Cup of Coffee

April 13, 2014: Happy Little House

56 Comments

One of my good friends wrote a song called "413" in college and I think of it on this date every year. That thing was an earworm. He probably could have made a hit out of it.

56 thoughts on “April 13, 2014: Happy Little House”

  1. Morning game alert: Chattanooga, with Alex Wimmers (remember him?) pitching, takes on Montgomery at 10:35 Central today.

    1. Adrian Salcedo is pitching for Chattanooga, not Wimmers. That makes more sense, as Wimmers was moved to the bullpen last year.

    2. Chattanooga scores six in the second to go up 6-0. Byron Buxton is having his first good day of the season, going 2-for-2 with a single and a double

    3. A two-run homer made it 6-2 going to the bottom of the fourth. Salcedo, who's also normally a reliever, was replaced by Cole Johnson. I don't know why the Lookouts are having to go with a bullpen game in the fourth game of the season--my guess is that maybe the callup of Trevor May created a ripple effect.

    1. Ha ha Scioscia!
      It warms the cockles of my heart to see that the LAA are one of the four AL teams that that Twins are within one of.
      He others are CLE, CWS, and NYY*.
      *Ha ha Girardi!

      In other standings news, the Athletics have the third best run differential in the league at +17*, but have a losing record at 3-4.
      *Undefeated DET is +31 and undefeated KCR is +25. KCR hasn't even had the advantage of playing the Twins! Maybe they are for real?

      1. Twins Geek said on his podcast that (a) the Twins were going over their 72.5 win total and (b) he thought the Tigers would win as few as 76 games. In other words, he's thinking Twins are about as good as the Tigers.

        Ha.

    2. Since we don't strike anyone out, let's make sure our outfield defense is below average too!

      1. Eduardo Nunez is thrilled and amazed that you consider his outfield defense "below average"

  3. I will be at the home opener this afternoon.

    As excited as I am to see baseball (especially given the forecast today), I think the last time I was this down on the Twins at the start of a season was the mid-1990's. I am very close to actively rooting for embarrassing losses so the organization will be forced into a youth movement.

    1. I'm with you there Scot. I have not watched one inning so far this year. It isn't out of protest; I just have literally forgotten they were on every time I had the opportunity. Nothing about the team excites me right now. It's very much like the 00 team that was trotting out Butch Huskey and Midre Cummings and Ron Coomer and Sean Bergman and....Torii Hunter? Aww, man.

    2. I'll be casting my eyes in the direction of the stadium while not taking part in my workplace's home opener tradition: a hot dog lunch. (No veggie options.) (This is one of two days all year when the company provides lunch for all employees; the other is for the holiday lunch in December.) Enjoy the weather and the game!

    3. I'm still listening (and watching when I can), but as I've said before, I'm consoling myself that the worse they play now, the sooner the kids will come up.

      1. This is me too, though I haven't had a lot of time to watch/listen lately. It sure was nice to catch that win while I was driving though.

        The biggest thing for me is keeping an eye on the prospects, and really getting excited for them. I'm looking so forward to J.O. Berrios.

    4. While I'm looking forward to the youngsters coming up I'm so disillisioned with Terry Ryan, et. al. being able to surround the the young studs with other good players, I'm worried that it's not really going to matter a whole lot. Yes, that's a lot of disillisionment.

      2. The worst thing that has happened to this organization was peaking when the division was down. It allowed the organization to ignore its warts and focus on those division titles.

    5. The 2006 Twins started out 1-7. The Twins have the reinforcements to make the kind of turnaround that team made with Jose Berrios as Francisco Liriano, and Byron Buxton as Jason Bartlett, Eduardo Escobar as Nick Punto, and Trevor May as Boof Bonser. Unfortunately, we don't already have a Johan Santana.

      1. Or a recent history of winning, which would suggest 2006 was more good players returning to being good players, and not... what we're looking at this year.

      2. Or 2006 Joe Mauer or Justin Morneau or 2006 Torii Hunter. 2006 was the greatest regular season that I can ever remember. I am very confident that this club won't even begin to approach the greatness of that club.

      3. In 2006, Liriano was 22, in his sixth year of pro ball, and had half a season of success in AAA. Berrios is a year and a half younger, is in his fourth season of pro ball, and has made ten starts above Class A (9 AA, 1 AAA). Maybe next year Berrios can be Liriano, but as high as my expectations are for him I don't think it's reasonable to expect him to be Liriano this year.

        1. I would never expect anyone to be Liriano 2006. I was just trying to make a silly comparison. But if we're going to continue with this comparison, through age 18, Liriano had thrown 151 pro innings and Berrios 30 because Berrios couldn't be drafted until he was 18 and Liriano was signed out of the Dominican before his 17th birthday. Despite the head start, both made AA about midway through their age 20 season. Liriano of course had a better K rate but Berrios had a better walk rate, HR rate and a much better WHIP. I suspect that Berrios won't be up here until late in the season, but I think that will mostly be because the Twins will try guys like Meyer and Taylor Rogers first. Plus, Santana will be back and push May down even if he's replaced Pelfrey in the rotation.

          1. I am extremely excited about Berrios, probably more than it's reasonable for me to be.

  5. Perhaps I don't follow politics as closely as I should, but I was legitimately confused by this headline:

    'Spoiler' SelectShow

    (Spoilered just in case, but I don't mean to get into anything forbidden zone-y here.)

  7. Went walking around TF before the game today. This tweet got some action for me.

          3. Ha, I was looking at this on my phone yesterday, and it cut off the second half of the picture, so all I saw was "Harper", and I was thinking "okay... so?"

    1. If your resume says you've been working at White Castle for 10 years, why would it make sense to hire you to be a chef at Butcher & the Boar?

      Nicely done. Mark Hamburger didn't make the team despite a 10-2 K-BB rate in 9 2/3 innings and 10 base runners allowed in the spring and throwing in the mid-90s. Why did he get sent down? Because he had an ugly ERA. Twins still way behind in evaluation methods. At least they are stockpiling power arms in the minors. Hopefully, they'll get here quickly.

  9. Wow. Cedar Rapids is 4-0 and leading 8-0 behind Felix Jorge, who has 8 Ks in 5 shutout innings with one hit and one walk allowed. Yes, that's right. Jorge is their fifth starter! He's actually had great numbers in short season but struggled when he got to AA last year. Hopefully, this is a sign that he learned from his experience last year.

    1. As I type this, Ryan Eades also has a shutout going for Fort Myers. The Lookouts have already won and the other three Twins' affiliates are ahead, two with shutouts going. I know the big league team stinks, but we may have quite a bit of fun following the minor league teams this year.

  11. LEN3 tells me the Royals are great. The reason: multiple players are hitting over .400. Yeah, right. That will last. That's called a team being hot. Remember the Twins' offense in April last year? Wasn't Colabello going to be an MVP? The Royals aren't this good and the Twins aren't this bad, especially their offense.

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