264 thoughts on “2023 Wild Card Games 2 and Toronto at Minnesota”

  2. Rangers now with a 4-0 lead, again, in the top of the fourth. I'm feeling really good about my pick now.

  3. this crowd is already LIT. I love it (although it feels muted and muddled on the ESPN feed)

    1. honestly, the Jays should bunt, slap , punch, anything they can do to hit the ball to third base

    2. Michael Kay sucks so much. "That wasn't a sacrifice with one out."

      Yes it was, ding dong.

    1. It was better than any play Jeter ever made. Jeter only ever made those plays because he had crap for range.

    3. NBC morning show covered playoff baseball and featured the rays outfield blunder and in passing mentioned the twins also won. No highlight of a game altering play…

      1. SportsCenter led with the National League games and then talked about--the Dallas Cowboys.

        1. Heh, I just saw a comment at Twinkietown asking "if you don't care about exit velocity, why the steroids?"

        1. Yeah, I get playing matchups and trusting your guys, but each next pitcher you put in the game is someone who might have an off day.

          Also, Berrios probably does fine with the back half of the Twins lineup second time through the order -- I could see playing the matchups more when Berrios is going through the order the third time.

  21. Didn't the Jays use six or seven pitchers yesterday? And now going to the pen after four innings when Berrios is cruising?

  25. It was nice of the Jays to let Lewis get to third so he didn't have to run very hard to score.

    1. Same. There are still two lefties and two switch-hitters so the lineup has some balance. But Castro doesn't have the same bat.

    1. Michael Kay is doing the same thing. I put it down to playoff over-thinking as much as anything, but I'm sure the decision was at least somewhat "analytics-informed."

      I do think that it's possible many/most/all analytics teams in MLB struggle with the idea of good days versus bad days. It would be awfully hard to quantify it, but these guys aren't actually machines. Sometimes it is something concrete like a nagging injury, or maybe a bad night of sleep, but other times I think it's not just old-timer talk that a guy has good feeling for his pitches some days and not other days.

      This isn't the only place this problem shows up. (It is similar to annealed disorder versus quenched disorder in statistical mechanics.) Almost all playoff odds simulations show odds too close to 0% or 100%, because it doesn't account for "hot" or "cold" teams -- not "hot" and "cold" based solely off of recent records, but also things like player health and availability. When you're doing, say, a Monte Carlo simulation for that, if you have a .600 team, you can't just use the .600 as the estimate for the rest of the season, you need to draw from a distribution around .600 for what the actual underlying expected win percentage should be, and then stick with that percentage for the rest of the simulated season. If you do this over and over again, the odds of having a comeback or a collapse are more likely, because a good team might actually be worse than their record and a decent team might be better than their record.

      It's also possible that Berrios could have given up a couple runs there, but it didn't really seem likely for that to happen.

  30. Hi everybody!

    I got to the bar in time to see the walk to load the bases. Had to double check what inning it was because Berrios wasn’t pitching…

  31. There was a time for the Twins when based loaded with no outs had a run expectancy near zero.

        1. The whole place went from anxious chatter (“Oh no … here’s where the wheels come off”) to absolute bedlam on that play. Then they showed the replay from multiple angles on the big screens and it gradually rose to a crescendo as it became clear he was out, and then chaos when blue signaled that the call was confirmed. It was awesomeness!

  50. I had to pick up the trinket from volleyball practice, so of course something cool happens.

    1. I’m imagining a timeline where Austin Martin & Woods Richardson were good enough to bring back López and Julien & Arráez are in the same lineup.

      1. I’d claim that as a spooky, but to be honest I pooped my pants when he smoked that foul ball.

    1. I’m glad I’m not the only one who noticed that. I thought I might have been too harsh in the moment, but it looked extremely slow.

        1. ha! no, it was a job I had just four months ago that I left after being there for six months for what is looking like a much better job.

  61. Not gonna lie, that white/black helmet looks pretty cool with a crap load of pine tar on it.

  68. Elijah Craig small batch and water in my glass to calm the nerves. What are the citizens drinking tonight?

      2. I was late to the mezcal party. Recently, I’ve been making a variant of Negroni with (cheapish) mezcal and a smoked Irish that have just been fabulous.

  74. in A'Rod's defense, against Slowey he was 4-9 with two doubles, a homer, and no strikeouts

    1. More bunts, fewer home runs — he’s clearly protecting his position on the all-time HR leaderboard.

  77. The last time the Twins advanced was against the A’s in 2002. I was in jail when that happened. Been even longer since I had a proper celebration after a series.

      2. To add some context: Correa is at 26.5 ft/s this year. So is Gallo. Wallner is at 28.0 ft/s and Buxton somehow leads the team with 29.4 ft/s. Stevenson is right behind him at 29.2 ft/s and Taylor a bit more at 28.7 ft/s.

    1. His defense has made his offense this year sooooo much more tolerable. (and I think he'll bounce back on the latter next year)

    1. So I haven't actually heard it, but I caught a couple bells. Is it the Undertakers theme?

  111. I do feel a little bad for Schneider and his decision to pull Jose. Smart move? Not really, but the Twins only scored two whole game -- it was the lineup (and "baserunning") that let them down.

  113. 9 LOB for Toronto, the Twins certainly got a lot of reps pitching from the stretch today.

  115. Bring on those fat Astros!

    Let's show the world who's best by beating last year's best.

    LET'S
    FREAKING
    GO!

    2. Tomorrow's the first time I'll be able to spend a full day with my brother in quite a while. We figured we'd have a lot of playoff baseball to watch. We probably should've known, now that the short history of the three-game set has produced 13 sweeps in 16 series.

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