54 thoughts on “May 11, 2016: Happy Minnesota Day!”

  1. bS - beat my Cup post by mere seconds. Your intro is sunnier than mine was:

    Low grade fever and general crankiness means no daycare. Wife was home with Niblet on Monday. My mother was here with him yesterday. I'm home with him today.

    Oh, and I got a flat on the way home from a 22-4 softball drubbing last night. Tires have less than 7000 miles on 'em.

    Yay for me.

    1. One of my all-time favorite songs. Our jazz band in high school would play that every year to finish a concert. We'd play for 10-15 minutes and have a lot of players take a solo.

  3. Today is one year since I packed up everything I had (again) and left Austin.

  5. Anyone have any experience with ASUS or TP-Link routers? My Nightgear Nighthawk is having a lot of connectivity issues no matter which channels or settings I change and some communication with their customer service team has left me really frustrated. If they don't replace the router I don't plan to make another Netgear purchase.

    1. I have had an Asus Dark Knight (good god the name is so stupid) for a few years now. I've never run into issues. I'm not sure I have ever even had to power cycle it. Seriously. My previous router would stop working if a certain number of devices connected to it in a period of time. I had to reboot it like every two days. So, the Asus was a godsend.

    2. We have a TP-LINK TL-WR940N. I do not recommend it if you have Chromecast. For the Chromecast to work, you need to downgrad to v1 of the firmware. This, I suspect, leads to lots of power cycling when it gets crappy. I would love to upgrade the firmware, as I've heard it's a really good router otherwise, but like 90% of our consumption is via Chromecast+apps.

      1. I hadn't considered TP-Link until I saw it was the new Wirecutter recommendation. I almost bought an ASUS instead of the Nighthawk, so that's probably at the top of my list for now. Glad to hear the two of you haven't had any issues.

  6. Nick Nelson discusses the post-Terry Ryan era at Twins Daily.

    I agree with him 100% that it is both unlikely the Twins make wholesale changes when Ryan steps down (whenever that may be) and concerning to think of the internal candidates in line to be the next GM. My guess is that they turn it over to Rob Antony, which sounds like a horrible idea.

    1. I don't think there will be significant change unless the Pohlads sell the team. And of course, there's no way to know whether that will be a good change or a bad change.

  7. cc to JeffA, (perhaps Rhu)
    I'm not sure I've seen a bear in the wild before. Yesterday I saw two (black bears) about a mile apart. Apparently hanging out by the railroad tracks is what you do in Jasper if you're a bear. Never mind the half-dozen CN employees 30 yards away, either.
    Turns out bears are cool.
    Bighorn Sheep and Elk are also not bothered by train traffic.

    2. Wildlife will spend lots of time along the RR right of way as it is (by necessity) cleared of trees and brush, and therefore makes for a convenient thoroughfare.

    3. I saw a mama black bear with two cubs today while I was driving on 35 just north of Hinckley. They were on a railroad track at the edge of some woods parallel top the interstate. Very cool.

    1. Since this mentions Aaron and I didn't see the news elsewhere here last night, adding it now.

      I am curious what he'll write about.

      1. It'll be nice to see him to do more long-form like when he was with Hardball Times. HardballTalk didn't utilize his full talents.

      2. Has Baseball Prospectus been at all relevant since Nate Silver left? I canceled my subscription and stopped paying attention to them a long, long time ago. I felt like they got really dogmatic about all the new stuff that more advanced stats had revealed and stopped pushing in a direction where they were really providing additional insight.

        1. Well brunch recommendations and bar time anecdotes should help with new content....

            1. Fair enough. Reflecting on it, the home isn't really that funny anymore anyway.

        2. I don't know if they're as relevant as they used to be, but I still enjoy the free articles I can access. I've bought their annual two years in a row now and I think I'm done. Very repetitive, with not enough funny, insightful writing.

  9. Molitor, on the radio pregame, said that Jepsen's problem is that he's been brought into too many tied games rather than games in which the Twins are ahead.

      1. I agree with the discussion below that Molitor has been worse. The one thing I'll say in his defense (kind of) in this instance is that it's hard to know how much of what a manager says he actually believes. He may just not be ready to make a move with his closer yet, so he defends Jepsen in this way because, well, he has to say something.

        1. Yeah, a manager's role is sometimes more of a politician's role than I give it credit for.

    2. So, has he always been a Gardy clone? I didn't see it quite as much last season.

      Or do beleaguered managers just hide behind cliches?

      1. It seems to be a progression to Gardy clone, he started out doing things at least a little differently last year I thought. I think Molitor's been pretty terrible this year and none of his supposed strengths/baseball intellect have made it through to the field.

        1. I mean, it's easy to just say that he's doing worse than last year because a lot of the luck we had last year disappeared, still... He HAS been worse this year, I feel. It definitely feels like he started the year in a regressive way and has only gone backwards from there.

          1. He doesn't really seem to believe in any of his moves, there is a lot of change for change's sake happening with the lineup. Darin Mastroianni comes up and bats lead-off before dropping to the bottom of the order, for instance.

            1. Yeah, I heard or read somewhere that he was talking or thinking about batting Mauer leadoff for a while now. so what took so long? He had it right at the beginning of the year when he had Mauer second and Sano third but when the entire lineup other than Mauer just wasn't hitting, he went away from that. Then he had Santana leading off and that went about as well as anyone could predict. At one point, we had Santana leading off and Nunez, who's pretty much been our best hitter and has been very good since the beginning of last year, batting ninth behind Murphy, who was in a massive slump to start the season. I wonder if Molitor's biggest problem is keeping the team loose. He relied too much on Torii last year and now doesn't know how to get the team out of a mental funk. I'm guessing he doesn't mask his feelings that well even though he seems pretty stoic.

          2. Batting order only matters so much, though. I think a good exercise would be to look through and see how often he had the best 5 hitters of the day hitting in the top 5 spot of the lineup. If he's mostly doing that, it's not really the lineup that's the problem.

            1. I agree that batting order only matters so much. I do think, though, that constant shuffling, especially if there appears to be no good reason for it, can have a detrimental effect on the team.

              1. Sure, that might matter more than the actual lineups themselves.

                Nevertheless, I decided to put my money where my mouth is and actually look at some stats for once. I looked at all 32 lineups the Twins have had this season. I based the hitter's quality on his ZiPS projected wOBA going into the season. Not perfect but a good enough proxy.

                For each lineup, I gave Molitor 1 point for each of the best 5 hitters in the lineup that was hitting in one of the first 5 lineup slots. So 5 is a perfect score, and 1 is the worst you could do (by the pigeonhole principle you have to have at least one of the best 5 hitters in the top 5 slots.) The breakdown is like so:

                5 -- 1 game
                4 -- 26 games
                3 -- 5 games

                So most of the time, he's been hitting one of the best 5 hitters lower than 5th and one of the worst 4 hitters 5th or higher.

                If you look at it by lineup position, how often that lineup position is occupied by a top-5 hitter:

                1st -- 34%
                2nd -- 72%
                3rd -- 100%
                4th -- 100%
                5th -- 81%

                And then if you look at how often a top-5 hitter has been in other lineup positions:
                6th -- 75%
                7th -- 59%
                8th -- 6%
                9th -- 0%

                So basically, hitting any of Nunez, Santana, or Mastroianni leadoff has been ridiculous. (Earth-shattering news, right?) Mainly they are keeping Park and Arcia out of the top-5 slots--they are the most common top-5 hitters to get slotted in the 6th spot.

                Essentially for any of the games that Nunez, Santana, or Mastroianni hit leadoff, the Twins would have just been better off starting the game with the #2 hitter and moving the lead-off hitter to the end of the lineup.

                1. Thanks for doing that. I can kind of understand the thinking behind keeping Park and Arcia out of those slots--they both strike out a lot, and you don't want to put too much pressure on Park right away.

                  But Earl Weaver used to say that the first inning should, in theory, be the inning when you score the most runs, because it's the one chance you have all game to start an inning the way you ideally would want to. It appears that far too often, the Twins are wasting that chance.

                  1. Yeah, the reasoning for Park and Arcia makes sense in a vacuum, but it does hurt on some level to have such poor hitters hitting leadoff. Like Mastroianni the other day--he's arguably the worst hitter on the team, aside from the pitchers. Starting the game that way has to be demoralizing to the team in a way, too, and probably helps the opposing pitcher settle in a bit as well.

                    Partly this just goes to not having enough good hitters on the roster. It's a lot easier to set a batting order when the players are hitting better.

                2. I agree with Santana and Maestro, but Nunez has been the Twins' best hitter (by OPS). He's not expected to be that good but at some point when a team is going so bad you have to start rewarding the guys that are performing. Nunez since the start of last season has a 121 OPS+ in nearly 300 PAs.

          3. The Twins have also been very unlucky (or unclutch) this year. I mean, if we believe it was good luck last year, then we have to admit to bad luck this year. Twins pitchers have been at their absolute worst this year in: late & close situations (7th and later, tied or save situ.); high leverage situations; and with 3-5 runs of support (which is enough to win consistently with good pitching). These are the situations you want the team to be at its best to squeeze the most wins out of a team and the Twins have been at their worst.

            1. According to BaseRuns, they should be 12-20. Only the Cards have a worse difference at -6. Using BaseRuns for everyone would put the Twins above four teams.

              1. They do however have the second-worst run differential. The Braves have a healthy lead but the Twins have simply been bad.

    1. Drake also has three former players as DI football head coaches. Only Alabama and Iowa have more.

      All the trivia points if you can name them:

      'Spoiler' SelectShow

      1. I read the article on them and I went to school with two of them but can't remember their names.

  12. Re: coffee pot water tower in Lindstrom.

    Don't think those of us in Scandia are skulking when the King of Sweden's visiting. Hey Lindstrom - check out the Gammelgarden if you want the immigrant experience.

      1. Cool! But I so wanted to see 21. With McCann up, I thought he had it. He must have been sitting on the slider since the fastball was right by him on the first pitch. Probably should have stuck with the fastball at least until 2 strikes. It was funny hearing an audible groan from the home crowd when a pitcher gets a routine ground ball to third to finish off a one-run win.

  14. So my internet has been mostly broken tonight... and charter's phones appear to be down too. As it has started to come back I notice bigger sites like google and facebook seem to have come back more quickly. Is this like a universal "the internet went out" kind of thing?

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