Free men and the geek

Premen and the geek

Freemen and the geek

Talking baseball every week.

Because the Glemen and the geek.

And welcome to Gleaming of the Geek on KFAN, sponsored by Mill City Dental and Dr. Jay Williams, located in the Brinmar neighborhood. Go talk twins with Dr. Jay Williams, the baseball dentist. I'm John Bonas of Twinsdaily.com with me, Aaron Gleeman of the Athletic. Happy birthday, John. Well, thank you. First and foremost. Thank you very much. The big 70.

Right?

Am I right about that?

No, I don't know. A little early. A little early. Feels like 7-0. Yeah, because the twins are just your life. Yeah, both, I guess. What a way to celebrate. That's what, I mean, that's what anybody wants. They didn't lose for me today. Yeah, that was nice of them.

Mother Nature took care.

A two-day break for this team right now.

Not the worst birthday, breath. anybody wants. They didn't lose for me today. Yeah, that was nice of them. Mother Nature

a two-day break for this team right now. Not the worst birthday present. Yeah. That's,

ooh, that's sad. But yes, what a birthday. On your birthday, come on in and talk about this team with

your good pal, EG over here, Mr. Personality. They, uh, we talked last week. I mean, it seems like a broken record now at this point. It's the same thing every week, essentially. There are no good weeks, or they really haven't been. Last week, we were a little more optimistic. I think we even called the podcast, which you can download. Signs of life, we call it. Sides of life or signs of hope or something like that.

It's all relative. It's not like they went six and one or something. No. But it's the same story over and over, which is the, the lineup cannot sort of break through in any sort of meaningful way, particularly after, you know, they scored two or three runs early, and then it's all of a sudden it's a seventh inning, and it's a three-three game. And then the bullpen is just, as our friend Paul Hambert would say, it's just a dumpster fire. It just is a forever burning. And no matter, and we're at the point now where, you know, they removed Colome from the mix. Now he's starting to work himself back into some high-leverage spots. He had a decent outing last time out. But there's no, like, I know everyone is, has pitchforks outside of Rocco Baldelli's house or whatever at this point. But, and I'm here to tell you he's, you know, going to win manager the year or anything this year. But what button can he push here with the bullpen that's not good? Just

decent. I mean, every button, Tyler Duffy, who's been their best reliever really for the last year and a half. Right. I mean, he just looks, he doesn't, you couldn't even recognize. Yeah, and you take a look at that walks number. You're like, what is going on? He's not missing any bats. He's walking people. And so it's, and then they get to extra innings, which they did twice in the Ranger series.

Right. Like if this were, you know, soccer or whatever, they'd be 12, 13, and 7. Right. And what did, I mean, I'm not here to tell you to say that's good either. Right. But 12, 13, and 7 is a completely different vibe, 32 games in the season compared to 12 and 20. Right. Which is, I mean, that is, it's not even an early hole. that is just, you're in danger of just having an awful season at this point. And so we'll talk a lot about the bullpen, I'm sure, on today's show. Can talk a little bit about the lineup because it's very strange to look at this lineup. And even without Buxton, which we're going to get into a lot, because now he's probably lost for maybe a month or so.

We should level set.

This time last week, we were talking about the signs of life that we were talking about. We're all line up. We're not talking about the bullpen. We were talking purely about the lineup because there were. We saw Kirillov really hitting the ball. We saw, you know, Polonkels looked like he was coming back a little bit. Garver was showing some signs of life.

Suno was on his way back to becoming healthy.

We spent, I hate, I hate, I hate doing this. But I fell into the trap again, which is, hey, when Snow comes back, who's he going to push out of the line? And every time we have to, you know, somebody asks us that question, nine times out of ten, I say, it's going to take care of itself. Things never as good as we think they're going to be. In the span of 72 hours, they lose Arise, Kirillov, and Buxton, back to back to back there, to the point now where not only do they have room for anybody, they had to call up Trevor Larnack well ahead of schedule. He's played three games at AAA. Now he homered in two of them. I mean, he was at absolute soonest in terms of what they planned out, a second half potentially call up. I mean, he was behind Kirillov on sort of the pecking order of prospects here. They call him up.

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