Maybe the best thing about baseball is that it happens every day.

There’s plenty of emotion and plenty of anger and plenty of frustration in baseball, as Twins fans know well, but maybe the best thing is that no matter how poorly things are going, there’s always another game coming, usually the very next day.

Sometimes this feels like a curse and a drudgery, especially in August or September, for teams that are nowhere near the pennant race (or in the case of last year’s Twins, still technically in the pennant race, but only mathematically.)

I note this mostly to make my excuses, to say that even as things have turned sour with the Twins, I still tuned in on Wednesday night, because you never know, and today’s a new day, and all that. And anyone who tuned in along with me was rewarded, as the Twins finally won again, beating Boston 5-4 in ten innings.

read more...

I checked the official Twins website, late in Minnesota’s 10-4 pummeling at the hands of the Boston Red Sox on Tuesday evening.

The big headline was “Buxton puts an end to O-fer,” noting for the whole world that Byron Buxton had finally ended his streak of hitless at-bats. Here’s my question: who is this more insulting towards? Possibilities:

1. Buxton, since him getting a hit was front-page news.
2. The Twins overall, since the most positive news that the team website could find was that somebody actually got a hit.

Buxton did go on to hit a home run as well, as the Twins made things a little more respectable after trailing 10-0; all we can hope now is that his slump is over, like a deluge after a drought.

read more...

When the Twins traded Luis Arraez for Pablo López, I wasn’t happy, but not because I thought it was necessarily a bad trade. Minnesota has been desperate for starting pitching for decades, for as long as I can remember, and so getting a front-line starting pitcher always seems like a good idea.

What made me unhappy was this: I could remember what it was like to be nine years old, and to have a favorite player, and Arraez was the perfect favorite player to have when you were nine, because he was always fun to watch.

read more...

Sunday was Father’s Day, which gave me the chance to watch all the sports in the world, guilt-free. Most of them, I confess, were not Minnesota-related. That said, I’d rather talk about Minnesota sports, as ever. And not because everything went well this weekend.

read more...

Okay, who brought the old Twins back? Right as we thought the Twins were on the upswing, they’ve now scored one run in their past 16 innings against the Tigers, to whom they lost on Friday, 7-1.

They’re getting killed by Javy Báez, who got the biggest hit of the game again on Friday, this time a three-run homer. They’re also getting killed by whoever Matt Vierling is; he hit two home runs and is 6-for-7 in the series.

Byron Buxton is 0-for-8 with four strikeouts since returning from the IL. Since May 2nd, Buxton is batting .161 and slugging .290, and has struck out in almost one of every three trips to the plate. Even Max Kepler has a better slugging percentage (.310) over that span, and most Twins fans would happily see Kepler sent to someplace they don’t have baseball.

The Twins are back to .500, 35-35, and are just two games up on Cleveland. Maybe more damning, they are just 12-10 against the horrible AL Central.

read more...

There’s no question in sports quite like the one that baseball fans ask, in reference to the game this afternoon or this evening or that they’ve just passed by on the TV: “Who’s pitching?”

For Twins fans, it’s often been a bit of a fraught question, since so often over the past decade, the follow-up question has been, “Who’s that?”

For once, though, the Twins have put together a rotation that almost always means there’s a good answer to the question. Almost always, you look at the starting pitcher and think, “Yeah, the Twins could win today.”

There’s one catch, though, regarding that question, especially in today’s game. Obviously, the starting pitcher remains important, but - especially for the Twins - an equally important question might be, “Who’s available out of the bullpen?”

Wednesday, the Twins used their Good Bullpen. Brock Stewart pitched the seventh, Jhoan Duran the high-leverage eighth, Griffin Jax the ninth. The Brewers didn’t get a sniff - they struck out five times and only managed to hit two ground balls that made it past the pitcher.

Thursday, though, that meant that all the Twins had available was their Bad Bullpen. Which is why it was even more curious that Rocco Baldelli decided to go there early.

Sonny Gray wasn’t particularly sharp on the mound, especially in the fourth inning, when he threw 35 pitches and allowed a single and three walks. But he pitched out of it, mostly; one run scored on a double-play grounder, which turned a 4-1 lead into a 4-2 lead.

With just 79 pitches under his belt, Gray expected to at least pitch the fifth, which prompted an argument with Baldelli in the dugout when the latter informed the former that his evening was done. I don’t expect that Gray was reminding Baldelli that his available bullpen was about to light some fires, but fans had to know that it was coming.

And so it proved. Jovani Moran immediately gave up three runs in the fifth, including a two-run triple by Javy Báez. This did have the effect of freeing Emilio Pagán, who is a good pitcher as long as he doesn’t have a lead to blow, and who thus contributed two solid innings. But this led right into the latest episode of “Jorge López Is Working Through Some Stuff,” one that included three Tigers doubles in the ninth inning, ended only by López somehow catching a foul pop-up to end the inning, and then sprinting to the dugout before he could be booed off the field again.

Duran, Jax, and Stewart are the Good Bullpen; Moran, Pagán, and López are the Bad Bullpen. (José De León and Josh Winder are the Anonymous Bullpen.)

Who’s pitching? Well, Friday is a Good Bullpen day, so the Twins have got a shot.

Down in Triple-A, the St. Paul Saints kept homering - but didn’t manage to keep winning. Catcher Chris Williams homered for the third consecutive game, bringing his three-day homer total to six, but the Saints lost 6-3 to Louisville.

Matt Wallner has cooled down a bit; he’s just 4-for-21 over his last five games, with eight strikeouts, and he hasn’t hit a homer in a couple of weeks. That said, he’s still hitting .295 / .409 / .455 in June, so “cooling down” is a relative term here. Jose Miranda, conversely, seems to be righting his ship a little bit. After not hitting at all, anywhere, in May, Miranda is batting .333 / .417 / .429 in June, with only six strikeouts in 11 games.

Tonight’s Schedule

TWINS vs. Detroit, 7:10. Joe Ryan is pitching.
SAINTS at Louisville, 6:15. Kenta Maeda is expected to make a rehab start and go five innings.
LYNX at Los Angeles, 9:00. Minnesota’s now tied for the worst record in the WNBA, with Seattle.

According to the underlying numbers, Minnesota United’s mediocre record isn’t because they’re a mediocre team - instead, they’re underperforming their numbers to a historic degree. Now that Emanuel Reynoso is back, it’s up to him to fix it. My column for Sota Soccer is here.

(Editorial note, after the jump here: I haven’t been writing much for Sota Soccer this year, but the plan is for me to contribute a biweekly Loons column.)

It was Wildfire Wednesday in Minnesota, as the smoke came rushing down from Canada, and affected the entire sports slate in the state.

The most obvious effects were felt by Minneapolis City SC, which postponed its game, and the Minnesota Aurora, which hurriedly shifted its game indoors, to the St. Croix Valley Recreation Center.

A special word for the Aurora and to the crew from Fox 9+. Not only did they manage to get their game played - albeit with no fans in attendance - but the match was still broadcast on TV, which gave disappointed fans the ability to watch the game, at least.

The Aurora rewarded those that tuned in, by hammering Green Bay 5-0, in a game in which Hannah Adler scored after 33 seconds. Cat Rapp scored five minutes later, then again in the 26th minute, and the rout was on. Minnesota’s now 7-0-0, has scored 34 goals, and allowed two.

Cheering for the Aurora is fun because, unlike most Minnesota sports teams, they pretty much always leave you happy at the end of the match.

For the Twins, the wildfire effects were less totally debilitating - they got their game in, before the air quality went from “it’s bad” to “nobody should go outside” - but they still did affect the game. The Twins’ fourth run scored when two Brewers failed to track a Joey Gallo pop fly into right field. Frankly, it looked a bit like a Metrodome game - every time a fly ball went up, there was a chance of losing it in the haze.

Carlos Correa was the hero again, lining a two-out triple hard off the right-field wall that scored two runs, in what was a bit of a carnival inning for Milwaukee right fielder Brian Anderson. First, he went back on Correa’s liner, but failed to corral it when it bounced hard off the wall in right, below the limestone facade but above the padding. The ball rolled halfway back to second base, allowing Donovan Solano - not a speedster - to score standing up from first base, and Correa to motor all the way to third.

The next batter was Trevor Larnach, who ripped a shot at Anderson - who went back and back, got concerned about the ball hitting the overhang, took his eye off the ball to look at the wall, and turned back in time for the ball to almost hit him in the head. RBI Double.

Gallo was next, and that was the pop fly that Anderson didn’t track; he hardly started in, and the ball ended up dropping 225 feet from the plate, behind the scrambling second baseman. RBI… single?

(Gallo got tagged out at second base because he failed to slide, so it was just some well-played baseball by everyone, on that play.)

Anyway, in another universe, the Twins get just one run from the inning; in the event, they got four.

Bailey Ober gave up back-to-back homers in the second inning, but was otherwise solid, striking out seven and coming back to labor his way through six innings. And the Twins bullpen, subject of so much opprobrium, was lights-out; Brock Stewart struck out the side, Jhoan Duran got two weak grounders back to the mound and a strikeout, and Griffin Jax shut the door.

As long as those three guys are the guys out of the bullpen, the Twins’ relief core looks just fine. Jax in particular has been transformed over the past month or so.

Somehow, the same team that scored three runs in three games against Tampa Bay has come back and won four out of five, and should have won the fifth game too. Suddenly everything seems fine with the Twins? Now they get to play the Tigers four times?

Down in Triple-A, in Louisville, Chris Williams was at it again for the Saints. A day after homering three times to lead his team to double digits, he launched two more homers, and St. Paul beat up on the Bats again, 11-3.

In two days, Williams has five homers and eleven runs batted in, which is a pretty good month in about 19 hours or so.

Jair Camargo also homered, as did Elliot Soto and Anthony Prato, and St. Paul has itself another three-game winning streak. St. Paul’s still six games behind Norfolk at the top of the International League, somehow, with just ten games to go until the end of the first half, so unless something miraculous happens, this hot streak won’t put the Saints in the playoffs.

They’ll get another crack at the Bats tonight, and the Twins might host the Tigers as scheduled (I really don’t know what MLB’s air quality-related policies are).

In Minnesota, where we’re trapped inside for five months in the winter, it sure is a slap in the face that the environment has found a way to trap us in our homes in the summer, too.

We need to rank the Twins’ hitting heroes from the ninth inning of their 7-5 win over Milwaukee on Tuesday.

Yes, of course, Carlos Correa will take the headlines, as well he should - partially because Twins fans are just hoping that the Correa they’ve seen over the past few games is the Correa they’ll get for the rest of the season. For the second time in three games, Correa won a game with his bat, blasting a walk-off homer off of unhittable Brewers closer Devin Williams to give the Twins the series opener against Milwaukee.

I estimate the exit velocity to have been approximately 300 mph; it was one of those homers that fans barely had times to get sound out of their lungs, before it was banging off the facade of the second deck in left field.

But there were so many more heroes! In a Twins batting order! We need to properly appreciate the rest.

First, let’s set up the context here. For the last few innings before the ninth, the Twins broadcasters on both TV and radio had been reminding viewers and listeners that if the game got to the ninth inning with the Twins trailing, the game was pretty much over, because Milwaukee had Williams.

He came into the game with an 0.42 ERA, having allowed one run all season - a meaningless homer in a 7-3 win against San Francisco. Hitters had a better chance of standing still and hoping to walk to first than they did of getting a hit; he’d allowed ten walks in 21.2 innings, but batters were hitting .110 against him.

I’m not sure it worried the Brewers dugout that the Twins had Michael A. Taylor, Edouard Julien, and Donovan Solano due to hit.

For additional context, the Twins had just managed to load the bases in the bottom of the eighth inning, with a single and a walk and a hit-by-pitch that was called after replay, but Joey Gallo took two monstrous whiffs and then watched the next four pitches, including the last one, which was right down the middle.

So not only did Milwaukee have their impossible-to-hit closer on the mound, but Gallo had just demonstrated the entire panoply of Twins hitting failings - failure in the clutch, failure with the bases loaded, striking out, swinging and missing, et cetera.

Which is why hero #1 on my list is Taylor, who stepped up and cracked the second pitch he saw over the fence in straightaway center.

It’s June 14th and somehow Taylor has ten home runs already; only Gallo has more, for Minnesota. Plus Taylor has played really good defense in center, and has stolen eleven bases without getting caught. Going by bWAR, he’s just behind Willi Castro as the most valuable player the Twins have had this season.

Which brings us to hero #2, which is Castro. After Julien worked a walk, the Twins pinch-ran Castro, down 5-4, in the hopes he could do exactly what he ended up doing - steal second, then score on a hit.

It was a little wilder than that, though - not only was the stolen base perfectly dramatic, including Castro almost over-sliding second and having to reach back to avoid the tag, but then when Solano - hero #3 - cracked a single to short center, Castro wheeled around third, ignored the stop sign he got from Tommy Watkins, and charged home to tie the game.

The throw was up the first-base line; an on-target throw would have gotten him. And imagine what this post would be like if Castro had run through a stop sign and made an out at the plate in that situation.

A word for Solano, who also drove in a run with a single in the third inning. “Donnie Barrels” struck out twice and went 2-for-5, but he came up with runners in scoring position three times in the game, and knocked in two runs. Solano has a 1.050 OPS with runners in scoring position this year.

So, save a thought for Taylor and Castro and Solano, who got Correa to the plate - but it’s Correa’s walk-off homer, somehow the first one of his career in the regular season, that we’ll remember.

When a team wins 18-7 and sets a franchise record for hits in a game, as the St. Paul Saints did in their first game of six in Louisville, there are bound to be a lot of guys whose lines in the box score jump out.

That said, the top one is definitely first baseman Chris Williams, who smashed three homers and drove in seven runs. Williams is one of those Triple-A guys who come without much pedigree; he’s 26, was an 8th-round pick in 2018, and doesn’t seem to appear much on top Minnesota prospect lists. He did post a .915 OPS in Double-A last year, in 75 games, but hit just .192 in St. Paul in 42 games there.

Hitting three homers in a game is a good way to get noticed, though, and he does have a .940 OPS this season.

Gilberto Celestino also homered and had three hits, in his second game with the Saints since returning from the disabled list. (Matt Wallner only had two hits, the bum.)

But hey, the Twins can hit again, so who even cares which prospects are stuck at St. Paul? [/sound of every Twins blogger crying out in pain]

Wednesday’s a day for afternoon baseball, as the Twins play at 12:10pm and the Saints at 11:05am. Tonight, there’s plenty of local soccer on tap, as the Minnesota Aurora take on the hated Green Bay Glory, and Minneapolis City SC hosts less-hated FC Manitoba.

I don’t know how old the readers of this blog might be, but it occurs to me that some of them might be not only younger than me, but perhaps even under 30 years old. So as we round up the Minnesota sports scene, I’m going to start by assigning those potential young whippersnappers a bit of homework: this is the Eric Fox Game.

The quick summary: riding high as World Series champions, the Twins took a three-game AL West lead into a home series with Oakland in late July of 1992. Unfortunately, Minnesota got swept, including losing the third game 5-4 when a little-used outfielder named Eric Fox hit a three-run, ninth-inning homer.

The Twins never recovered, going comprehensively in the tank, finishing half a dozen games out of first… and it was a straight line from there to near-contraction five years later.

Why are we talking about Eric Fox, of all people? I mention him because ever since then, it’s been tempting to look at small moments throughout any season and wonder, “Hey, maybe this is his / their Eric Fox Game, the thing that changes everything.”

Saturday’s Twins game was like that for Carlos Correa. The Twins shortstop has been worse than a league-average hitter, the worst hitter on the team in terms of Win Probability Added, and so his eighth-inning grand slam felt like it very well could be an inflection point - both for him, the struggling hitter, and for the Twins, the team that seemingly couldn’t hit with the bases loaded.

It was a perfect setup, after that home run - win Friday, win Saturday, five-run lead Sunday - and then Correa swept across second base, about to turn the double play that would let the Twins escape the fifth inning with a 6-1 lead, and darted his throw into the dirt at first base. A run scored, then Matt Chapman hit a homer to make it 6-4.

All of which would have been fine, except it set the stage for another one of Rocco Badelli’s fits of belief in Emilio Pagán. Pagán, who is a fine pitcher as long as there’s no possibility of blowing a lead, was given the eighth inning with the Twins still leading by two, and did what he does - single, single, home run, Twins down 7-6 before he’s even managed to get an out.

Putting Pagán into a close game is like opening a creaky, dark door in a horror movie - everybody watching knows it’s a bad idea, but they’re powerless to stop it.

It put a damper on what was otherwise a fine weekend for the Twins in Toronto. They won an extra-inning game, for one, and then they scored more than two runs in back-to-back games, which probably qualifies for fans to meet their return flight at the airport, at this point of the season.

Anyway, we can only hope that Correa is about to turn it on. He hit two doubles on Sunday. He got five hits and two walks in 14 trips to the plate in Toronto. This qualifies, well, as “more like it.”

In the next province over, Minnesota United got hammered in Montréal, losing 4-0.

It’s another weird one! I know that xG isn’t completely predictive on a one-game basis, much as we’d all like it to be (just think of the number of coaches who sometimes cite expected goals as a justification that it was the forces of luck and fate that did their team in), but when the Loons keep on winning the xG battle and dropping points, you have to think something’s up.

If you go by the numbers at American Soccer Analysis, this was the sixth time in the last seven games that the Loons have had better xG numbers, and yet in those six games, the Loons have earned five points.

I suppose that the best explanation for this is finishing. Mender García officially has Hunou Syndrome, where you start to wonder if maybe he’d be better off trying to miss, because then he’d screw up and actually score. The Loons officially sold Luis Amarilla to Mazatlán FC this week, which is actually pretty good business, whatever the transfer fee - but also maybe makes you wonder about the Mazatlán scouting department.

Teemu Pukki can’t get here fast enough.

On the flip side, we still have to wonder about Dayne St. Clair. We’re halfway through the season, and I can’t find any numbers that don’t rate him as the worst regular keeper in MLS (and believe me, I’ve tried). Maybe there are just random outliers in the data sets that will work themselves out, but I think it’s fair to say that St. Clair’s not exactly winning them matches right now.

The Lynx split a pair of weekend games, with the win coming Sunday against Los Angeles. Napheesa Collier led Minnesota with 24 points, but it was Bridget Carleton who was the heroine, drilling two threes in the final 1:10 to turn a two-point deficit into a four-point lead.

Minnesota’s 2-7 now. If they’re tanking, they’re still doing it right - Friday’s loss was to Indiana, just the Fever’s second win of the year. On the flip side, they’re not exactly out of the playoff race already - Atlanta, the current 8th seed, is 2-5.

It does feel like there are three good teams in the WNBA (Las Vegas, Connecticut, New York), three or four middling teams, and then a group of maybe five teams who could all end up on the bottom of the standings.

The Saints lost twice over the weekend, including a painful loss Friday when they led 5-2 in the ninth and ended up losing 7-5. But Joey Gallo did hit two homers over the weekend (and struck out twice, because he’s Joey Gallo), and Kenta Maeda was sharp on Saturday, striking out five in four innings and allowing zero runs.

Also, Gilberto Celestino made his Triple-A debut for the season on Sunday, walking three times and going 0-2 to give him the strange slash line of .000 / .600 / .000.

In USL action, one team went forwards and one went backwards. Minnesota Aurora FC won again, and remains undefeated and untied at the halfway mark of the season.

It’s still unreal that the Aurora, in one and a half seasons, has tied once (opening day 2022) and lost once (championship game 2022) and has otherwise won every game they’ve ever played.

On the other end of the spectrum, Minneapolis City lost 5-1 at home to Rochester FC. The Crows are in sixth place in the seven-team Deep North division of USL League Two, and have to be feeling realistic about their chances this year.

Also in the lower divisions, Minnesota United 2 got waxed 4-1 at home by Houston Dynamo 2.

Monday’s another one of those “no sports in Minnesota” days. I suppose this is due to fact that the Saints have only one Monday game the entire year, it’s not a big day for soccer, and every one of the Twins’ off days this year is on a Monday or a Thursday.

Still, a good night for calm, and to review everything about your life, to see where the Eric Foxes might lurk.