Minnesota Update, 7.10.2023
The Twins reach the All-Star Break with hope but no plan, the Loons keep underachieving, the Lynx have found their level, and we still don't know how good the Aurora actually are.
We’ve hit baseball’s summer break, meaning that there’s not much going on in the sports world for the next two days. That said, there was plenty happening in Minnesota sports over the weekend - and not much of it was good.
We have to start with the Twins, who continued their trudge to becoming one of the most disappointing baseball teams we’ve ever seen here in Minnesota. They got swept again, this time by the Orioles, and scored five runs for the weekend.
It got worse as the weekend went on; Minnesota lost in extra innings Friday, got beat 6-2 on Saturday, and then got comprehensively hammered 15-2 on Sunday, earning themselves a solid amount of booing from the Target Field crowd in the process.
They simply have to make some kind of changes, by the time the season restarts on Friday. Hope is not a plan, but it’s been their only plan. They assembled a lineup consisting mostly of nine guys straight out of 2019, and watched them get repeatedly blown away by every pitcher in the game.
We thought it was a low point when Kolby Allard made his first start in two years, for Atlanta, and struck out eight Twins, but Sunday has to be the low point by far. The Twins contrived to strike out ELEVEN TIMES against KYLE GIBSON, which is simply not possible for a major-league baseball team.
Hope is not a plan. The team has lurched through 91 games now without making any changes. They have scored three runs or fewer in 45 of those 91 games. They have, almost magically, received the best starting pitching of any team in baseball, and their hitting was so poor that they turned that into being one game under .500 at the All-Star Break.
The league-average OPS this season is .730. They spent big to re-sign Carlos Correa; he has a .700 OPS. They brought in Christian Vázquez to be their main catcher; he has a .552 OPS, almost the worst in the big leagues for a regular player. They have buried several young outfielders in the minors while giving 226 plate appearances to Max Kepler, who has a .688 OPS and is on his fourth consecutive season at or around that number.
You could argue that their best move was to sign Joey Gallo, who is batting .186 but has walked enough that he has a higher on-base percentage than Correa, Kepler, or Byron Buxton. When your best move is signing a guy who has struck out 95 times in 91 games, that’s telling.
The team has struck out 916 times this year. Just for comparison, the 1991 Twins struck out 747 times in the whole season. They have to try something different - in part, because the final 71 games of this season feel like they’re going to be a referendum on the front office and the coaching staff, more than the guys on the field.
If they continue this horrifying fade into oblivion, this is going to be it for Rocco Baldelli and Derek Falvey and Thad Levine. I don’t know who they’ll get to replace them, but: hope is not a plan.
Over in St. Paul, Minnesota United had just about as bad of a weekend as the Twins did, losing 4-1 at home to Austin FC.
Just like the Twins, the Loons didn’t seem interested in doing much differently this weekend than they have done during the rest of their season. Minnesota started Ménder García at striker, watched him blow a bunch of good chances in the first half, then fell behind 2-0 at halftime thanks to some bad defending and then a very questionable penalty kick.
The second half wasn’t much better; Minnesota pulled a goal back through Devin Padelford, of all people, but conceded twice more and endured their worst home lost of the season. Teemu Pukki did make his Loons debut, and did manage to have two shots on target in three attempts.
So that’s the best thing you can say: their new signing at least managed to bother the goalkeeper.
“The Loons didn’t convert their chances and ended up getting beat” is a common theme for the year. Just like the Twins, they’re running out of time to turn things around; they’re outside the playoff line after 20 games, and as a reminder, it’s getting harder to miss the playoffs in MLS, with nine out of the 14 teams in the West making it into thoe postseason this year.
Minnesota remains the most underachieving team in the league this year, at least compared to their expected goals numbers, and being the most underachieving team in the league is hard to do in a league that also contains the Los Angeles Galaxy.
The Minnesota Lynx seem to have about found their level, in the WNBA this season. They’re right in the middle; not good enough to play with teams like Las Vegas, which beat them 113-89 on Sunday, but plenty good enough to outclass teams like Phoenix, who Minnesota beat on Friday, 75-64.
Not being able to defend Kelsey Plum is not exactly a unique thing in the WNBA, but the Lynx really couldn’t do it on Sunday, as Plum got a career-high 40 points. Four other Aces were in double figures, as well. Diamond Miller was the only Lynx starter who wasn’t at least -17 for the game.
Minnesota’s next two games are against Dallas and Atlanta, two of Minnesota’s fellow teams in the middle of the WNBA; by next week, we might have a better idea whether Minnesota is in the high middle or the low middle.
In other soccer news, it turned out that I was right to worry about the Minnesota Aurora. After a 12-0-0 regular season, the Aurora’s season ended in the W League quarterfinals, as Minnesota lost 1-0 to Indy Eleven.
In the conference semifinals, the Aurora had a 28-0 shot advantage, but could only convert once. In the finals, goalkeeper Amanda Poorbaugh actually had to make some first-half saves, and the Aurora’s inability to finish chances ended up dooming them.
Maybe they shouldn’t have been allowed to watch any MNUFC games?
I don’t know if you can exactly call this a disappointment for the Aurora. The regional nature of the W League meant that they really had no idea how well they matched up against any team outside the Heartland division. They’ve dominated that over the past two years, going 24-0-1 against those teams (including playoff games), but against everybody else - again, only in the playoffs - they’ve won twice and lost twice.
I understand the need for regionalization at the pre-professional level; affordability is one of the main concerns, for these teams. It’s the same in every sport, not just women’s soccer. But we’ll never really know how good the Aurora actually are, except for being able to say that they’re definitively and by far the best team in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois.
The Aurora feel a little bit like the old Minnesota Thunder, especially after MLS kicked off in 1996. They were fun to follow and fun to watch, and they were enjoyable on their own merits, but as a fan it was hard not to hope for a team at the top level instead.
I’ll finish with this. There is more to top-level women’s soccer than attendance, but if I have my numbers right, the Aurora - playing in, of all things, the Vikings’ practice stadium - drew more fans per game this year than five NWSL teams.
A quick word for other lower-division soccer teams: MNUFC2 got beat at home on Sunday, 2-0 by the Real Monarchs. Meanwhile, Minneapolis City SC had its best weekend of the year, drawing 2-2 at division-leading Thunder Bay and beating third-place FC Manitoba 2-1 on the road. Maybe the Crows just need to play more games in Canada?
Finally, the St. Paul Saints righted the ship over the weekend, taking all three games from Iowa after losing the first three of the six-game series.
The pitching was the story, with both Dallas Keuchel and Simeon Woods Richardson pitching well. Keuchel started Friday and finished five and two-thirds scoreless innings, though he allowed five hits and four walks. On Saturday, Woods Richardson threw five innings after an opener pitched the first two, and he allowed one run on three hits and a walk in five innings, while striking out seven.
It’s been a bit of a lost season for Woods Richardson, who has just one decent start the whole year. He’s sporting a 6.79 ERA and opponents have hit .301 off him. But hey, the way the Twins bullpen is going, he’ll probably get a chance in the majors soon anyway.
Sunday was a day for hitting, as the Saints scored 20 runs; Kyle Garlick and Andrew Stevenson both had four hits, and combined to drive in 11 runs.
Stevenson has a .907 OPS on the year, and he has the worst numbers of the current Saints outfield; Matt Wallner is at .931, and Trevor Larnach is at .984. First baseman Chris Williams has hit 16 homers and has a .969 OPS.
Williams has played a little outfield in the past, so if you cheated and lumped him in with Garlick and Gilberto Celestino, you could make two entire Saints outfields that have a better OPS at Triple-A than any non-injured player does on the Twins (except for Edouard Julien, who the Twins only called up when forced to by injuries to Jorge Polanco).
TONIGHT’S SLATE
Absolutely nothing, unless you’re an NBA Summer League junkie. (Maybe I’ll become an NBA Summer League junkie?) Anyway, maybe tomorrow’s blog will be about Wimbledon and the Tour de France.
ON DECK
LYNX vs Dallas, Wednesday
LOONS at Houston, Wednesday
TWINS at Oakland, Friday
CROWS vs FC Manitoba, Thursday SAINTS vs Durham, Friday
DOUBLOONS vs LAFC2, Sunday
Remember in Moneyball how Brad Pitt wanted to get guys that could get on base? Twins are playing some kind of Pennyball where they just get at bats. Where's Chris Pratt when you need him