60 thoughts on “September 18, 2013: Wait, What?”

  1. I think this late August-through-now stretch of baseball has almost broken my baseball spirit. Maybe its the culmination of the last 3 seasons, maybe its the desperate need for seeing a starting pitcher go to the 7th innings...I dont know. But watching the Twins now is almost 'hate watching' a once great tv show only to have it overstay its welcome, like Seasons 8-9 of The Office or the last few seasons of How I Met Your Mother.

          1. Oh, and for the record, there was an episode of Happy Days where a guy literally jumped over a shark, and it was the best one!

            — Troy Barnes, Community

    2. I agree. Last night, I tuned in to the game long enough to see that Pelfrey had loaded the bases in the second inning and given up a run. That was enough to make me tune out.

      1. Spoiler SelectShow

    4. I don't think I feel any differently than I did at this point last year. If anything, I'm more interested in going to see a game than I was last year. I'm not tuning in on TV/Radio, but I'm still checking out the recaps and such.

      1. I am completely apathetic about this 2013 club except to the extent that they can break futility records. Maybe in two years when the young guys come up I'll be more interested, but this club is an embarrassment.

        1. Yeah, I'm in this spot where I find the Twins unwatchable but the division races aren't close enough to over that they're superseding the other obligations I have. So, mid-September is here and I'm barely watching any baseball. In a couple of months I'll be annoyed that I was skipping out on most of it, but my spirit's broken too.

    5. It goes back to the end of the 2010 season, after they clinched the division.
      Ten games left, best record in baseball (tied with the Yanquis).
      2-8, then 3 straight losses to the Wild-Card Yanquis.
      Then 281 more losses, nearly 100 more losses than wins.

      Gardy still at 996 wins: with one game against a last-place team, and the ten after that against two division leaders and the team that I expect to be holding one of the WC positions by the time they get here, can Gardy get to #1000 this year?

      2. Also: The Angels' magic number for having a better record than the Twins is 4.
        🙁

        On August 21, the Angels were a half-game behind the Twins: 55-71 (vs 55-70).
        Since that day, the Angels are 18-7. The Twins? 9-16.
        9 games lost in the standings over 25 games.

        1. Be comforted by the fact that a lot of talking heads inexplicably picked the Angels to win the division.

          I picked them to finish fourth with a losing record, and hey, close enough.

  2. Stolen from a friend:

    The guys from the Effectively Wild podcast got a question and looked up the players whose teams have won and lost most often when they have played. So not just the record of your team, but the record on days that you play (minimum: 800 games played). The worst active player is Ryan Doumit, of the Minnesota Twins, whose teams are 327-539 when he plays. If Ryan Doumit is in your starting lineup, you become a 61-win team, basically.

    2. I'm glad others are listening to Effectively Wild. I listen to a good number of podcasts (preferable to all but two spots on my radio dial hereabouts), and Effectively Wild is one of my favorites.

      2. I don't catch all of them (daily podcasts just keep piling up in my queue!), but I listen to probably 2-4 episodes of Effectively Wild every week. I tend to skip some of them when they start talking about the Yanks or Red Sox or the Hall of Fame.

        The "clubhouse leaders" episode was kind of fun.

    1. Eh. A chaotic finish like that would be hilarious regardless, and Trueblood's assertion that the coin-flip game makes a mockery of the regular season is the opposite of true, since it's now much more important to win the division again. Adding a team and a play-in game was the next-best thing to eliminating the Wild Card outright, as far as honoring the regular season.

      Nice to see Trueblood putting effort into writing again, though.

      1. I have gone toe-to-toe with him on the Wild Card game so many times. He's absolutely wrong about that.

        1. His use of "coin flip" is hilarious, too. If he thinks any single game is a coin flip, why does he care about the small-sample playoffs in the first place?

          He seems to be riled that there are more teams in the playoffs so they mean less, but what's the difference between the fourth and fifth seeds in any given year? Probably one to three games? A couple of coin flips. Big deal. His argument might hold water if both WC teams could get to the semifinals or finals of the league championships, but they can't.

          1. I once thought as he did. I've come around to the idea that it makes the division crowns more important, and that can't possibly be a bad thing.

            Also, anything that raises the chance of repeating what happened in 2011 is okay in my book (I still watch the intro movie to The Show 2012, because of the great recap of the final day of that season.

            1. I so wanted that Red Sox game to be postponned until the next morning, so that they had to finish the game in Boston (NY?) and then travel to Tampa(?) and play on the same day.

    3. David Pinto at Baseball Musings (one of the first baseball blogs I followed) has been pushing for these events ("Massive Tie Scenario") for more than a decade now. With odds!

      Here are his thoughts on this year (as of this morning):

      The chance of the six way tie remains remote, up to one in 56000. I’m still watching it, however, as the six teams play enough against each other that the leaders can still be drawn back to the bottom of the pack. We’ll see what happens tonight, but the Yankees and Royals pretty much need to run the table. A much more likely event would be the three-way tie between the Rays, Rangers, and Indians. There’s about a 1 in 34 chance of that happening, and big improvement from yesterday. A four-way tie that includes the Orioles comes in at 1 in 273.

      He also talks about the potentials for NL Central-Wild Card tie madness:

      The chance of this three-way tie is about 1 in 60.

      and...

      There is the possibility of a four-way tie in the NL with Washington, which would be extremely disruptive to the playoff schedule. It would require a two-day playoff to determine the NL Central Champion, then a two-day playoff to determine the two wild card teams.

      !!!

      The odds are too long right now, however.

      OK, nevermind.

    2. Your response was such that it made me go look up what Jory soil really was*...is that validation enough for you?

      *and down the geological spiral I went, eventually ending up here.

  6. i just watched a guy with a book of baseball cards soliciting autographs by the twins dugout take off his twins hat, put on a sox hat, and mosey over to the other dugout.

        1. What would be the worst cap for a professed Twins fan to be caught wearing? I can't decide between a Yankmes or Pale Hosers lid.

          Seems like the order of AL teams' acceptability is roughly something like:

          Yankmes & White Sox
          Angels
          Red Sox
          Tigers
          A's
          Indians
          Blue Jays
          Rangers
          Mariners
          Royals
          Orioles
          Rays
          Astros

          1. Yankmes & White Sox

            -
            -
            -
            Angels
            Red Sox - these three would be mostly interchangeable to me
            Tigers
            -
            -
            -
            -
            -
            A’s
            Indians
            Blue Jays
            Rangers
            Rays
            Royals
            Orioles
            Mariners
            Astros

            1. The A's are a little closer to the Tigers for me because of the old AL West rivalry from the '87-'92 run, during which the A's were absolutely obnoxious, and the 2002 & 2006 ALDS encounters.

              I also dislike the Rangers more than most Twins fans might, but that probably has more to do with how I feel about Texas than anything else.

              1. I have to admit, that break between Detroit and Oakland was a bit arbitrary. In reality, I would be hard-pressed to don many of those lids except maybe the bottom 3 or 4. Even then, it would only be in support of the shared recent or historic futility.

      2. I don't collect IP* or TTM** autos, only certified by the card company. I wouldn't mind autos on a GameDay program, though. And if a Sox cap touched these locks, I would shave my head.

        *In Person
        **Through The Mail

  8. PBS's Frontline looked at the risks of high school football. They reported on studies that showed hs football players took more blows to the head than college players and that the players had damage done to there memory throughout a season. The damage was done to players who had never had concussion symptoms and yet they could see damage on MRIs and on memory tests that they were getting progressively worse throughout a season. This isn't something that comes to a few through concussions or to the pros who play it for many years. These are hs kids. I can't believe this hasn't gotten more press than it has, but then again, maybe I can.

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