.

I could see adding one starter and maybe a reliever (because pushing one of their current starters to the pen would likely improve it already). None of their starters' performance so far suggests that they need to be replaced, but it wouldn't hurt to have a good 6th. Even Pineda has a good K/BB, but seems to have been a little unlucky so far.

Starting pitching has been great. Unsure if odorizzi and Perez can keep this up though. I have a feeling a strong regression might be coming for those 2

For whatever it's worth, it looks like Odorizzi's average pitch speed is up 1-1.5mph across all his pitches and his biggest change is that he went from throwing 5% curves every year to 12% this year.

Perez obviously has had his changes well documented (never threw a recorded cutter before and now 34% of his pitches are cutters)

I would be more inclined to think people will regress to the means if the peripherals remained the same....not saying it couldn't still happen, but seeing change makes me a bit more optimistic.

Perez's fastball is also up about 2mph over his career average.

Dong gong in full effect

Going tomorrow, first time in years. Love how coincidentally Mauer is gone and we have the best team in in a long time.

whats even better than having a good team first year that mauer is gone, is they are on pace to shatter home run records