Game 128: Twins at White Sox

First pitch: 6:40 Central

Weather: National Weather Service somewhatstillgutted, partly cloudy, a nice 73°

Opponent’s SB site: South Side Sox. A non-SB site: Sox on 35th, with a staff that look like they’re from Logan’s Run

TV: Twins TV. Radio: Home of Buxton singing Sheboygan and a game I don’t care about

Tonight’s Sox starter, Aaron Civale, has been traded midseason each of the past three years. He’s pretty mediocre as an MLB pitcher, with the usual disclaimer that a mediocre MLB pitcher is better at baseball than most of us will every be at anything. That said, his mediocrity means the Twins will probably sign him next year after they’ve traded Joe Ryan. He throws in the low-90s, relying usually on his cutter, sinker, slider, and curve. YTD digits:

For those of you who have strong opinions about the TV broadcasters, Awful Announcing ranked all 30 MLB teams’ TV booths. The Twins came in the middle, at 15. Although they got a higher percentage of “F” votes than any other team, there was generally little enthusiasm or loathing.

From The Athletic, it’s looking like ESPN will be getting the rights to a lot of MLB.tv, and this will probably mean Twins games going to them next season. That might mean paying a little extra for games, $29.99 a month instead of the $19.99 it currently is. Hopefully the “regional blackout” will still be over.

Derek Falvey talked to WCCO about the recent player dump. He said “we want people to want to be here to enjoy the experience of Target Field and Twins baseball.” Note the order. The team exists to serve the stadium, not the other way around. Same as it ever was.

The Manchester United soccer team in England is owned by Americans (two sons of a billionaire, who also own the Tampa Bay Buccaneers). They want oodles of public money for their stadium in Manchester. That’s generally not how things are done over there. The team is claiming that the spending will create so, so many jobs and be a boon for economic growth. The Guardian did better than virtually the entirety of U.S. media, in that they called out the team’s growth projections as a ridiculous fantasy. Of course there are several things The Guardian does better than most of U.S. media.

Back in 2018, we looked at one of the companies that produces these growth projections, Convention, Sports, & Leisure. Typically, every number they come up with is utter horses**t. And the media reports it as true and the stadiums keep being built and they keep draining public funds.

Well, Neil deMause recently found out that not only is CS&L predicting huge new growth due to a San Antonio basketball stadium… also, that their parent company owns 20% of the Spurs! And the city of San Antonio paid them to do a study on economic impact from a new building! That the city paid CS&L is bad enough (usually, teams fork up this money, and CS&L gives them the lies they paid for) — but essentially, the city was paying the Spurs to determine how great it would be if the Spurs got free taxpayer money! Ridiculous!

A article at one of the copy-and-post sites wrote about how the Twins helped some Minnesota girls form a 14-and-under team that made it to the championship game in Reno recently. That’s nice! But remember, recently Maggie Mertens at Defectorwrote about how girls’ softball teams in Minneapolis are struggling because they don’t have enough places to play. Maybe if we hadn’t handed all that money to professional sports teams, we’d have enough spaces for girls’ teams. Not just one that the Twins are being nice to. All of them.

I’m gonna give the day, though, to one of my favorite sporadic baseball writers, Brian O’Neill of South Side Sox. I had mentioned before that he seemed to disappear from the site last year, after writing some really excellent articles. But he still does something there on an occasional basis. Here’s one about how he feels proud the new Pope is from Chicago, even though O’Neill gave up Catholicism as an older teen (so did I).

The must-reads, though, are three articles from last year about baseball jerks: like Marge Schott, people who were adamantly against the Guardians’ name change, and especially the Royals’ adventures in stadium swindling. You generally wouldn’t think that a campaign for a ballot measure to pay for stadiums would rely on rank bigotry to drum up support, but that one DID. That goes down in the Stadium Swindles hall of shame, right along with the time the Twins ran an ad with Marty Cordova visiting a sick kid, and saying if the Twins HAD to leave town, the sick kids would be sad. And that kid was DEAD when the ad aired.

I’m just glad O’Neill’s out there writing whatever he is, not that I need to read about the Chicago pope, but I like the way he writes, which is well-researched and honest and personal. Which is the way I try to write. And I can tell you from experience that it wears you down. You appreciate the readers you do have but you never get any more, and you see dishonest monsters becoming rich from their online presence, and it gnaws at you. For every Craig Calcaterra who’s a good writer and makes a living doing it, you’ll see 100 more who are also good and give up after years of total frustration. (I don’t know if that’s what happened with our Froggy, but I’d guess it was, it’s pretty common.)

So’s here to the writers still giving it a go out there. Lord knows that the energy-sucking worthlessness of A.I. will be anything anybody reads in the future (if they even read at all). Here’s to anybody still trying, no matter how useless it seems.

And here’s to Wes Farrell, too. Who? He was a pitcher for, primarily, Cleveland and Boston, and on this day in 1934 he broke a 2-2 tie in the 10th inning by homering at old Comiskey Park. It was his second dinger of the game, and he had an OPS of .828 on the season! Not bad for a pitcher! He apparently had a nasty temper, per SABR’s Mark Smith, so, not an inspiring figure or anything. He just did a thing 91 years ago that was neat. I think he’s probably dead now.