Just a note to start: I’m writing a few articles about the World Cup for the Star Tribune. Here’s the first one about the USA’s competition for the title, including a few traditional men’s powerhouses that were late getting going with women’s soccer.

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Sonny Gray is having a very strange season.

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The Twins swept a series! Now let’s never speak of it again!

Okay, that’s not entirely fair to the Twins, especially since they hadn’t swept a series in Oakland since 1997. But it’s not entirely unfair either, since Oakland is now 25-70 and has a real shot at failing to win 40 games this season.

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Along with “goals change games,” one of the things that MNUFC manager Adrian Heath says most often in postgame press conferences is, “I’ll never turn down a point on the road.”

This is pretty much accepted wisdom everywhere in soccer, that a draw away from home is a good result, but in MLS - with long flights and weather variability and an overall style of play that tends to reward energy alongside, and even sometimes above, skill - even getting a point on the road seems like a tall ask, sometimes.

This is why Minnesota United has usually stuck to a road playbook that starts with the headline “first, you must defend.” The Loons tend to cede possession to the opposition, focus on defending first and foremost, and then try to pick a few opportunities to go forward - one opening for a fullback to get forward and cross the ball while the defense is disorganized, say, or an opening for a midfielder to launch a long pass to a striker who’s running in behind the defense.

I’m not sure this plan has ever worked as well as it did on Wednesday, when the Loons scored twice in the first 20 minutes, and cruised to a 3-0 victory against Houston.

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The days around baseball’s all-star game tend to be some of the quietest sports days of the whole year. In Minnesota, both the Twins and the Saints have four days off, and it just so happened that the Lynx and Loons don’t play again until Wednesday evening, and so all has been calm since Sunday.

With the benefit of some quiet, it’s hard not to notice how negative everything feels right now. The Twins are immensely frustrating. The Loons are outside the playoff picture. The Lynx are the best of the major-league lot, and even their best-case scenario for this season feels like being somewhere in the middle of the pack.

With that in mind, I thought I’d better sit down and make a list of a few players who’ve given me some hope this year - pleasant surprises, if you will. It’s small, but I think this is important, if for no other reason than just to manage my own attitude for the rest of the summer.

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We’ve hit baseball’s summer break, meaning that there’s not much going on in the sports world for the next two days. That said, there was plenty happening in Minnesota sports over the weekend - and not much of it was good.

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Three days ago, I wrote that I thought that we might all be happier if we just started watching the St. Paul Saints instead of watching the Minnesota Twins.

I can’t help but feel like this was part of some sort of Freaky Friday ancient curse thing, since basically at that moment, the Twins and the Saints switched team personalities entirely.

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Long ago, the concept of a “replacement player” in baseball took on a larger meaning than just something related to labor disagreements. The famed WAR statistic, Wins Above Replacement, has for years attempted to quantify just how valuable any baseball player is, as compared to a mythical replacement player.

An entire team of replacement-level players - the type who are always available, generally making the league-minimum salary - would win about 50 games in a year, according to Baseball Prospectus.

This is, in many ways, viewed as the absolute basement of baseball, a point so low that it should be virtually impossible to go any lower. Which makes it pretty funny, and faintly legendary, when a team manages to win fewer than 50 games: the ‘03 Tigers, that lost 119 games, or the ‘18 Orioles, that lost 115.

I’m not saying that this year’s Kansas City Royals will definitely lose 113 or more games, and get themselves into the historical running as one of these vaunted sub-replacement-level teams. But what I’m saying is that if they were going to do so, their latest series against the Twins is exactly what it would look like.

Pablo López threw one of the best games in Twins history, a four-hit shutout in which he struck out 12, and the Twins kicked dirt on the hapless Royals, 5-0.

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Something weird is going on with the Minnesota Twins this week.

Tuesday afternoon, they put together not one, but two two-out rallies in which they hit singles and ran around the bases. They torched old rival Zack “Zach” Greinke. They struck out sparingly. Donovan Solano had three hits and a homer. Byron Buxton had three hits and a homer.

But what really made me check my pulse was this: Max Kepler not only had two RBI hits, an RBI single in the first inning and a three-run homer in the third inning, and not only were they both with two outs… they both went to the left-field side of second base.

(/Twilight Zone theme plays)

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There was a moment in the eighth inning of Monday’s Twins win against Kansas City when I realized what it seems like Minnesota has been missing all season.

It wasn’t when Edouard Julien led off the inning with a towering homer to right field, one that gave the Twins the lead back, after they’d given it away in the top of the eighth. It wasn’t even when Michael A. Taylor pulled off a safety squeeze, scoring Joey Gallo to make it 5-3.

It was a couple of batters later, when Alex Kirilloff singled. It was, in the box score, the fifth consecutive Twins hit, all singles; it made the game 8-3.

When was the last time the Twins got five consecutive hits, four of them with runners in scoring position?

When was the last time the Twins had an inning like this - an old-fashioned rally?

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