The Weekly Minnesota Sports Survey

#-1: Twins (Last Week: -1).  Is it me, or have the Twinks played a lot better lately?  They won two-of-three against the White Sox, and was a Thursday matinee short of sweeping a four-game series at Cleveland for the first time in franchise history.  A 5-2 week is great!  Way too late -- they're still about 20 games below .500 -- but it's still great.

Meanwhile, they did clear the decks, sort of, by Monday's trade deadline.  They traded two of the failures from their pitching corps, Ricky Nolasco and Alex Meyer, to The Los Angeles Of Anaheim Angels Of Los Angeles Angels Of Anaheim Angels Of ... for two other Pitchers, Hector Santiago and Alan Busenitz.  Nolasco and Santiago have been in the majors; Santiago, in fact, represented Anaheim in the 2015 All-Star Game.  Meyer and Busenitz are prospects.  None of them are game-changers, either pros that could vastly improve their new teams or blue-chippers who may be good in the long term.

So I don't exactly get why the trade happened.  Nolasco has been a disappointment, but I don't think he has played horribly this year.  So why trade him?  Meyer used to be the hot prospect for this organization, but he probably has underwhelmed so much that he has fallen off of Baseball America's Top 100 Prospects List.  There are some people who think Meyer has been screwed by the Twinks, and given its track record, that accusation has some credibility.  So why trade him?  Probably because there's been so much bad karma that they just want to get rid of them, even if it's in exchange for equally hot garbage, as Santiago and Busenitz appear to be.  This feels like a move made for its own sake, but if one of these four players get better just because of a change in scenery, well then, this trade has generated its own intrinsic value.  Let's hope then that the redemptive player comes from one of the two that's coming this way.

Oh, and in this season where half a season automatically turns everyone into prime-era Pedro Martinez, a guy in the bullpen who did marginally well this year, Fernando Abad, was flipped to Boston for another pitching prospect, Pat Light.  I didn't know a person by the name of Fernando Abad existing on this earth before this season, so, yeah, whatever.  Light is still in AAA, so his future is ahead of him, and that's the only reason this transaction makes sense for the Twinks.

This week: Three at Tampa, four to Houston at Target Field.