Monday Morning Minnesota: extending Dozier and all of the dongs

• Twins Daily looks at how Charlie Blackmon’s 108 million extension with the Rockies might illustrate what it would take for the Twins to retain Brian Dozier. It is unknown how much money it would take to also retain his hair.
• The Twins are finally slathering all their balls in money, which is to say they’ve embraced analytics. MinnPost has the analysis.
• Minnesota is averaging 2 dongs per day, and that furious pace is a far cry from the piranha days of old. The Runner Sports wonders if this could be a historic power team in the vein of the 1997 Mariners. I can’t work a 2 dongs 2 furious joke into here, but I’m pretty sure there is one somewhere. Craft your own!
• Fantasy baseball and baseball sims are (surprisingly) simulations of the real thing. But this interesting look into the unseen specifics of transactions from fangraphs shows us that the real thing is starting to look like a simulation of the simulations.

Today’s soundtrack is 90 degree turns with no walls.

Old-Timey Baseball of the Day: Aloysius Stanislaus Travers

During the 1912 season, Tigers star, noted dickbutt, and my brother’s namesake, Ty Cobb was suspended for beating up a one-armed, three fingered man who had questioned quite vulgarly that Cobb may have had African-american heritage. There are no heroes in this story. Anyway, Cobb’s teammates got all sorts of mad and went on strike until Cobb was reinstated. Desperate to not forfeit, manager Hughie Jennings went and found replacement players from the Philadelphia area for the upcoming game against the Athletics (of Philadelphia apparently.) Here is where the 20 year old Travers (who went by Allen) comes in. He was a student at St. Joseph’s College who had failed to make his varsity baseball team and was more noted for his sick violin skills.

Jennings literally found him on a street corner and payed him 50 dollars to pitch in a major league baseball game against the two-time defending champion Philly team. Travers managed to throw a complete game! A complete game in which he gave up 24 runs, though his fellow of-the-street-corner players fielding for him likely played a hand in this as only 14 of those runs were earned. He also got an entire one strikeout(s.)

Cobb was reinstated and Travers went back to being a college student, retiring from major league baseball with a 15.75 ERA. He would go on to be ordained as a catholic priest, and is the only priest to ever play in the MLB. He died in 1968 and the old-age of 75.

Okay bye!