October 4, 2013

Link-O-Rama

Before getting to the links, I just want to say thank you to everyone who stopped by AG.com, followed me on Twitter, came to various get-togethers, and listened to "Gleeman and The Geek" this season. Being a Twins fan hasn't been much fun lately and at times writing and talking about a third straight 95-loss team felt more draining than rewarding, but knowing there are so many other people out there who also can't bring themselves to look away helped me keep going.

This was my 12th season blogging about the Twins and fan morale has never been lower during that time, but if you can stand all the losing there are certainly plenty of interesting aspects of a rebuilding team. It'll be business as usual here this offseason, which means weekly podcasts, my annual Top 40 Twins Prospects series, lots of free agency analysis, next-day break downs of any moves that happen, and player-by-player outlooks. And lots of other stuff too. Thank you.

• My favorite sentence from this excellent New York Times article: "A recent six-month fling with a 90-year-old woman he met at synagogue did not work out." Happens to the best of us.

• Back when I was shopping for a house I remember really enjoying looking at all the real estate photos online, but this website allows you to enjoy them on another level.

• Here's my analysis of the Twins bringing back Ron Gardenhire and his entire coaching staff.

• Incidentally, regardless of your opinion about Gardenhire re-signing his sunglasses placement and overall style during the press conference were amazing.

• Nothing has ever given more hope to the hopeless than 15-year-old George Clooney.

• For this week's "Gleeman and The Geek" episode we tried something new by recording from the Target Field stands during one of the final games of the season and the results were interesting.

• For those of us in mourning after the "Breaking Bad" finale there's always the Latin American version starring Walter Blanco. There's a trailer and everything:

Can't wait to see what they do with the Todd character.

Francisco Liriano had a fun Tuesday night. And a few dozen internet friends who got together to watch him beat the Reds had fun too. I even dug this out of the closet for the occasion.

• If you want to read all about Liriano's big night, Jenn Menendez of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette put together a nice quote-filled story on deadline.

• Five years later, Chuck Mindenhall of MMAFighting.com wrote a lengthy article about the night everything came crashing down around Kimbo Slice.

• This is more or less how I watch sporting events at home, but he's taken things to another level.

• "Gleeman and The Geek" regular Kate Agnew was featured in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

• General manager Ruben Amaro Jr. and the Phillies might hire a stat-head to do ... something.

• There has since been backtracking, but that doesn't change the grossness of #playyousissies.

• SABR announced that next year's convention in Houston will be held from July 30 to August 3, which is less than ideal for me because it's during the trade deadline and will be 1,000 degrees.

David Temple and Than Tibbetts are the only tuba players I know/am willing to associate with, so this is how I choose to imagine their day-to-day lives:

Temple says I'm not the first person to make that joke, but that's just the sign of a great joke.

• We'll be recording the next "Gleeman and The Geek" episode Saturday at 612 Brew's (totally free) Octoberfest event. Beer, food trucks, live music, and at least one podcast. Should be fun.

• Living legend Carson Cistulli chatted with my hero Rob Neyer, so how I could I not listen?

• Twins social media guru Keith Beise, who got guilted into inviting me to the Deckstravaganza event last month, did an interesting interview about his job.

• Last week Keith Moyer was kind enough to invite me to chat with his sports journalism class and one of the students, Mike Potter, has a Gopher sports podcast that you should check out.

• I highly recommend checking out Nightingale restaurant/bar on Lyndale Avenue in Uptown. I've been there twice now and loved the vibe and crowd both times. They also have maybe my favorite bartender of all time, so look for the guy stumping people with hardcore baseball trivia. And the Minneapolis Star Tribune just said they have one of the Twin Cities' best hamburgers.

• I sat a few seats over from Corey Koskie at Target Field last week, which reminded me that he's one of the most underrated players in Twins history.

• Some of this week's weird and random search engine queries that brought people here:

- "Aaron Glee"
- "Can you safely carry a child at 245 pounds?"
- "How will the Twins look next year?"
- "Bill Smith tough decisions"
- "Rob Dibble's ex-wife"
- "Michael Keaton married again"
- "Will elliptical give me my six-pack back?"
- "Aaron Gleeman on Tinder"

• Finally, in honor of the Twins' season mercifully coming to an end this week's AG.com-approved music video is "Love Is A Losing Game" by Amy Winehouse:


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7 Comments »

  1. Pretty cool you got to speak in Keith Moyer’s journalism class. He was the publisher for the Strib back in the day, so when are you going big time? Back then I was taking a journalism class at the U with his wife, and she brought in Sid Hartman to talk sports and “journalism” with us. I kind of thought he was crazy but it was pretty damn cool to be in the same room as that guy as an undergrad student. He was an institution. And I’m sure students felt the same way about you…

    Comment by Sean — October 4, 2013 @ 5:10 am

  2. Wow Aaron, you didn’t even mention getting back to the “Greatest Twins List” for the off-season. Isn’t this the perfect time to crank it out? It’s not like you’re going to need to make any adjustments in the rankings for the next several years…

    Comment by John Baranick — October 4, 2013 @ 7:15 am

  3. Reusse may have backtracked to get the heat off, but in light of what he said yesterday on the radio there’s an open question as to what he actually thinks about the whole Mauer issue: in a discussion of the various Molina brothers while he was on 1500 ESPN with Soucheray yesterday, he was praising their durability, which is fair enough, but also added “and, if they get a foul tip in the mask, these guys don’t get concussions.” To me, it seems pretty obvious what he’s getting at; as bad as understating the seriousness of concussions is, in light of what we now know, I think it’s worse, and quite cowardly, to impliedly make that kind of insinuation and not at least stand behind your stupidity publicly.

    Comment by ck — October 4, 2013 @ 8:26 am

  4. Thank you for doing what you do, Aaron. I will be a daily visitor as long as your blog lives.

    Comment by neil — October 4, 2013 @ 3:15 pm

  5. Great work this season, Aaron. Looking forward to next year.

    Comment by haplito — October 4, 2013 @ 6:15 pm

  6. I’m with John on this one – I’ve asked many times for the conclusion of the Top 40 Twins. I’ve even gone so far as to see if I can figure out who the final 14 are…somewhere on my desk is a piece of paper that has my best guess as to who and how you have them ranked. I’d love to see if I am correct.

    As for any adjustments that John mentioned, I guess Morneau might crack that list now, but I haven’t looked at his rankings compared to all the others on the list. My initial impression is that his peak with the Twins was unfortunately too short to put him too high on the overall list.

    Comment by Breaker — October 7, 2013 @ 3:04 pm

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