Minnesota Twins

John rejoins Aaron and they talk about the Minnesota Twins tumble, two AAA players that could soon join the team, Darin Mastroianni's new diagnosis, Joe Mauer's new hot streak, ballparks, baseball bars, David Ortiz's return, Aaron's Apple fetish and difference between baseball prospects and baseball prospects. To listen, you can check out:

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Like the Minnesota Twins, Twins Daily has a farm team on the blog page. Here's what you've been missing if you haven't been checking it out the writing from our top prospects...

• Cody Christie reminds us of a Twins starting pitcher who is about ready to rejoin the team. And it's not Kyle Gibson.
• Thrylos gives you 129 college pitchers that you will want to know before the Twins start drafting them in June.

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Mike Berardino, the excellent new beat writer for the Pioneer Press, linked to a new story on Wednesday with an amusing teaser: "Attention Gibsonites: Kyle Gibson takes a step back at Rochester."

Gibsonites. I like it. And it’s a label I’ll proudly wear because, from my view, it seems obvious that Gibson should be on the major-league roster by now.
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By the end of the coming weekend, the Twins will have reached the one-quarter mark of the season with 40+ games under their belts. It’s as good a time as any to reflect upon how some of the decisions made by General Manager Terry Ryan in building the team’s roster have turned out.

As a team, the Twins have been hovering over the .500 mark most of the season and, after Monday night’s win over the White Sox, they are one game over the break-even point. Over the weekend, Ryan told 1500ESPN that .500 wasn’t what he was looking for out of this team, that he wanted them to be contenders. It’s great, of course, for your team’s GM to say that kind of thing, but I think most fans would have been pretty satisfied with the prospects of a .500 year out of this Twins team. ...

In what is thought of as one of the greatest Simpsons episodes of all-time, Nuclear Power Plant owner turned softball manager, C. Montgomery Burns gave one of his ringers, Daryl Strawberry, an invaluable hitting tip.

“You there. Strawberry. Hit a home run,” advised the decrepit hitting instructor. Strawberry took the counsel and smacked a dinger onto the Springfield Expressway. In a perfect world designed by major league hitting coaches, life would be that easy.
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Pitch To Contact - at this point, I think we can go with capital letters, don't you? That phrase and philosophy have drawn a fair amount of criticism, a chunk of which is just snark, but some of which at least tries to ground itself in statistical analysis. In a thread started yesterday on Twins Daily, there was a lot of debate on Pitch To Contact, what it means and what we really know about its effects.

When Bill James unveiled several new tools for analyzing baseball, the most fundamental ones usually started by analyzing team stats. ...