76 thoughts on “October 5, 2023: WOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!”

    1. You'd think someone like Michael Kay would have enough pride to at least learn how to pronounce the names of the players. But on the other hand, I still hear national commentators pronounce Jose Berrios "BEAR-ee-os."

      1. you would also think producers on a national broadcast would care and would be feeding these guys correct pronunciations.

        1. Agree. And it's not like "Duran" is such a strange, unusual name that's hard to pronounce.

  3. Has Jose Berrios asked for a trade yet?
    I still cant believe that he was pulled out of the game

    1. On the one hand, I feel bad for Jose. On the other, I feel very good for the Twins.

      *monkey paw curls*

      Oh god, ARod is going to be even more insufferable to listen to.

      1. The game now move to FOX. Now go to deal with John Smoltz's expert loving baseball analysis

        2. Good news! We have avoided John Smoltz (for now).

          Twins vs. Astros TV broadcasters in the ALDS: Adam Amin, A.J. Pierzynski, Adam Wainwright and Tom Verducci. Dave O’Brien and Eduardo Perez are on the call for ESPN radio.

          2. Amin/AJ called a major of games when the Twins were on FOX/FS1. I never really had any qualms with that booth

  4. I see hj must have received a copy of the email I sent to the OOTP in response to cheaptoy

  5. It was kind of a backward response out of me - as celebratory and excited as I was last night, I was much louder and more animated after game one. I guess I just needed that single win so badly, and now it’s more like “cool, we can win - but there’s a lot more work to do.”

    Still bummed there are no games today.

    1. I feel this. I had chills after game 1, but not yesterday. Game 2 was just more "this is really fun awesome baseball" instead of "this is everything important in the world right now."

      1. I understand what you both are saying, but had they blown game 2, especially after leading most of the way, it would've been a real downer.

  6. Text from my friend who was at the "Thielbar Saints Game" with me back in 2011 when he entered: think Thielbar can get out of it?

    My response: We put him through a much more stressful situation years ago

  7. I really feel for Berrios though. Think he wants a trade back? I'd happily take him.

    1. When they showed him watching the Twins celebrate like he certainly wanted to do while he was here, I did wonder how complicated those feelings must have been.

  8. Important programming note: I added a space in the “wooooooooo” in the title to improve the phone experience. The exact count of the letter “O” has not been reduced so as to retain the proper amount of enthusiasm.

      1. Would it help if I frame it as the “woooooo” being so protracted that one would have to take a breath to complete the intended woooooo?

  10. A month ago I finally started working toward a long-intended goal of speaking Japanese. I’ve picked it up better than I would’ve thought at this age and can now read just about anything written in hiragana (of course, I can only understand a small percentage of it, but I’m getting somewhere).

    The course has helped me become very adept at ordering seafood, which will come in real handy as I can’t actually eat seafood.

    1. How are you learning? I visited this summer (second time in my life). Definitely hoping to go back multiple times, and I would love to have more language with me when it happens.

      1. Duolingo. The format is perfect for my learning style, it would seem. Each lesson is a pretty small bite so you can keep a daily streak alive with two minutes if that’s all you’ve got, or you can do it like I do (about a half hour each in the morning and late at night, barring obligations).

        The written aspect is by far the toughest for me. Ask me to make all the characters and I’ll flail a little bit, but once they’re in front of me I recognize all of hiragana immediately and can pronounce most of it on sight. Katakana is next and it feels overwhelming, but that’s what I thought about hiragana 35 days ago. Kanji is what really terrifies me; I don’t know that I’ll get into it anytime soon, but if I live long enough, maybe I’ll get to the point where I can read it.

          1. Yeah, I look at it and honestly just laugh at the idea that anyone, including natives, could possibly learn a large amount of it. I watch New Japan Pro Wrestling obsessively, and in the upper left corner it lists the competitors in the next match. I can read nearly all the names of the gaijin so I typically say “okay…it’s Robbie Eagles against…someone from Japan.”

        2. How do you feel it is doing for you in terms of listening and speaking? I suppose listening and comprehending is easier to test - how has that gone?

          1. It’s going well. I’ve always been good with dialects so speaking it is going very well. Listening is fine so far, though there are some sounds that don’t quite get used here (and some that exist here but not there) and that requires some calibration. They really drive home the sentence structure, so I’m getting pretty comfortable with the basics.

    2. I won’t even be able to see games one and three. I’ll be pretending to listen to customers as I listen to the game. Of course, in a sports card shop our traffic will be pretty low on a Twins playoff day.

        1. At this point our store is so cluttered that I don’t even know where we’d put it. The upside on Tuesday: I enjoyed the game but didn’t have to listen to Michael Kay and A-Rod.

      1. Season ticketholder who has a strip of two tickets throughout the playoffs. I could have gone with him this week but I'm very busy. So there's a chance I could go for ALCS and World Series although I have a feeling he's trying to share the spoils.

        1. I decided I'm taking a half day on Tuesday and will try to get a ticket when they go on sale tomorrow.

    4. I am, again, unhappy with the schedule of home weekday afternoon games that prevent me from working/attending. I guess we'll just have to make it to the ALCS so I can get another chance.

  12. So Polanco made zero putouts in the series. Here are hit expectancies on the four balls hit his way:

    1. Springer reached on error: 10%
    2. Kiermaier single that Correa bailed him out on: 35%
    3. Bichette infield single: 40%
    4. Espinal infield single: 21% (that seems really low for that one)

    1. The Springer one was the only one that seemed particularly egregious to me. The infield single hit expectancies I would think would need to be adjusted for the speed of the batter moreso than harder-hit balls where 99% of hitters can't outrun the throw to first base. And while I'm not the biggest proponent of the postseason being different from the regular season, I would say that (Royce's bum hamstring aside), on average, hitters are going to be getting a better first step and more hustle down the line than in a blowout game back in June.

      Maybe the hit expectancies do adjust for the home-to-first speed of the hitter? I'm not sure.

  13. Other fun notes:

    1. Chapman's flyout in game 1 that Taylor caught at the wall would have been out in 13 parks
    2. Guerrero's warning track flyball in Game 1 would have been out in 2 parks
    3. Royce's homers were both out in 29/30 parks
    4. No ball hit in game 2 would have gone out anywhere, though not surprising since there were no extra-base hits in the game. The hardest hit ball all game was Springer's single to lead off the game. Chapman's GIDP was the third hardest hit

  14. I checked and unfortunately there will be no chance that all four Minnesota men's professional sports teams will play on the same day this fall, even if the Twins make it to the World Series. Alas.

    1. We were in Chicago for our anniversary (9/29) several years ago and four out of the five, including da Bears, were playing at home that Sunday. Public transportation was nuts that day.

  15. A thought on tickets: Would there be any interest from the citizen to purchase a set of 4 season tickets and split between a bunch of us? For me, I would be interested in lower level tickets down the first base line somewhere? I would be willing to take a 1/8th share on tickets. I figure 8 of us split up the games, which gets us to about 10 games each. If a partner did not want to go to 8 games that person could sell to other citizens. Like I said, I would be interested in being a partner on a deal, I just unfortunately would not have the time (or talent) to be the ringleader/organizer of such an effort.

    1. I think it's too bad that so much of the response has been "analytics bad" rather than "bad analytics bad". Whatever difference there was going to be between Berrios and Kikuchi was marginal at best. A good analytics department should know the difference between marginal recommendations and solid recommendations, and give on-field personnel some influence when they are making marginal recommendations. In the end, the Blue Jays bullpen usage was even quite good. Yes, they allowed the two runs with Kikuchi on the mound, but it's still possible that Berrios would have done the same, or worse, though I tend to think all things considered that leaving him on the mound would have been the best choice.

      Vlad getting picked off of second is pretty awful, considering he was not the lead runner, but the hitter also had two strikes on him, and it's reasonably likely that Gray would have put him away anyway.

      Overall, I'd say the media are being overly harsh to the Blue Jays -- it was two games, they gave up very few runs, and they got a lot of runners on base. Yes, they left a lot of runners on base, but was that really a systematic issue, or just the sort of thing that happens every now and then in a randomly selected two-game period? For instance, Chapman being inches from a bases-clearing double that arguably would have won them the game, but then hitting into a double-play (with the third-hardest-hit ball of the game according to Beau above) hardly seems like an indictment of Chapman, it's a bad break as much as anything.

      They also played both games on the road -- you could potentially argue that was more of a failing on their part than some of the individual events of the two games, since they had 162 games to secure a placement that would give them home-field advantage.

      Maybe I am particularly sympathetic to the Blue Jays because I have seen good Twins teams lose a lot of playoff games like this, where there were some mistakes, but ultimately they played well enough to win if things went their way in a couple more spots.

      1. I wasn't able to follow the games as closely as I'd have liked, due to other commitments, but it seems to me that a lot of things went the Twins way in those two games. They were due for that--a lot of things have gone against them in the playoffs in the past. But it wouldn't have been hard to see those two games go the other way.

      2. Reading the Twins' articles feels the same but flipped. Certain players are now media darlings because they did well in two games. And there were no other Twins that had done that since '91, or maybe since 2002. Both games felt so close that they could have gone either way. Finally, the Twins had them go their way.

      3. Agree with all of that, including JeffA and Sean. This really struck me as the key in the decision to take out Berrios:

        A good analytics department should know the difference between marginal recommendations and solid recommendations, and give on-field personnel some influence when they are making marginal recommendations.

        1. There's a LEN3 column linked at the bottom of your linked Strib article that covers this well I think. From that near the bottom:

          The eye test should matter. Front office decisions are driven by collaboration more than ever, but one person has veto power if it feels like the right thing to do.

          That's the manager. Or it should be.

    1. I don't think anyone could watch one of last year's playoff games, then watch one of this year's games, and honestly say they liked last year's pace better. I still don't like the Manfred Man, but they don't use that in the playoffs.

    1. Something is wonky with the WGOM this morning.... I was just testing the link and somehow posted two identical comments without the ability to delete / edit. This is the first pass at LEWIS 10k rakes. Comments, suggestions, redesigns etc welcomed. Still working out the ordering as we'll need a minimum of 6 to have the old gold color. Pricing breaks with larger number of orders - no profit on my end -

      1. I will certainly purchase one (and maybe another if there's a kid size option) to get you to the minimum

      2. Ordering from custom ink may be more trouble than it’s worth…. Any alternative print on demand sites y’all have worked with?

        1. Funny story... Aquinas is apparently the class president (which appears to be an honorary title mostly?), and someone decided that meant his one duty was to design/order/pay for/try to get reimbursed for powder puff football t-shirts. He started working on it 2 weeks before orders were needed. Then just before order were due, half of the girls decided didn't like the design (that he had them vote on), so gave him a different one. Then they took a week to tell him how many to order, so now they needed to rush them.

          Custom Ink was the website they gave him for ordering. I took a few looks at it (including their prices - and rush prices), and, well aware that he certainly wasn't going to be reimbursed by about half of the students, I chalked up his "deriliction of duty" to the enigma that was Custom Ink's website. He spent 2 weeks trying to make it happen, but... junior high kids shouldn't really be managing things like this. Give 'em a pack of t-shirts and a marker. Apparently one of the girls' mothers took care of things.

          Anyway, Custom Ink - more trouble than they're worth, which ended up working out well for us.

            1. I've gotten a few shirts people printed at Bonfire, and I was very happy with the quality of everything, fwiw.

          1. I was thinking of this as a Lewis feature because his bat won us our first playoff game in … I can’t say it out loud … I’ll work a wgom into the greater design. Maybe wg / om on the flags.

            2. I like the Lewis on the back. The front feels a bit busy considering how bold/large the back is.

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