Twins Diary ’24
The main story from the Twins’ Opening Day 4-1 win over Kansas City was, simply, the injury to potential superstar Royce Lewis, who pulled up lame with a quad injury as he rounded second base. It’s not that a sustained injury, if it proves as serious as it looked, will hurt the Twins’ prospects this […]
Twins Preview ’24
As the Minnesota Twins’ 2024 season opener approaches I am more doubtful than sanguine. While the national prognosticators uniformly pick the Twins to win their division, I read this more as a referendum on the weakness of their rivals than an endorsement of the Twins’ strength. And given their success last year–winning the division plus […]
Stupid Rule 2
While baseball has a stupid rule or two–one less next year, as I’ll discuss later–football has a doozy that has more actual impact on the game: the fumble-out-of-the-end-zone-for-a-touchback rule. When this rule was invoked against the Vikings in mid-season it may have cost them a win and led to general speculation that the rule would […]
Winter Birding
Even when there are no new birds to be seen or locales to visit, birding can give me great satisfaction, as two days this weekend demonstrated. On Friday, December 29, the day before Santa Barbara’s annual Christmas Bird Count (CBC), I took the noon-to-two Snowy Plover docent shift at Coal Oil Point. The beach had […]
World Series
A quick note on Game 2 of the Rangers-Diamondbacks series: yesterday the Diamondbacks bounced back from a heartbreaking extra-inning loss in Dallas to whump the Rangers, 9-1. Arizona struck out only two times the whole game. With 16 hits. I wonder if the Twins were watching. Post mortem: I was part of why this was […]