Game 24: Royals at Twins

Time: 7:10 Central. Vegas Line: -140 MIN / KC +130

Weather: No rain, little sun, 62° at first pitch

Opponent’s SB site: Royals Review

TV: BS North. Radio: The Porta Dash Dock Dot Com Jingle Is In My Head

Brady Singer spent all of one year in the minors before KC rushed him up last season (you could argue that, at the time, being on the Royals was akin to being in the minors, although they seem better now). If that screams “bonus baby,” well, you’re not entirely wrong — he did sign out of college for over $4 mil. But... he gave some of that money to his parents. On Christmas:

Everybody, now: awwwww.

Singer is a sinker/slider guy who throws around 94 and gets more grounders than flies, as sinkerballers will. His opponent, Michael Pineda, is even taller than the tall Singer (6’7” vs. 6’5”), and we’re all hoping his recent flubserdoozie against Pittsburgh was merely a statistical blip. Speaking of statistics, here’s the career digits for both:

I promise these stats will make more sense once we have more than short rookie careers and a wonky 2020 season to go on. Or they won’t!

Finally, let’s continue the doomed effort to make Friday a day for sharing images and memories of baseball swag. Here’s a hat of mine, see if your inner Sherlock Holmes can guess from what year:

That’s right, 1906.

I’ve written about my love of MLB: The Show on this site here, and here, and they still haven’t sent me a free copy (which you’d think would cost less to print then the books I keep getting). Cheap bas****s! Anyhoo, it’s still great, although this year’s primary new tweak is a little annoying. When pitching with a runner on, the little runner window is SO little I can’t see the 1-99 rating on that runner’s speed very easily. Is the guy on first a Byron Buxton or a Drew Butera? C’mon, San Diego Studios, enable “Larger Runner Window Speed Rating Numbers” for those of us who’ve been playing your game so long that our eyes are feeble.

What I WON’T be doing this year is mimicking the Twins’ real season in “Franchise Mode” as I usually do, to strategize about resting players and such. Thing is, once you start Franchise Mode, you have to make any changes to the opponents’ roster manually, inside the mode (instead of just using the latest Roster Update to play a casual-style “Exhibition” game).

This involves manually making all the trades, and creating rookies who weren’t on 40-man rosters to start the year, so it’s a great way to learn who’s on which team and what they can do. I just don’t have the time for it anymore. Does that mean I’ve finally “matured,” or simply gotten slower, or are those phrases synonymous? I dunno.

Anyhoo, I’m still open to submissions from anyone interested in sharing photos/descriptions of their Twins swag to twinsbrewer@gmail.com. Which so far has only gotten spam from Google about how to increase my email visibility rating OR WHATEVER.