(Title Card: An Exasperated Dad Talks To The Minnesota Twins)

I mean, was that so hard?

Really. We’re asking you, the Minnesota Twins. Was that so hard?

After all, you don’t seem to have listened very well this year. This whole season, all we’ve been telling you is that if you just have your starting pitcher throw the game of his life, plus have your best players hit a bunch of home runs, you’re going to win some baseball games!

You want to think about listening to us, for once?

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Minneapolis City SC just hit a milestone: 100 matches as a club.

I was at the team’s original launch in 2016, so I went down to check in on the Crows, and find out what keeps this thing going, seven years later.

It’s not exactly long-form, but it’s long-ish, for Sota Soccer.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.