She also probably wants you to eat a vegetable and call her
Tawny is still on an alien hunting tour with Jose Canseco, (or something,) so you all are stuck with me today. I promise all my jokes will be bad, but the links will be good-ish. Fair enough?
Some of the stuff we’ve done here lately, TJ is bad at doing link dumps, so it’s been a bit
- The Twins utterly shocked a small yet vocal minority of members at this site, not getting swept by Cleveland this weekend, and in fact winning two out of three. All three recaps are linked in this bullet point, because why waste bullet points, right
- this bullet point intentionally left blank, to prove the above point wrong
- We did a couple satire pieces during the All-Star break. One of them is about those darned Millennials (yells in baby boomer.) The other one looks at what each player did over the break.
- Cole looked at the legitimacy of Luis Arreaz’s hot start. Because Cole is smarter than I am, it has charts and graphs and math. It’s not boring math though. It’s fun math. If such a thing exists.
- We swapped questions about the Marcus Stroman and Ken Giles trade rumors, with our friends at Bluebird Banter. They’re pretty nice people, as far as Canadians go.
- There was a bunch of other really, really good stuff during the last week, despite your not-very-humble author being too lazy to round them all up. Go to your homepage and scroll down if you don’t believe me.
But TJ, other people write about the Twins too!
- The always excellent Pat Borzi at the Minnpost wrote an interesting look into the struggles Rocco Baldelli has had giving his players rest days this season. Rocco’s mom apparently thinks the Twin’s manager needs to “limit stress and get his rest.” All our moms tell us that, Mrs. B.
- P.S. Mom, if you’re reading this, I’m fine, I’m eating well, and I promise I’ll call soon!
- Jon Tayler (who would drop the ‘a’ out of his name if he wanted to be cool, all the cool people are named “Tyler”) wrote up his take on the best trade for every AL team to make. He suggested the Twins pick up a left-handed reliever, but not a name we have talked about a whole lot yet.
- Trevor May is annoyed at you guys. Not most of you, but those of you who get on social media and get all negative. You folks should probably stop, seriously.
As odd as it sounds, there are baseball teams outside Minnesota to talk about:
- In a game honoring their late teammate, Tyler Skaggs, the Angels pitching staff put together a combined no-hitter. Usually I prefer the old-school one pitcher version, but something about the team effort just feels right about this one.
- Hardball times provides an interesting look at the history of MLB divisional alignment. The Twins once enjoyed playing in the AL West, with Kansas City, Chicago, Oakland, California, and Seattle/Milwaukee. No Cleveland? Sign me up!
- If you recall, the MLB and the Atlantic League have partnered up to try some of Rob Manfred’s wacky ideas to
ruinspeed up baseball. One of these is to allow a steal of first base. It just happened for the first time. A slightly more popular idea, “Robot Umpires” also made a debut. It took all of one game for a controversial call to happen.
Old Timey Baseballer of the day?
One of my favorite segments that appears here from time-to-time is the old-timey baseball player of the day. I think I want to try that out. Today’s old-timey player is Millard “Dixie” Howell, who was a pitcher from 1940 to 1958, with a break in the middle due to certain world events happening in the early 1940’s. Despite technically debuting in 1940, his rookie season is considered 1955, and he threw a no-hitter in 1950 as a member of the old Minneapolis Millers. He also holds a couple spots in the MLB odd records book, as his write-up on baseball-reference notes:
Dixie Howell holds three of the weirdest major league records. First, Howell’s 1957 batting line is the all-time single-season record for most hits (5) without a single, tied with Rick Wrona in 1994. Second, he is the last relief pitcher to hit two home runs in one game: he did this against the Washington Senators on June 16th that year. Third, Howell holds the record for the longest time between when he first pitched in the majors and when he got his first victory. He broke in during the 1940 season, with the Cleveland Indians but didn’t get a major league victory till 1955, hi rookie season with the Chicago White Sox at age 35, when he got 8.
Video Game Music for your Monday:
Enjoy!
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(What, wasn’t this already long enough?)