Monday, September 9, 2019

Notes from the weekend

In terms of the pennant race, the Twins got the bare minimum they needed. They knocked two digits off the magic number. Cleveland, denied the sweep, is still 5.5 games back.

In the big picture, it wasn't a good weekend at all. By the end of Sunday's game, the Twins were without Nelson Cruz, Miguel Sano, Max Kepler, Marwin Gonzalez, Jake Cave and Bryon Buxton with various physical issues. That's a lot of power sidelined; that's a lot of outfielders sidelined

It says a lot that the Twins felt compelled to pick up Ryan LaMarre for outfield depth. It says even more that LaMarre got to hit with two outs in the ninth with men on base. A hit would have been a great story. What he got was a strikeout.

Minnesota can certainly use today's off day.

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The really big news came really late, after the Sunday Night Baseball game on ESPN, when the Red Sox fired Dave Dombrowski.

This appears to be a classic what-have-you-done-for-me-lately move. The 2018 Red Sox won 108 regular season games and were really never seriously challenged in the postseason. And the architect of that team -- the best Red Sox team ever -- didn't make it through the following season.

Peter Gammons on Twitter:

 

 
 

I won't pretend to know what's going on here, but the chronic changing of the guard in Fenway is probably becoming self-destructive. And it is an ironic contrast to Yankee Stadium, where Brian Cashman has become one of the longest-tenured tops-of-baseball-ops figures in the game.


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