It's not time for Emmanuel Rodriguez yet.

 The Twins are approaching an eight of the way through the season, and have continued to flirt with .500. They have started to slide in the past week, losing painfully to the Reds and Mets, and dropping the series opener with the Rays. Their bullpen has shown weaknesses, but the skid has come as the starting pitching has scuffled, and the hitting has been less effective. 

The Twins, as I've said early and often, are still treating this team as a team that intends on contention. It seems like they should be putting their best players in the organization on the field, right? The folks that gave up on the the team before the season started are looking at the recent streak and have already started calling on dissembling the team and calling up prospects. 

In this regard, it seems like there should be common ground, right? Dispatch James Outman, call up Emmanuel Rodriguez. It seems so easy! Outman has been a little used bench player, playing in 20 games, mostly as a defensive replacement - he only has 24 plate appearances. Meanwhile, Rodriguez has an OPS of .887, smacking around AAA pitchers. There is no doubt that Rodriguez, right now, is a better player than Outman.

Of course, Outman hasn't got into a rhythm this year. There was a chance that he would pop in to spell Austin Martin or Trevor Larnach, two other guys that seemed to have narrowly made the roster this year. Well, Martin has been the Twins' best position player on the team so far, and easily so. Trevor Larnach has mostly platooned, and isn't known for his glove, but his WAR is #4 on the team among offensive players. 

When Martin is off, Larnach plays. Often, they play together. There is no spot for Outman to fit in the lineup, especially with Byron Buxton and Matt Wallner entrenched (and Ryan Jeffers or Josh Bell or Victor Caratini or whomever is occupying the DH role on a given night). But Outman is 28, and is not likely to emerge as the long term asset that Rodriguez could. It is paramount that Rodriguez plays every day. The Twins smartly don't want him waiting around on the bench.

If a change does come, expect it to come after an extended decline of the team, and trades being made. Or after an injury. There isn't as great a case to get Rodriguez to the majors right now as it appears on it's face. 

The Twins remain unabashedly confident.

 The Twins were on a high before they played the Reds. Since then, they were swept at home, suffered injuries, and have seen long suffering fans once again abandon hope. The moves the team made to address the areas of diminished depth, however, seem to indicate that the front office is still fully on board with making 2026 a success. 

It helps that, since Pablo Lopez went down, the injuries the team has seen haven't been the long term disasters that we all have become accustomed to. Royce Lewis is already back. Mick Abel's elbow, allegedly, isn't anything serious. Really, the longest term impact is probably Kody Funderburk, whose wife had a baby. He'll be dealing with that for a while.

The way these injuries have been addressed is interesting. In particular, the pitching depth tests have been strange, if this was a team simply looking to bide time until they are fully in contention again. There are plenty of spot fillers in St. Paul, players with longer MLB careers, and aren't reasonably presumed to be fixtures of the Twins' long term futures, like John Brebbia or the recently signed Luis Garcia. But that isn't the route the Twins took when Abel, Funderburk and Cody Laweryson went on the injured list. 

Even with the short stints expected on the IL, and with most of the world projecting the Twins to be in a rebuilding phase, the team still opted to start the clock on Connor Prielipp and Kendry Rojas, prospects in the organizational top ten. With Abel off the list, they are also two of the top 3 pitching prospects in the system. They also have had hot starts in St. Paul.

Maybe they will both be in the Majors for a longer stretch than just these couple of weeks, but with the information on hand, it looks like the Twins were trying to capture the momentum of a couple of guys pitching well to try to maintain some sort of forward momentum with the Major League roster, and they didn't take into account what that meant for service time. 

Calling up Prielipp and Rojas now, in mid-April, is a clear win now move. The prevailing narrative is that the Twins aren't a team that is going to contending team this year, but time and again, the team has shown that they aren't buying into it. 

A brief bit about luck and hitting in the clutch

 

This morning, we took the kids to the Mall of America, and they went on rides at Nickolodeon Universe, and I walked around, very happy not to do the rides. While walking the grounds, I walked over the site of the Met Stadium home plate, and said, "Aw, crap" and recalled the curse. Then the Twins blew their game against the Reds. Sorry, gang.

One factor that I regularly called out during obnoxiously slow starts was the "clutch" metric from Fangraphs. Essentially, it showed that the Twins were regularly and dramatically worse than their regular selves in late. close and run scoring opportunities. This year, the Twins have gotten off to a better start despite meager projections.

Naturally, I thought that perhaps this meant the Twins were finally seeing things fall their way. The "clutch" rating is thought to be luck driven, and should ultimately trend towards 0. The beginning of the 2026 season seemed like all those bad times were being corrected, with a better than normal performance in the clutch. You know, the Twins are getting results because they have been lucky. 

The Twins are in the middle of the pack. Their clutch score is a hair above 0. The highs we have been feeling in the first 1/10th of the season? That's just how normal fans live. I see why baseball is so popular.

So are the Twins actually good? Maybe. Probably better than promised. They have played a bit above .500, and I think that is plausible. If they had hit a bit better when it mattered in the past couple of years, perhaps this recent run of success wouldn't be so hard to believe. 

That same darkness remains.

 The Twins are 10-7 this year, much to the utter shock of the baseballing world, and perhaps most of all to Twins fans everywhere. I've spoken about my resistance to the overwhelming pessimism surrounding the Twins this season, but even this is a significantly better mark than I anticipated. It should serve as a reminder, however. 

A reminder that even though we have problems with certain specific actions or decisions the front office or management makes, or question a players fit with the team, the players aren't the problem. The manager isn't the problem. The front office isn't the problem.

It's always been the Pohlads. 

Derek Falvey was second guessed for his trade deadline results last year, and other trades he has made in the past. His signing of Josh Bell and retention of Trevor Larnach were questioned, because of the fit, and value vs. the money available. The Griffin Jax/Taj Bradley trade is paying immediate dividends. Mick Abel looks like the real thing. Josh Bell has been ethereal, and Trevor Larnach has produced, even against lefties. Austin Martin is breaking out, and on days he doesn't eat Canadian Subway, Simeon Woods-Richardson has been stable at the back end of the rotation. Those last two have been in the organization longer, but the first several instances were happenings early in the offseason.

Derek Shelton is getting plaudits, and people are still bad mouthing Rocco Baldelli, though managers barely matter. Even if Shelton was a deciding factor in the Twins' early season success, some is still owed to Rocco Baldelli, who brought him to the team in the first place, as bench coach. There is some philosophical overlap.

And of course, the players are always going to be out there grinding, for themselves and for one another. Their effort and attitude hasn't been the problem. The manager hasn't been a problem, and the front office isn't the cause of any strife the team has. The problem is the Pohlads.

Even after the team sold a portion, the problem remains the Pohlads. Always the Pohlads. 

Women's basketball on the cusp

NIL has left an indelible mark on college sports. Nevertheless, the NCAA football championship game featured Indiana winning over Miami, and the Final Four saw Illinois weasel their way in. None of those football schools are regarded (not anymore, in Miami's case) as college royalty. In Illinois' (and yes, Connecticut's) case, they got to the Final Four despite not being a number one seed. There is more money, yes, but there is a lot to go around.

In women's basketball, there is also a remarkable level of NIL and endorsement money in the women's game as well, and the game has benefitted because of it. Well known players like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and Paige Bueckers have been able to stay through a full college career because the income level is enough that they don't yet need the professional salary. Their brand names in their college towns were enough. 

There is a talent gap in women's basketball that doesn't exist in the men's game. I don't mean that  to diminish the game, but rather to state that the best teams are simply a lot better than even the next tier. This year’s Final Four consisted of four No. 1 seeds; last year saw three—plus Connecticut. The game is at a peak in attention, but for now, there isn’t much parity.

I officiate high school basketball, and I get to watch boys and girls, and even more than the college resurgence, that has made me a fan of the women's game. And women's basketball is a different game. The rules are the same, but the strategies are evolving. Former players are now coaching and recognizing more effective ways to utilize talent.

Unlike men's basketball, size isn't as important in players. Since players are smaller and don't have the same reach, there is more space on the court. Ball handlers and facilitators are essential. Clark is tall. Physically, she could profile as a forward. What separates her from her peers is her handling and outside shooting. No need to jam everyone into the lane.

The game is different for girls and women, thanks to co. aches adapting strategy to the game, which helped to bring the modern stars to the forefront. The game is better for it. The players are now put in a position to play the best version of their games. and now have seen that good women's basketball draws fans too.

Getting the game right was stage one, and probably not one that was recognized early enough. Now that the game strategy is so good and player development at younger levels is better equipped to find the right skills, NCAA Women's basketball is on the cusp of much more entertaining tournaments. More girls are playing, and more former players are coaching and developing talent.

It’s only a matter of time before No. 1 seeds are no longer automatic favorites—because more teams will have elite talent.

The Twins wish they had a bullpen problem

I've been putting my sports opinions online since I had a Geocities site with my friend Steve. That means over 20 years of this. Suffice to say, some things have changed. Opinionated young writers were early adopters to advanced statistics, which made us feel smart, certainly smarter than old fashioned writers, and often smarter than the teams we loved/derided.

Baseball is a numbers driven sports, and eventually, those advanced stats made their way into front offices, along with some of those same writers that proved they actually WERE as smart as they insisted. Now with everyone mostly on the same page statistically, teams have started ingesting more data and putting it to good analytical use. Maybe it is the loss of my youthful hubris, or if it is the teams stepping thing up in brainpower, but I am happy to admit that teams are generally smarter than I am.

But one thing hasn't changed, and I am equally happy to note that the Twins seem to ascribe to my philosophy on this: bullpens aren't particularly important. 

Good bullpens are made great by pitching staffs that go deep into games, and the Twins bad bullpen is mediocre - literally middle of the pack so far - thanks to a rotation that has given innings. Simeon Woods-Richardson and Taj Bradley, in particular, have stepped up to give that length. 

But the bullpen wasn't what did the team in last year, and it hasn't been the problem in 2026. The Twins failed to score enough runs. They never seemed to come through when runners were in scoring position. I've commented on this before, that the Twins just have a historical trend of being much worse in leverage situations. Towards the end of the year, they just stopped hitting in any situation.

The Twins had a tortured offseason, thanks to ownership intrigue and front office turnover, but they did have a throughline. Before Derek Falvey left, Minnesota added Josh Bell and Alex Jackson. Immediately after he left, the first move was for Victor Caratini. When the team broke camp, of all the utility infielder options, they opted for Tristan Gray, the bat first option. They kept Trevor Larnach. They did almost nothing until the very end to address the bullpen.

The Twins knew that the one thing that would hold them back was an inability to score runs. Their starting pitching would cover for their bullpen. Even if it didn't, the ability of the bullpen won't matter if they don't score runs. So far, the Twins aren't scoring. Take the Easter game against Tampa. Minnesota got 9 solid innings from Woods-Richardson, Kody Funderburk and Cole Sands. By all accounts, that should have been enough. In the 10th, things went sideways, but it was a problem because the Twins couldn't score more than one run.

Byron Buxton and Luke Keaschall are the carry over engine of the team, and they need to get going, certainly. They should expect more from Royce Lewis and Brooks Lee. Larnach, Bell and Gray have been effective. But they haven't hit much at all yet, and the bullpen continues to be a non-issue.