The Skolney Blog

The first ever July 31st or bust trade deadline was weird. Teams you wouldn't think would be buyers were. Teams you assumed would be the big buyers in some cases did nothing at all. Most of the players who had been talked about the most as trade targets stayed put. The Twins did not make that big splashy move for either a starter or a closer. But they did make 2 bullpen trades in the last few days. They got Sergio Romo from Miami and today Sam Dyson from the Giants. Both definite upgrades over the Trevor Mays and Tyler Duffeys. Suddenly the bullpen looks a whole lot more credible. We shouldn't have to see May in there trying to protect a tight lead in any more 8th innings. But a lot of the fans have gone into meltdown mode. They are mad there was no big trade. They are mad that the Indians and Astros made bigger deals. I wanted a starter, but nobody made those trades. The Yankees needed a starter badly, and the Yankees always get whatever the hell they want, but even they cou...

Quentin Tarantino's 10th film(sorry QT, Kill Bill was released as two films...I call em 2 films), OUATIH often feels like someone else directed it. This is a very laid back movie. It's probably his only film that could be categorized as strictly a comedy. It's also easily his most loosely structured film. This is a 2:30+ film that never really connects into a single storyline. Mostly it follows Leonardo DiCaprio's fading star actor and Brad Pitt as his longtime stuntman/best friend. But it also sort of follows Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate, the actress who was killed by Charles Manson's cult. But maybe not in this film, as Quentin may or may not be doing some of his Inglourious Basterds revisionist history here. The film's promotion made a lot of the Manson connection, but Robbie's casting here is basically a big misdirect. The Manson stuff is very much on the periphery. We see him I think just once. There is one incredibly unnerving sequence set at the ran...

Must be, cause the Twins just found every way imaginable to blow another game against the Yankees. That could have gone down as one of the greatest regular season wins in Twins history(and given the overall scarcity of playoff success, wins overall). I don't think I've been excited during a Twins game since at least 2010 as I was when Sano hit that moonshot to go up 11-10. But they blew it. Then my heart is pounding in the 9th as they load the bases against Chapman. They tied it up. But they blew it. Then they load em in the 10th. Only to have, naturally, the former Twin make one of the plays of the fucking year to save the game. This game could have been the reversal of so many awful trends. Yeah they beat the Yankees last night, but they've always won the stray game against these assholes. This would have clinched a series win, and would have clinched no worse than a split of the season series, which they haven't managed since 2006, and would have given them a s...

Movies: Black Widow. Obviously we knew this was coming next May. I'm hoping that Florence Pugh takes over the Black Widow mantle. The Eternals. Of all the new projects this is the one I'm probably the least excited for. It has an interesting, eclectic cast though. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. I like that they're bringing in the Mandarin. Honestly I just hope they get the kung fu right. Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. A straight horror movie that goes full multiverse craziness. This could frankly be amazing. Love that Scarlet Witch will be in it. Thor: Love and Thunder. I am literally living for this for the next 2 years. I would already be super hyped for another Taika Waititi Thor movie, with a lot of Valkyrie. But bringing back Natalie, and having her become Lady Thor? That's so fucking incredible that I can't even describe my excitement. And as a bonus it is already pissing off the incels. Blade. Mahershala Ali is great casting. ...

Fuck their choke artist starters, who can never even get past 6 innings, and who almost always give runs back immediately. Fuck their choke artist bullpen, who throw stupid pitches in every situation, blow every big chance they get. Fuck their choke artist fielding. It's like a game can't officially start until they've committed their first amateurish throwing error. Fuck their embarrassing choke artist filled lineup. Oh wow you hit some solo homeruns great! Try getting a clutch 2 out hit with risp. Try hitting a sac fly when the tying run in on 3rd. Try not shitting your pants everytime you load the bases. I swear teams are intentionally letting them load the bases cause of how god damn incompetent these choke artists are in those situations. Try not going scoreless for inning after inning every fucking game. Fuck Rocco Baldelli. He is so overmatched it's unreal. He sits back and watches this team give up a 12 game division lead but keeps sending out the same shitt...

As if the arrest of Trump's fellow pedo pal Jeffrey Epstein, or the Mike Pence concentration camp tour were not bad enough, disgraceful enough moments from the most disastrous presidency any of us have ever seen, now Trump and his state run media and his deranged cult have just completely abandoned even the charade of actually governing, of actually praising the things he has supposedly done(he's done NOTHING btw). Now it's all about ginning up intense, violent hatred of.. .surprise surprise....prominent congresswomen of color. When in doubt, get the cult to point their fingers at the brown people. The Squad, most notably AOC and Ilhan Omar, have been the most vocal about these disgusting torture camps at the border, where this fascist administration is literally just starving people, forcing them to exist indefinitely in the worst conditions, ripping parents from children, and yes, literally killing some. When people die in these conditions it's the same as murder. A...

When Ehire Adrianza is pitching mop up duty in the 9th inning of a 2nd straight home loss to the Mets, and fwiw getting shelled,  to top off a 14-4 loss to the 2nd worst team in the National League, that's when you know that a month and a half long slump has reached rock bottom. I'm done. I'm done giving this team any benefit of the doubt. This collapse is happening, and it's not stopping. That series win in Cleveland last weekend has already been obliterated. The Indians went right back to demolishing the Tigers, while the Twins opened a tough 9 game homestand by frankly embarrassing themselves in the 2 "easy" games. The lead was 5.5 at the break, was bumped up to 6.5, and now will likely be 4 at night's end. The Twins of 2019 are having a historic collapse. It is HARD to blow a 12 game lead in less than 2 months(I'm very much assuming the Indians pass us before August 1st). When that happens it's legendary. It's the 78 Red Sox(the Bucky Den...

Yeah it's the summer dog days. Crawl is a very straightforward monster movie. A hurricane floods a house with ravenous alligators and, well, that's it. No scientific bent. No evil humans setting them loose. I appreciated that it didn't pretend to be anything more than it is, but it's never more than just a passable B movie. The acting by Kaya Scodelario and Barry Pepper is fine. It keeps things fairly realistic. But it's not scary of even that tense, even for someone like me who is both claustrophobic and a bit waterphobic. Stuber is of a genre I wish we got more, the buddy action comedy, but man is this just a forgettable try. The pairing of Dave Bautista and Kumail Nanjiani sounds better on paper than what we get. For some reason they have Bautista be largely blind for much of the movie, which I guess is supposed to lead to some hilarious physical comedy but doesn't. The side characters are written super broad and annoying(only Natalie Morales fares alright)...

This weekend was the Twins most important series of the season. 3 games at Cleveland, who had cut the division lead to 5.5 games. A slumping Twins team against a hot Indians team. I was honestly just hoping the Twins could win 1 of 3 and stop the bleeding a little. It was already looking pretty disastrous around 8 or so Friday night. Twins were down 3-1. Kyle Gibson failed to get out of the 4th. The lineup was again being shut down, and failing with RISP. But one replay changed that game, this series, and, we'll see, maybe the season. Max Kepler grounds out to end another futile scoring threat in the7th. The Twins challenge, and it turns out that Kepler beat the throw the first by a blink. Could not have been closer. This is why you run out every grounder. The reversal gives the Twins a run to make it 3-2. Then Polanco drives a ball over the CFers head for a 2 run double and in a matter of a few minutes we go from the Twins still down 3-1 in the stretch to leading 4-3. Taylor R...

Yesterday: I've always felt that the old time music acts that we are all told are the greatest ever would across the board be far less popular if their music came out today. The Beatles are right at the top of that list. This movie imagines a world where they never existed, and only one struggling musician remembers them and their songs, so he passes them off as his own. It's a premise that could have led to a great film, but Yesterday is mostly just a likable, mildly amusing, not at all deep movie. It's a curious choice for director Danny Boyle, who usually does edgier movies, but he brings a fair amount of energy to the movie. The romance is clunkier, although Lily James is so god damn adorable that it goes down okay. Midsommar: I really did not like director Ari Aster's Hereditary at all. So a 2 1/2 hour cult-set horror movie seemed an iffy proposition, even with the glorious rising megastar Florence Pugh starring. But I really got into this. It's barely even ...

The Indians are going to win the AL Central. Might as well start accepting that sad reality now. No sense spending another couple months futily hoping that the Twins magic of April and May will ever resurface. It's over. In the final, humiliating act of an awful road trip, finishing off a now sub-.500 last month of baseball, the Twins once vaunted offense scored a measely 2 runs off a winless, 7 ERA pitcher. Their ace, Jose Berrios, immediately gave a 2-1 lead back, then let Chris Hermann drive in the go ahead run. Their bullpen surrendered a grand slam. They let Hermann and Robbie Grossman, and even Liam Hendriks, all castoffs from bad Twins teams, dominate them. I have been on meltdown watch for weeks. I have been called a fake fan, downvoted on reddit on a daily basis, all for seeing the reality that this team was in a slump. But when a slump lasts this long it's no longer a slump. This is officially a meltdown. The Twins have pissed away half of that division lead, and ...

MEGA spoilers. It's one of the most spoiler heavy MCU films. The 1st MCU movie post-Endgame. The final movie of phase 3. Far From Home is the first look at what the MCU is actually going to look like now that Endgame has closed so many doors and finished off so many major characters. But it also wants to be your kind of expected fun superhero romp. It works at both, although after one viewing I would say that Spiderman: Homecoming was the overall better movie. This one takes place an unspecific time after the Tony snap(the 5 year disappearance of so many people is called "the blip"), although it seems like it was at least a few months since everybody came back. Peter is more concerned about his upcoming class trip to Europe, and his  plan to tell MJ about his feelings for her, than any Avengers type missions. But he gets pulled into one by Nick Fury, as a superpowered man dubbed Mysterio needs help defeating the last of the "elementals", creatures who he has ...