Tag Archives: featured

Better Know a Citizen

Musings From the Emeritus

38 Comments

Hello, folks.

How are you doing? I understand that there's a fundraiser going on. This is a humble little site, but even humble little sites need $$$ to keep on keeping on. Hungryjoe asked that I say a few words about this. Open up your wallets, folks and shake out a few nickels.

I've been away for a while. In fact, I'd been gone so long that at first that I'd forgotten my login password. Then I remembered: THEWARRIORSBLEWA3-1LEADINTHENBAFINALS (all caps).

The reason I took a hiatus was that someone suggested, when I wished everyone a Happy 2016 on New Years Eve and announced that I'd be off the grid for a week that my being off the grid would make 2016 a truly Happy New Year. This is exactly the type of care and concern that I tried to foster at the site over the years, so I stayed off the grid in the hopes of everyone having a Happy New Year.

Turns out, though, that it's nearly unanimous that 2016 has been, all things considered, pretty crappy. Is it because I haven't been around? Well you can decide that. I thought about swooping in before the election and announcing that I was back to save us all from Trump. I didn't do that, of course, and now we have the most deplorable person to ever hold the office ready to disgrace our country. I'm not sure, but I think that this is the first time in the history of our country that a President-Elect settled a fraud case for $25 million and then headed to twitter to brag that the settlement was a fraction of the potential damage award. Oh. Mr. President-Elect, did you defraud those people of $50 million? $100 million? Or more? Did I say all this out loud? I can say that out loud and not break the politics ban because, well, I'm not talking about politics. Remember when red trucker hats used to be cool?

bitusa

Personally, I've been doing pretty well, thanks for asking. My little baby girl is now 9 1/2 years old. Some of you may remember that I asked ubelmann to write for the site when she was born because I could no longer write every day with her around. She's now over five feet tall and headed to six feet, I think. (If only she'd pick up a basketball. She does willingly watch basketball with me, but play? Not a chance.) She's skating almost every day and working on her Axel. She plays piano very well for the amount of time she's been playing. I tell her every day, pretty much, that she's got more talent there than I did and that she can really be a good pianist. In other words, I have to motivate her to practice. I used to have to motivate her to skate, but she's doing pretty well there now and doesn't need my motivation.

I'm still working out of state a lot, but not as much as I used to. Plus, I do fly there now, so I've gone from driving about 35,000 miles a year to under 10,000. That makes life a lot… easier. I do spend a fair amount of time away from my family and sometimes that gets to be lonely, but I'm used to it and my time home has gone up quite a bit. Still though, when make that monthly trek, there are days. I've been doing this commute now for almost 6 1/2 years.

In January, we'll be heading out for our fourth Disney cruise. I consider this to be my one real indulgence. Miss SBG and I really love it. Lucy likes it. I can't wait to get on the boat, unplug, and enjoy a week of escaping from all that concerns me.

I'm so old that I remember when we had a banner at the site referring to the Twins saying, "Is It 2014 Yet?" That 2016 campaign was one for the ages. 2016 was necessary. The Twins needed to clean house a long, long time ago. One thing this long period of craptacular baseball has done for me is uncouple me from watching. I gotta go to the rink and watch Miss SBG twirl and jump -- I ain't got no time for watching Ricky Nolasco or some other stiff give the other club 6 runs in the first three innings. I've been a fan for over 40 years, but I'm more of a fair weather fan now. If they win, great. If they lose, I'm outta here. Good job, Twins, you've started to chip away at your most ardent supporters.

One club that never seems to fall on hard times will be gunning for their sixth consecutive FCS Title, entering the playoffs as the number 1 seed. I'm a little less than completely confident that they'll get that sixth one, but even if they don't, man, what a run. In this, what is no doubt the weakest of the six teams, they've gone 10-1 and beat a middle of the pack B1G team. Plus, they are extremely young… very few seniors and they didn't pull a single redshirt. So, all's good there.

Speaking of all being good, how about LeBron? Turns out he's a once in a generation player who carried his club to almost unimaginable heights. Turns out he's pretty woke, too. Heard the Warriors had a pretty good season though, congrats on the 73 wins. To lose a 3-1 lead in the NBA Finals after setting the all-time regular season win record… That's a… that's a real kick in the nuts.

Blah, blah, blah. I'm still the same old guy. It's just that my favorite sport is figure skating now.

Back to the fund raiser. This site and its previous incarnations have meant a lot to me and I'm reasonably sure to a lot of you, too. I can think of a lot worse ways to spend your hard earned dough than to kick a few bucks toward the maintenance of this site. For example, paying to watch Ricky Nolasco stink out the joint (I'm aware he was traded… and promptly started pitching better). Money is a resource and a fairly scarce one for most of us. That's why we shouldn't waste it. A dollar a month or two dollars a month to support a site where you can talk about just about anything is a fine allocation of resources. Please keep the site going. Thanks. And remember, the Warriors (best team, evah!!!!11!!eleventy!!!!) blew a 3-1 lead in the NBA Finals.

Spoiler SelectShow
The Nation Has Problems

The Nation Has Problems: Vol. 11

36 Comments

Hi Everybody!

After being gone for a while, I'm back here with a quick edition of The Nation Has Problems for pledge week. I didn't have a lot of time to put things together, but I came up with something that should be pretty fun! Probability questions are always good for people that are interested in sports, so I've got three questions of varying difficulties to attempt!

Easy

Suppose you roll three dice. What is the probability that you roll at least one 5 or 6?

Medium

Two players play a game involving flipping coins. Each player has a particular sequence of Heads and Tails that they'd like to see. Once one of the two sequences occur, then that player wins and the game is over. For instance, suppose Player 1 has HHH and Player 2 has TTT, then the following sequence:

HHTHTTHHTTHTHTTHHH

In this case, Player 1 is the winner.

Here are three different pairs of sequences for the players. In each case, what is each player's chance of winning?


a) Player 1: HHH, Player 2: TTT
b) Player 1: HHH, Player 2: TT
c) Player 1: HTT, Player 2: TTH

Hard

A banquet is thrown for 100 current and ex-Twins players. Each player is assigned his own seat. Unfortunately, A.J. Pierzynski is the first player to enter and he completely ignores the assigned seating and just sits in the seat closest to him. Each other player that comes in after him then sits in his own seat if it is available and otherwise picks a seat at random. Joe Mauer is the last player to enter. What is the probability that Joe sits in his assigned seat?

Good luck and have fun! --GH

Minnesota Twins

Falvey, Philosophy, & the Future

4 Comments

"Good pitching beats good hitting," the saying goes. "TINSTAAPP," might be the rejoinder.

Derek Falvey no longer works for the reigning American League Champions. As of today Falvey is in charge of the worst team in baseball. The newly-installed Executive Vice President & Chief Baseball Officer of the Minnesota Twins, Falvey has been credited with a substantial role in the development of the pitching program that provided the bedrock of his former team's success. He announced his first hire, Thad Levine, who will be the Twins' General Manager and Senior Vice President. Levine's previous duties in Texas included international scouting, player acquisition, roster composition, contract negotiations, and statistical/financial analysis. Rob Antony, the now-former interim GM, was considered the contracts expert in former GM Terry Ryan's cadre of longtime assistants and former GMs. Antony's new duties have not yet been defined. The continued involvement of Terry Ryan, Bill Smith, Wayne Krivsky, Mike Radcliff, Deron Johnson, Brad Steil, and even Jack Goin appear to be open questions.

As I contemplated the rosters of Cubs and their opponent last night, I felt the first major question of this new era of Twins baseball hit my mind with full force:

Will the Twins follow the pattern of Falvey's old team and stress the development of a raft young pitchers as the prime motivator of a run at contention. The Twins' ballpark might be well-suited to this approach, but the volatility of young arms suggests a substantial amount of assumed risk in that strategy.

Or will Falvey shift gears and attempt to fix a player development program that has left talented young position players spinning their wheels in a constant revolving door between Minnesota and the minor leagues? Said another way, will Falvey's plan be to develop a core of talented young position players like the Cubs, and then buttress it with a pitching staff assembled through smart acquisitions and signings?

Of course, it's simply too early to know. What we'll learn about Falvey's roster construction approach first will be informed by the more mundane, familiar offseason questions: Which veterans are tendered a contract? How does the club approach and weather arbitration? What does the front office say about the 2017 roster?

But it seems worth discussing, in the (small?) window we have before things begin to take shape under Falvey's guidance, the merits and pitfalls of each approach, or how – and to what degree – we might like to see them applied to the organization. This is a pivotal moment in the existence of our favorite franchise. It's the first gust of truly fresh air through a front office that has been intellectually stagnant & compositionally fetid for over a decade, a front office that was working off a plan that traced its origin back to the mid-1980s and its conventions back to pre-integration baseball. The twenty-first century, it seems, may have finally arrived for the Minnesota Twins.

The clubs that concluded the World Series last night offer two compelling patterns. For the first time in a long while, there is an exciting amount of uncertainty around the Twins.

History, Minnesota Twins, MLB

Top 300 Twins of all Time: One Man’s opinion

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It is year 5 of putting my pet project on the WGOM site, SBG put it on his old site a few years before this. Despite the worst record in 56 years of Minnesota Twins baseball, a few players did move up the rankings. Joe seems stuck for eternity between Oliva and Hrbek. He still needs one more decent year to crack the top4, but he's running out of time. Dozier rockets into the top30 on the strength of his outstanding 2016 season. Plouffe jumps 13 spots to 83. Sano jumps 39 spots to 123. Suzuki jumps 31 spots to #133 just ahead of his almost statistical equal (as a Twin) Terry Steinbach. All Star Eduardo Nunez goes from unranked last year all the way to 145. Ervin jumps over 100 spots to #156. Besides Nunez, other newcomers this year (that all are in the 250-300 range) are Grossman, Kepler, Buxton, Pressley, Polanco, Vargas

Staying put (or even falling backward) are Perkins, Hughes, Escobar, Danny Santana, Rosario, Gibson, Fien, Arcia, Milone

I stole most of the idea from when Gleeman started his top40 list years ago (book coming next year?) The below quote is his, and the rest is an excerpt from a book I put together at the 50 year mark. I’ve updated the list and stats through 2016.

“The rankings only include time spent playing for the Minnesota Twins. In other words, David Ortiz doesn’t get credit for turning into one of the best players in baseball after joining the Red Sox and Paul Molitor doesn’t get credit for being one of the best players in baseball for the Brewers and Blue Jays. The Twins began playing on April 11, 1961, and that’s when these rankings start as well.”

I used a variety of factors, including longevity and peak value. Longevity included how many years the player was a Twin as well as how many plate appearances or innings pitched that player had in those years. For peak value, I looked at their stats, honors, and awards in their best seasons, as well as how they compared to their teammates. Did they lead their team in OPS or home runs or ERA for starters or WPA? If so, that got some bonus points. I factored in postseason heroics, awards (gold gloves, silver sluggers, MVPs, Cy Youngs), statistical achievements (batting titles, home run leaders, ERA champs, etc), and honors (all star appearances), and I looked at team success as well. If you were the #1 starter on a division winning champ, that gave you more points than the #1 starter on a cellar dweller. I looked at some of the advanced stats like WPA, WAR (as calculated by fan graphs and baseball-reference.com), WARP (as calculated by Baseball Prospectus), and Win Shares (as calculated by Bill James). For hitters, I also looked at OPS and the old school triple crown statistics like batting average, home runs, stolen bases, and RBI (and not only where you finished within the AL in any given year, but where you appear on the top25 lists amongst all Twins in the last 50 years). For pitchers I looked at strikeouts, innings pitched, win/loss percentage, ERA as well as ERA+). If there was a metric that was used for all 54 years of Twins history, I tried to incorporate it. I tended to give more credit to guys who were starters instead of part time/platoon players, more credit to position players over pitchers (just slightly, but probably unfairly) and starters over relievers (and closers over middle relievers). There’s no formula to my magic, just looking at a lot of factors and in the end going with the gut in all tie-breakers. Up in the top10 I’m looking at All star appearances, Cy Young and MVP votes, batting average or ERA titles or top10 finishes, etc, and placement in the top25 hitting and pitching lists in Twins history as well. In the middle 100s, it’s more about who started a few more years or had 2 good seasons rather than 1 with possibly an occasional all-star berth or top10 finish in SB or strikeouts. Once you’re in the latter half of the 200s there are none of those on anyone’s resume, so its basically just looking at peak season in OPS+ or ERA+, WAR, Win Shares, and who started the most years, had the most at bats, or pitched the most innings. What the player did as a coach, manager, or broadcaster is not taken into consideration for this list, so Billy Martin, Tom Kelly or Billy Gardner weren’t able to make the top 300 since they were poor players and Frank Quilici didn’t improve his status due to his managing career.
Continue reading Top 300 Twins of all Time: One Man’s opinion →

Minnesota Twins

Your 2017 Twins Are…

52 Comments

Forking off the discussion to here...

Here's my barely half baked attempt at a 2017 lineup.

Listing it out...

Catcher: ???
First: Mauer.
Second: Dozier.
Third: Sano. UZR had him as a plus fielder there this year and last.
Shortstop: Polanco? UZR did not like his fielding at short.
Right: Kepler.
Center: Buxton.
Left: ???

Suzuki's option did not vest so I think that makes him a free agent. That leaves Murphy as the catcher to start the season. Grossman is the obvious one to put in left but, well, gross. Maybe Rosario instead? Scouts never liked Polanco's fielding at short and the metrics agree with them. Escobar would then be the shortstop but he needs to bring back the 2015 version.

At The Movies

Third Tuesday Movie Day

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Well, I was close. It's actually a heartbreaker, as I was off yesterday and had ample time to BS about film. I can't say I saw much, though; I finally saw the final Harry Potter movie yesterday, about four years after seeing the one prior. My wife ended up watching it with her parents, thinking I had seen it for some reason, so I never got around to it.

Sitting alone in my living room on a day off with the lights out, shades drawn and a movie on my new and altogether-too-high-end TV and home audio was pretty spectacular, I've gotta say. I need to work a little more of that into my life. I should probably just quit my job to catch up on cinema.

First Monday Book Day

First Monday Book Day – Labor Day “Get to Work” Edition

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The Olympics always mess up my reading schedule quite a bit, so in honor of not really reading all that much this month, here are a dozen short stories that I have not read yet from my bookmarked "Stories to Read" Folder.

SCI-FI

Charlie Jane Anders - The Time Travel Club (audio)
I loved Anders other short fiction, so it was completely on the reputation of the author that I picked this one.

Desirina Boskovich - The Island
I have no recollection of bookmarking this.  It appears to be a horror short story.  I'll have to read it and get back to you.

Chen Qiufan - The Mao Ghost
Translated by Ken Liu, who I love as an author and I've loved his choices for translated sci-fi work as well.

Aliette de Bodard - Prayers of Forges and Furnaces
I will read anything by de Bodard ... eventually.

Yoon Ha Lee - Combustion Hour
I feel like so many of these are "this author is awesome - I just haven't got around to this yet."  And that's exactly what this one is.

Sofia Samatar - Those
Sofia Samatar - Tender
Samatar's "Selkie Stories are for Losers" was a wonderful story and one that convinced me to read her first novel, which I really liked.

NON SCI-FI

Kobo Abe - The Magic Chalk
Abe is always surreal, but I've never read any of his short work.

Leopoldine Core - Historic Tree Nurseries
She won a Whiting Award last year, and every time I've read a book by someone who won that award, I've really enjoyed it - her collection "When Watched" is on my to-read list as well.

Clarice Lispector - Clandestine Happiness
Lispector (the most famous Brazilian woman author) is going to be my 2017 reading project, which includes her recently released complete collection of short stories.  I'll probably just pick this one up when I read that.

Tade Thompson - The Monkey House
The fun part about going through this list is finding stories that I have no clue where they came from or why I bookmarked them.  This must have been recommended somewhere, but I can't for the life of me remember where it came from.

Colin Winnette - Ghost Mountain Murder Mystery
I love Colin Winnette - "Giant Panda" is one of my favorite short stories of all time.  There's no good reason that I haven't already read this.

Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon - Wait Anywhere
Cauchon got me invested in a novel ("Nothing") with a cast full of self-absorbed twenty-somethings, which is kind of remarkable, so I marked this one to see what her other writing is like.

At The Movies

Third Monday Movie Day

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I saw some things. Several things, actually. I watched a couple of long epics, Ran and The Deer Hunter, on the same day a couple of days ago. Did you know John Cazale was only in five movies before his death, and they were all nominated for Best Picture (with three of them winning)? I didn't, but I feel like I should have.

First Monday Book Day

Summer Reads

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Grab your books and head to the beach! Or . . . not. I've read on a beach once exactly once in the past six years. The book? Infinite Jest.

In theory, summer is supposed to be a time for fun, breezy reads. I don't know that this is true for me. (But then again, I have a particular tendency to gravitate toward overly serious things. The summer after eighth grade, I read Hamlet. But don't worry--I didn't understand it.) As a kid, my favorite thing about summer was that I could pick anything I wanted to read. And to be sure, I went through my fair share of Choose Your Own Adventure books along with those that were out of my league.

As an adult, I haven't noticed that my reading habits change much with the seasons. But perhaps I'm anomaly. Do you gravitate toward different reading material in the summer? If so, what?