The Twins beat Oakland on Tuesday, 11-3. It had an exhibition feel to it; Minnesota has little to play for except to tune up for the postseason, and the Athletics… absolutely would forfeit the series if they thought they could get away with it.

But there wasn’t nothing to see here, because you have to see Matt Wallner’s grand slam.

I have written this before, in the context of Wallner, but there was a time when the upper deck in right-center field in Minneapolis seemed more or less unreachable. When Target Field opened, something about the park - I remember a theory being “the concrete is still settling” - made it all but impossible to hit the ball out to right-center. Guys would pound the baseball, admire it from the plate, then have to start digging hard for second because the ball would barely reach the middle of the wall.

I don’t think this is so true any more… but at the same time, I don’t think anyone’s hit the ball as far as Wallner did on Tuesday night. Remember, it was a rainy evening in late September, and Wallner’s slam nearly hit the back wall - THE BACK WALL - in right-center field.

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I covered Saturday’s Minnesota United home game for the Pioneer Press. It was a 2-1 loss for the Loons against St. Louis, a come-from-ahead affair where Minnesota failed to convert some early chances, then gave up a pair of pretty good goals to the Fightin’ Toasted Raviolis.

Postgame, everyone that talked to the media - manager Adrian Heath, and midfielders Wil Trapp and Hassani Dotson - were at paints to stress: the Loons don’t feel like they’re playing that badly. They’re just not converting their chances.

“I thought the first half was one of our best performances of the season,” said Trapp. “But ultimately, and we said it at halftime, [we need] the cutting edge to score goals. The chances we had at the beginning of the game - the first 10, 15, 20 minutes - these have to be goals.”

Said Heath, “I have to take positives out of what we’re producing and what we’re doing. Are we getting opportunities? Yes we are. Are we creating opportunities? Yes we are. It’s not like we’re playing and not having a shot at goal.”

And, just to add to it, here’s Dotson: “Right now I feel we are outplaying teams, and just not getting the results that we need to get, or we deserve.”

These seem like excuses… but if you look at the underlying numbers, they’re not wrong.

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Please don’t make me talk about the football, or fútbol, games this weekend. We’ll attempt this later, maybe later today or tomorrow; I think we all need some processing time.

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Sets are a weird way to keep score, when you think about it. This is true of volleyball or tennis or really anything.

It’d be like if basketball games were decided based on who won the most quarters, not the total score.

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I’ve said all season that the Lynx are a three-person team; in the playoffs, that’s become a two-person team, with Napheesa Collier and Kayla McBride carrying them. Two could be enough, as Minnesota proved in their game 2 win, but in order to win Game 3, they’d need both to show up in a big way.

They only got one.

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There are lots of details yet to be filled in about the fledgling PWHL, the first women’s hockey league in years that will have all of the top players in the sport.

Minnesota’s team doesn’t have a name yet. They haven’t announced where they’ll play. You can’t buy tickets or a jersey. They don’t even start playing until January. But one thing is very clear already: this Minnesota team is going to be very, very Minnesotan.

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Every year, when the Wild make the playoffs, suddenly there seems to be a random injury generator that kicks into overdrive at Xcel Energy Center. Last year, it was Kirill Kaprizov and Joel Erikkson Ek and Ryan Hartman that all got random injuries. Usually, after the Wild’s annual first-round exit, we find out that six or seven players were playing with broken bones, or ruptured tendons, or legs that had been torn from the body and hastily reattached with bailing wire.

I don’t know what causes this in St. Paul, but whatever it is, it’s found its way to Minneapolis.

A day after Carlos Correa reaggravated the plantar fascitis that’s plagued him all year, Royce Lewis managed to hurt himself while running yet again, pulling his hamstring.

This being Royce Lewis, he played two more innings, and only left the game when he made things worse while trying to swing the bat. If the guy worked construction, he’d be the guy who accidentally nailed his hand to the side of a wall with a nail gun, and then also broke his own fingers trying to pry out the nails with a claw hammer.

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Last weekend was the latest edition of what’s usually known as the Great Baseball Road Trip, an annual long weekend that’s organized by my friend Mike. Most years, this means that the trip contains as much baseball as we can pack into the trip; there was one year that we managed to see six games, in five parks, in three states, in four days.

Like I said, it’s an annual event, but there hadn’t been a trip since 2019. In 2020 it wasn’t possible; in 2021 it still felt dicey; in 2022, it just didn’t happen. And honestly, it seemed like it might not happen this year either, and probably wouldn’t have, except road trip co-founder Rocket lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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For me, the defining moment of the Vikings’ 34-28 loss to the Eagles on Thursday night came after Justin Jefferson’s fumble, near the end of the first half. Jefferson, trying to score on a long pass, attempted to reach the ball for the end-zone pylon while being tackled; instead, the ball flew from his grasp, over the pylon, and out of bounds. On review, the referees awarded Philadelphia a touchback.

Jefferson, looking abashed, patted himself on the chest, as if to say, “My bad. My bad, guys.” No kidding! Who were you worried we were going to blame for this? You don’t need to take responsibility for something that literally everyone knows was your fault!

Anyway, Jefferson wasn’t exactly alone, in needing to take responsibility; he was one of four Vikings to fumble the football. Brandon Powell had the second-dumbest one, returning a punt 20 yards deep into Eagles territory, but then fumbling the ball right back to Philly. Kirk Cousins fumbled again, his third fumble in two weeks; he needs just 20 more in the final 15 weeks of the year to tie Daunte Culpepper’s team (and NFL) record. And Alexander Mattison fumbled too, on the team’s first play after Powell’s fumble.

At that point of the game, the Vikings had run five plays, gained one yard, and handed the ball to the opposition three times - once on a punt and twice by fumbling.

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The Minnesota Lynx may not have been able to play any defense in Game 1 of the playoffs, but at least they also turned the ball over a lot, too.

In what you’d have to say is one of the worst playoff performances we’ve ever seen in Minnesota basketball, the Lynx went down to Connecticut 90-60 on Wednesday night. Minnesota led briefly early in the second quarter, at 24-22, and from there were simply awful. The Sun ripped off a 21-3 run, led 46-32 at halftime, and pulled away from there.

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