Monthly Archives: May 2018

Keeping Track

Happy Birthday–May 8

Dan Brouthers (1858)
Edd Roush (1893)
Turkey Stearnes (1901)
Mike Cuellar (1937)
Steve Braun (1948)
Orestes Destrade (1962)
Todd Greene (1971)
John Maine (1981)
Adrian Gonzalez (1982)
Sean Gilmartin (1990)

I could not find out why Edd Roush's first name was spelled with two d's.  I did find out, however, that he had a twin brother whose name was Fred, not Fredd.

Outfielder Turkey Stearns was a star in the Negro Leagues from 1923-1940, posting a slugging percentage of .619.

Mike Cuellar pitched in AAA in the Twins’ organization in 1961.  He does not seem to have belonged to the Twins, however.  It may be that he was temporarily loaned to them, a practice which was not uncommon in the 1960s.

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2018 Twins Game Logs

2018 Game 31: Minnesota Twins vs. Saint Louis Cardinals

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One good thing about the years long slog of White Sox ineptitude is being able to score really nice seats on the cheap.  The boy had a birthday party, and I wanted to catch at least one game, so I convinced Jane to let me slip out to the South Side.  $30 something dollars later, I had a ticket just to the side of the Twins' dugout and a few rows back.

As it happened—"as it was meant to happen," Bokonon would say— DG and I bought tickets literally right next to each other for the game yesterday. I was later informed that there was actually a real good up close shot of us on the Twins broadcast. You can find a screenshot here:

SCREENSHOT SelectShow

Anyway, good times and well met, DG. See you at the GRate in June.

The Twins meanwhile move their road trip on down to St. Louis for a couple of games. We've got quite the pitching battle tonight as neither pitcher has yet to allow a run all year! Both have gotten the W every game they pitched! Sure, they only have 8.2 IP between the two of them, but why should that matter? Romero looked good in his MLB debut last outing. His 98.4mph pitch was the hardest thrown by a Twins pitcher since 2008. Yeesh.

Mauer has 26 BBs to 15 Ks, making his 1.73 BB/K rate the best for all MLB hitters. On the flipside, both in terms of stats and believability, at 10.28 batters per nine innings, the Twins pitching staff as a whole has the majors' best K rate on the road.

Mauer, Dozier, and Rosario are all beasts against NL teams, so hopefully some modes will be engaged. The Cards will be without Molina because, well, I recommend against Googling it. Let's go beat those Birds, gang.

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First Monday Book Day

FMBD: Firsts

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It's the end of the semester, so now I have some free time and I can really get after it and read some books.

I recently tried to quantify all the translated books I've read, and they pretty much fell into three categories: European, Latin American, and Murakami.* But there were no African writers and very few Asian writers (not even African writers writing in European languages).

This past month I listened to Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag - translated from Kannada (spoken in India) - it was a very short, but very well constructed family drama, with an undercurrent of violence.

And this month I'm picking up Beyond the Rice Fields by Naivo. This is the first Malagasy novel that has ever been translated into English. Madagascar is already so strange and interesting, so I'm excited to see what the book is like.

So I've been expanding my reading in that direction, what have you all been reading?

* one notable exception was Han Kang's The Vegetarian (from S. Korea)- which is hallucinogenically great.