Twins 4, Angels 0: Let the victorying commence!

I'll have to admit, while I always enjoy previews for these things, I've gotta be in the right mood for recaps.

Previews, you might share some information you found, or could phrase a bit differently, which maybe some people might find interesting.

Recaps, I can do from the box score. We've all got the internet, unless you're getting this recap via a weekly mailed newsletter sent from Joel Hernandez's penguin farm in West Antarctica, in which case, I'm sorry to say, the penguins all got aftosa and died.

And this season's Twins team is almost perfectly boring. They're hovering around five games plus of .500, not likely to get hugely better than that, and fighting for a postseason spot that will involve a three-game raffle to face the Yanquis or Astros in a conceptionally-possible second round. Despite SB's apparent new partnership with various instant-betting sites, you wouldn’t gamble anything on the Twins' chances in such a matchup, and if you would, I've probably had immediately regrettable sex with you.

Hey, the Twins won! New tradee Tyler Mahle (I still don't like the spelling/pronunciation of his name) was excellent, going slightly more than two times through the lineup in a way that would make our wonderful John Foley chew broken glass shards. Gilberto Celestino hit a homer, celebrate if you bet the house with Draft Kings on that, and so did Gio Urshela. Byron Buxton, playing centerfield, did not have any of his limbs visibly shatter into a collection of priceless diamonds we Twins fans hoped against hope we could collect/reconstitute into Byron being as healthy as we dream.

It's late. I get up early to drive mostly old people to mostly medical appointments on tires that my well-meaning, somewhat overextended owner won't replace even though those tires are almost completely bald. And I keep mentioning this. And it keeps not getting fixed. So, by the end of work, I'm pretty wiped out from constant nervousness over driving on bald tires.

That's fine for a 7:00 start. It's impossible to be properly recappy about for an 8:30 one.

Instead, I gave up and focused on the gamethread, which was fun, and had Joel reminding us he's not just a blogsite jokester but a serious student and college instructor, in the field of "shattered limb diamonds collecting," quite the specialty. Several people mentioning a curious two-out "go go go" send by third base coach Tommy Watkins to backup catcher Sandy "Lightfoot" Leon, which resulted in Leon being out by the approximate width of Rhode Island.

(Sadly, in this gamethread, I also got smackdowned by head site sorceress Tawny, but I should have expected no less, her comment/recap powers are far greater than mine. I can only wave my feeble 50-year-old-wand in the vague direction of previews, and even that isn't much except on rare occasions like today's.)

If that sounds a bit too much "inside gamethreads comments," well, I apologize (not much), and I have no idea if these things will even continue. Per current (and quite nice) siterunner Ben, SB has been shutting down sites left and right. The Angels one has been shut down since mid-March. Who knows why this is. But I'll admit, it makes me less interested in recapping than in enjoying the gamethread.

(If SB plunks, and that two-story Manhattan office was a budget foul, there goes my never-used party trick of naming every SB American League site faster than anybody else. Lookout Landing is a genuinely tough one to remember. Halos Heaven is easy.)

Anyhoo, Twims wim!

And seriously, that Angels crowd is too loud. The Dodgers one was, too. With the Dodgers, I get it, creating a Yankees West vibe, but the Angels have approximately zero chance of making the playoffs, so I'm not sure what the noise is for. Even Yankee Stadium fans generally reserve their massive yelling factor until a visiting team is staggering from repeated body blows + a smaller payroll, at which point they go Full Noise.

I don't like baseball Full Noise crowds except when seasons are on the line, at which point I'll yell with the best of them. Baseball should not sound like this when a team out of the playoff race is playing a team kinda sorta in it and very little's at stake for the home fans.

Baseball should sound like baseball, where generally there's a soothing murmur and the announcers tell stories about "one time, when a lefthanded pitcher faced a lefthanded hitter and both their names ended in T, I was announcing a game in Australia and suddenly we discovered a crocodile in the booth with a snake on top of it."

"Did they attack you?"

"No, they were just sitting there. That pitch is a little outside, the count's now 1-1."

"What did you do?"

"Well, nobody was sure. We didn't want to startle either of them."

"I wouldn't startle a crocodile."

"Right, so everyone just sorta inched towards the other end of the press box. Then the crocodile yawned, I think, and they've got huge teeth, we all ran -- line drive foul, there, 1-2. So us running woke up the snake, and it chased us."

"A snake chased you?"

"Snakes are faster than you'd think. Especially going downstairs -- THAT'S A LONG FLY BALL, IT'S GOT A CHANCE, oh, Frambertoslud gets it at the wall, inning over, Twins 2, Angels nothing, we'll be back after this break brought to you by Kopier Krew -- we'll fix paper jams faster than you can say Play Ball!"

That's baseball. Loud is fine when it matters. Calm is better when it doesn't. One of the thrills of a live NASCAR race is the thing's rock-concert level of Loud, and that's its own kind of fun. So are thunderstorms. But it's not fun all the time.

Baseball should be 90% calm with moments of pure crowd-yelling mayhem. This road trip has been too loud for my taste.

Anyways that's my excuse for a s****y recap.