Cup of Coffee

May 2, 2014: Free Alex Meyer?

107 Comments

In honor of another poor Pelfrey start, how about an Alex Meyer poll.

How many games will Alex Meyer start for the Twins in 2014?

  • 6-10 (44%, 11 Votes)
  • 1-5 (24%, 6 Votes)
  • 16 or more (16%, 4 Votes)
  • 11-15 (12%, 3 Votes)
  • 0 (4%, 1 Votes)

Total Voters: 25

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107 thoughts on “May 2, 2014: Free Alex Meyer?”

  1. Wild Playoff Watch - Second Round Edition

    Game 1 tonight - 8:45 PM (on NBCSN) in Chicago. - The Wild have never lost a second round playoff series.

    No one is really giving the Wild a chance in this one. Probably with good reason, the 'Hawks are real good, they're the defending champs, they beat the Wild easily last year, the Wild may not actually have a goalie by the time this series starts... But whatever, pressure's off, and the Wild did handle Chicago pretty well in the regular season (3 wins, 1 loss, 1 shootout).
    It would be really nice to play from ahead, and against a team as good as Chicago it might be necessary. The Wild have lost their last six Game 1's in playoff series. In fact, they have only ever had two games in the NHL Playoffs where they had a series lead (in both cases they lost the next 3 games).

    1. Quick look back ( a before we look ahead:

      Game 7 was the highest-rated telecast ever on Fox Sports North. The Wild’s midweek matchup against the Avalanche generated a 16.4 household rating in the Minneapolis – St. Paul DMA, according to Nielsen Media Research. The previous record*, a 15.3 rating, was logged in August of 2010 by the Minnesota Twins (vs. White Sox).** In the Minneapolis – St. Paul market, 17,280 households represent one rating point. That means over 283,390 households tuned in for the playoff series finale. The game received a 32 share, signifying 32 percent of the viewing audience in the Twins Cities watched the game. During OT, the telecast reached its peak viewing audience with a 18.3 rating and 49 share, indicating that nearly half of Twin Cities households were tuned in.

      *kinda cool the Twins held that record. Lots of basketball & hockey on FSN the past 4 years.
      **Twins played the Sox 6 times in Aug 2010, @ Chicago the 10-12th and @ home the 17-19th. Not sure which one garnered the record.

    2. I was talking to a bartender during game sever, and it turns out he's from Chicago. He was watching with great interest as to who the 'hawks would be facing. He wasn't so optimistic about their chances, but I assured him that the curse of Minnesota sports fandom would prevail and the Chicago ice hockey club would likely emerge victorious.

      1. I'm not sure the Hawks are going to need the curse of MN sports fandom for this one.

        1. As I said yesterday, I'm thrilled that the avalanche are out. I'm a happy camper.

          1. Oh, me too. The ride's been a thrill. The last series was so exhausting, I gave up last night and went to bed early.

    3. Yeah, the pressure is off. The Wild is playing with house money now. Chicago's deeper and better up front and in back. If Crawford doesn't turn into a pumpkin, I don't see anywhere the Wild has an edge.

      1. You can tell it's been too long since a MN sports team has had any success. We're all ecstatic about just reaching the second round when our team came from a conference where more than half the teams make the playoffs.

        I'm in complete agreement though. Even if they lose in 4, I'm happy.

        1. I'm sure that's probably true, but I was more thinking about the development of the Wild as a team. Coyle is 22, Granlund 22, Haula 23, Nino 21, Brodin 20 and even Spurgeon and Scandella are just 24. I'm personally hoping there's room for growth.

          1. I agree entirely - didn't mean to be critical, just used it as a jumping off point.

          2. Heck, even Kuemper doesn't turn 24 until Monday! Every extra game facing high-quality opponents with a lot riding on every shift (i.e., the playoffs, and for the Wild, most of the last 2 weeks of the regular season) provides a great opportunity for these young guys to grow. Just look at the difference between Spurgeon Game 1 and Spurgeon Game 7.

            1. Agreed. And who knows, right? Hockey's weird. The Habs have no right to be up on the Bruins today, but there ya go.

  2. NBA Playoffs: I wasn't watching last night because driving, but three game sixes were played, in every case, a game 7 was forced.

    OKC rights the ship with a blowout of Memphis. I expect OKC will now survive.

    IND beats ATL, they'll likely move on now, too, although they've been shaky enough to invite doubt.

    GSW beats the Clips, setting up what will likely be the best of these game 7s.

    1. I missed the first two games (mostly), but watched GSW/Clips. I won't say it was a great game, but it was definitely an exciting game. Except for one weird stretch of "hack-a-stiff" near the end of the first half, where GS hacked DeAndre Jordan to force FTs, then LA retaliated immediately by hacking Hilton Root to force FTs at the other end. Oy.

      Both teams shot poorly. Clippers really struggled to score in the paint. Griffin was pretty bad, Chris Paul was bad (and struggling with injuries). For GS, Thompson couldn't hit much of anything. But GS scrambled, and grabbed offensive rebounds, and forced turnovers and, inexplicably, escaped pretty severe foul trouble and the loss of Jermaine O'Neal to injury in the first half.

      I give GS a lot of credit for persevering despite the losses of Bogut and, now, possibly, Jermaine O'Neal. How the hell are they even competitive against a team with low-post scoring? Draymond Green has really demonstrated his versatility and value in this series. Dude is a complementary player, but one that should be making a boatload of money soon. David Lee, on the other hand, has been exposed as over-hyped and over-valued. His defense is pretty bad. Dude lives off of being an afterthought to other teams' defenses, but when he has to play defense in the post, he gets manhandled.

      Where was Steve Blake last night?

  3. From LENIII:

    And I think everyone is gassed right now. Michael Tonkin, Brian Duensing and Anthony Swarzak all have throw in back-to-back games. Jared Burton pitched in both games, which they were trying to avoid with him. Caleb Thielbar and Casey Fien look like they should be available tomorrow, but Twins manager Ron Gardenhire said everyone in the bullpen was wiped out.

    Obviously it's a huge problem that the starters haven't frequently gotten past 5 or 6 innings since Game 1 (avg. 5.49 innings/start) and the bullpen has already combined for 97 innings of work, but come one. It's the 2nd of May, 26 games played and the Twins just had three days off. Is it unreasonable for me to scoff at the thought of 8 professional pitchers being wiped out after pitching a combined 15 innings over 2 days? Am I being a Stribbie here and missing something? I'll be happy if someone can show me that I am being unreasonable.

    1. Jeff has a suitable response to this.

      One of my pet peeves about the Twins announcers, both on radio and TV, is that they're always saying things like "Gardy is forced to go to his bullpen here" or "Gardy is forced to go to his bench in this situation". No, he's not. He's not forced to do anything. He's making a choice.

      Make the relievers throw more in a game, but in fewer games. They had 14 pitchers active for yesterday. Stretch out relievers so they can go two or even three innings.

      1. Three might be pushing it, but I definitely think more relievers should pitch two innings at a time, or at least 4-5 outs. The main thing to avoid is having them face any one batter twice. If a starter goes 5 innings, it's not so crazy to expect the bullpen to get through the last 4 innings on 3 pitchers.

        One of my big pet peeves with using relievers one inning at a time is when they have a great inning and retire each batter they face. Theilbar, Fien, and Perkins combined for 2.1 IP yesterday, but collectively they didn't even make it once through the Dodgers' order. In particular, using Theilbar against one batter on the day of a double-header is just short-sighted. And then with Fien getting through the 8th on 18 pitches, why not use him in the 9th? Even if it's just to pitch to a couple hitters, then bring Perkins in for 1+ innings.

        1. Perkins was hot; I would have used him for more than just one inning. Maybe not a lot more, but I'd certainly use LH/RH to determine when to swap out, not inning boundaries.

    2. To be completely fair, I think the problem is with the way Gardy used them. It is generally going to be harder for pitchers to go on back-to-back days. I think the big problem is using a pitcher against 1-3 batters after you've gone to all the trouble of warming him up. Every now and then there is a high enough leverage situation where you might really want to play the percentages (like, say, it's the 8th inning and the bases are loaded and you're protecting a 1-run lead), but managers seem to act like any time the score differential is -3 to +3, they need to pull out all the stops.

      Partly, I think there is a subconscious blame avoidance going on. Generally speaking, if a relief pitcher is initially effective, but then struggles, then it's blame the manager time--"he left him in too long, it was obvious he was fading, etc., etc., etc." But when the manager uses a thousand different pitchers and one of them allows the big hit, then the blame seems to go to the pitcher--"he can't get the one guy he had to face?, etc., etc."

    3. Aaron Hicks was placed on the seven-day concussion DL. To replace him, the Twins brought up...another pitcher, Logan Darnell. The only way this move makes sense to me is if he's going into the rotation.

        1. I hope that Nolasco pitches a complete game and all sorts of problems happen because of the short bench. But the Twins still win because obviously they will.

  4. Last night I had a CoC drafted about how this is the one-year anniversary of my friend Nayasha dying but I apparently didn't figure out how to finish it. I wasn't sure how I'd respond to this particular anniversary. It kind of sucks.

    1. Death may be a part of life, but it still sucks. On Wednesday evening, my daughter randomly says to my wife, "Sometimes I miss Nanna." My wife couldn't hold back the tears ... "Nanna" was my mother-in-law.

      1. It might seem odd to say this at first, but that's a beautiful, tender moment. Of course it's a reminder for your wife of losing her mom, but at the same time, what a wonderful thing to know that Nanna's presence meant something to your daughter and that her memories of her Nanna will always be warm and filled with love.

        1. I'm with that. My wife's grandfather had some serious shortcomings as a man that I won't go into here, but he was typically revered by children, as he kept the negative part of himself hidden from them, to his credit.

          Skim has mentioned Grandpa Ben many times, and how she just barely remembers him and how sweet he was to her. I think she was only three when he died, as he was sixty years older (to the day) than I am, and I'm pretty sure he was 90 when he passed. I don't miss the Grandpa Ben that I knew, but the Grandpa Ben that Skim saw was a reasonably great fellow and it's a shame I never knew that side of him.

          1. I had a vaguely similar moment yesterday. Received in the mail from my parents the obit and visitation notice from my Aunt's recent visitation. I read the thing and said to myself, "that's all there is?" So sad to see a life wrapped up in a paragraph.

            My aunt was an interesting and interested person: an MD who spent her career serving the U of M community as a health service doctor; an adventurous cook; an avid gardner and bonsai practitioner; a mother; and a wonderful aunt. She spent nearly a decade after her (early-ish) retirement providing live-in care of her parents (my grandparents), a process that took a great deal of patience and life out of her, even as (I imagine) it did give her some things back (her relationship with my MD grandfather was complex).

            Sadly, this is the way of the world. So few of us get the opportunity to leave something lasting that can be experienced beyond our immediate relationships. But maybe that is as it should be. I wouldn't want to turn the whole world into a museum dedicated to the dead.

      2. My 7-year-old wrote a poem about his Great Grandmother who passed away a few months earlier for a school project. She lived in Omaha, so he only met her a handful of times in his life, and did not make the trip for the funeral. It's amazing how much they absorb.

    2. Making sense of our emotions and responses to anniversaries of loss is a messy, convoluted process which should never have a timetable. There are obviously outliers with prolonged/complicated grief (labelled "disorders," which I think is unhealthy in itself). But I also think we (as a society) place unreasonable expectations on ourselves and others about how we should contemplate and process our losses and our responses to those losses. Sometimes searching for meaning can be comforting, but sometimes searching for meaning is unproductive and even harmful. And yet we tend to want to find a way to craft a précis about that experience which allows us to move on with life and to which we can resort when we're feeling the poignancy of that loss around its anniversary or from an unexpected reminder.

      The other day I found myself wondering about how my grandmother lives with my grandfather's absence; he died in 1988, and she could conceivably live to an age where she's been single longer than she was married. Both my mom and stepmom will likely reach that age by the time they're the same age as their mothers are right now. I guess what that made me wonder about is at what point we become a different person than the one our partners knew, and what that means (if it means anything at all). Of course, by extension I was wondering about how that same line of thinking applies to me and the losses I've sustained. And I don't really have an answer for any of that, but I think accepting that I don't have an answer is maybe more important that whatever the answer might really be.

      All that said, spooky, I'm sorry about Nayasha. Losing a presence that was so significant truly sucks.

      1. CH - Heartfelt, thoughtful and well said. Thank you. I'll be sharing this with my wife.

      2. I love all of this, CH, and have kind of come to the same conclusions as a result of the large number of losses I went through up until 2002, before a long nice streak before Nayasha's death last year. Trying to find meaning will drive a person insane (particularly in the wake of suicides, which her death wasn't, to be clear; she died of a heart disease at age 26 because such issues ran in her family, which is really no more "meaningful" than suicide, I guess).

      3. Making sense of our emotions and responses to anniversaries of loss is a messy, convoluted process which should never have a timetable.

        Very well stated. The same could be said, not just of anniversaries, but all along the way. There are an incredible number of ups and downs in the grieving process. The ups and downs can be day-to-day or even hour-to-hour. Sometimes things hit us from out of the blue. We're going along, having a fairly good day, and we hear a voice that triggers a memory, or a phrase, or a song on the radio, or we see something, or we smell something, or a hundred other things can happen that remind us of our loss. And we're right back in the middle of grieving again. It gets better, but it happens in its own way and in its own pace. And sometimes, if it's someone we really were close to, we never completely get past their loss. There's not necessarily anything wrong with that, either, as long as it's not one of those outliers you mentioned.

      4. echoing thanks here, CH.

        re: the grandmother thing. I can definitely relate. My father's father died in 1977 or 1978; his wife, my grandmother, lived (single) until 2005. That is a long, long time. Of course, they married in about 1921 or 1922, so still not as long as they were married.

      5. CH, I'm trying and failing to come up with an eloquent response, so I'll just say thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences.

        Spooky, I'm sorry for your loss. Anniversaries of bad things suck.

  5. I was at the gas station this morning and for the first time in forever there was Twins talk in the line at the cash register!
    Too bad it was "boy, our pitching stinks".
    I was happy there were no complaints about Mauer.

    1. Fortunately, very little.

      From everything I've read, the kid had tested things out, the remnants of which put the police on alert.

      An aware individual noticed some suspicious behavior and reported it. Police came, found the kid in the middle of his bomb-making equipment.

      It's cliche, but when you see something, say something.

    2. Here's a link.

      Police said they found three fully functional bombs, other bomb-making materials, gunpowder, numerous firearms and hundreds of rounds of ammunition in LaDue's home and in a rented storage locker.

      1. Man, would the kids in my town that put Santeen bombs on people's steps really be in deep doo these days.
        As it was, one had moved, and the other ended up in the Alternate School.

        1. "Santeen Bomb" gets zero hits on google.
          Fine then use another toilet-bowl cleaner.

              1. I guess NU was to Hydrochloric Acid bombs as MN is Duck Duck ____?
                Santeen back then looked like industrial: colored print on white bottles. Now they look fancy.
                Old Santeen vs. New Santeen
                I can't take the Works seriously.

  7. I can't tell you how happy I am with today's CoC title. I mean... we have a pitching prospect! You guys! We have a pitching prospect!

  8. Color me not surprised. Can't hardly stand my own armpits.

    2. It depends on your definition of "reliant." There are tons of great, original scripts out there. The producers will always go with predictable, though, and if there's one thing the average moviegoer loves, it's complete predictability.

      It always nauseates me when I hear about a great writer who pens a fantastic script, and from that, he ends up not making a movie but getting a deal to write the eleventh film in an endless franchise.

      1. I don't think there is much ambiguity about "reliant," as your comment goes on to illustrate.

        1. I realized by the end that "reliant" is indeed the word, and the only thing I'm saying is that more than likely, they don't need to be.

      2. I get annoyed by what seems constant remakes, but it at the same time I project the annoyance onto studio marketing departments. I assume remakes are a relatively small percentage of the movies out there compared to original scripts and adaptations.

        1. And of course, sometimes a remake is both a good idea and a huge friggin win. For example: Dredd.

  10. Hicks on 7-day concussion DL and Logan Darnell called up. So, the Twins have officially gone to a 14-man pitching staff. Unbelievable. That includes three long relievers.

    1. Well, I'm glad I'll be out of town this weekend so I don't have to listen to this garbage. Unreal.

  11. Fun Fact Of The Day:
    Daniel Webster, who ran for president and lost three times, declined the Vice Presidency twice, thinking it a worthless office. Both presidents who offered it to him later died in office...

    2. One of my favorite themes of presidential biographies is how inconsequential the office of vice president is.

  12. Im just putting this out there

    Dustin Morse ‏@Twins_morsecode
    Gardy believes tonight will be the first game he has managed with 14 pitchers on the roster. #MNTwins

    1. Of course, back when we had Cuddyer, Carroll and Butera, there are times we possibly had sixteen.

      (Wait...any overlap with Cuddyer and Carroll? How soon I forget)

    2. Splitting hairs- didn't he just have 14 pitchers on his 26-man roster last night for the double-header?

      1. Good thing he didn't serve them tiny Taco Bell.
        Cannibalism would ruin the whole cuteness thing.

    1. Well, now Pelfrey has suddenly come up with a "groin injury" and has gone on the DL. This despite insisting yesterday to the media that he had no idea why his velocity was down and that he felt completely healthy. Well, at least this means now the Twins can call up a position player and will be back to "only" 13 pitchers. Danny Santana is not playing tonight for Rochester, so there is speculation that he will be called up, so maybe this means we can avoid the Nunez era.

      1. Darn it, I almost posted something last night about waiting for the inevitable injury announcement but didn't mail it because I felt it was possibly too cynical.

        1. Now the question is whether it's a real or fake injury. Given his numbers, I'd guess real. Given his contract....maybe fake.

          1. The injury came out after they sat down today to figure out whether to pull him from the rotation and what to do with him if they do. To suddenly discover an injury is suspicious. Plus, it isn't that he hasn't said anything about it to trainers, it's that he's repeatedly insisted that he's healthy while he's been searching for answers to explain his early struggles.

          2. I would not be surprised to hear either be true, although I kind of lean more towards it being a real injury (though I haven't actually seen him pitch) that was held back from trainers because of #playyousissies. Its either that, a fake injury, or incompetence by the training staff.

            1. or, he pulled his groin getting into his car last night. I've done that many times.

              1. Maybe it was suggested that he pull his groin getting into his car after the meeting?

      2. Pelfrey didn't disclose his injury to reporters last night because he got it after his interviews, when surly fans kicked him in the 'nads on the way out to his car.

  15. I don't remember who, exactly, mentioned it (I'm thinking either meat or CH), but I made loco moco tonight. I need to make this more often.

    1. Loco moco's awesome. I need to make it again (or better yet, get my Hawaiian buddy to make it) soon.

      2. Speaking of things you've suggested to me that I think are great (in this case, Moscow Mule), you should check Woodman's. At the Janesville location 1.75 L bottles of Vikingfjord vodka are on sale for $15 with a $10 mail in rebate. (And, as I stupidly realized when I got home yesterday, the rebate for two bottles is $25.) I don't know if the Madison Woodmans hold the same sales, but that's a deal that's tough to beat.

    1. If they suspended Nene for his "head butt" they'll suspend a guy for anything.

  18. Earlier tonight, I was kicking the dirt in the back yard and found one of these.
    Pretty weird, the house was built in the 80s original owner of the house was subcontinental, so there's nothing in the history of the place that makes 20-year-old Bulgarian currency a likely find.
    I was surprised that the Bulgarians use the Lambda instead of the Cyrillic Л.

    I'll put it up there with my son's find of a block of small Amethyst crystals.

  23. I'm tempted to call that that, but with the way the playoffs have been so far, I'm not ruling anything out.

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