I spent part of the weekend kicking around thoughts on the coming season with Britt Robson and David Brauer over at On the Ball, Britt’s new home on the world wide web (or whatever the hell you want to call this impossibly dense and increasingly confusing constellation of monkey business).
Go check it out.
I’ll be back here Monday after the game, or perhaps even during the game.
I just got word that Herb Carneal has died.
I’m sure the basic information is up at the Star Tribune by now.
I honestly don’t know what to say. Going back to my childhood the man’s voice has been a permanent fixture in my life, and he was always a model of modesty, decency, and dignity.
Show me a man who can’t trust, he used to say, and I’ll show you an untrustworthy man.
It was lies that broke his spirit and drove him out of the arms of…what? America? The human community?
The lies of culture and commerce, public and private lies, political lies –virulent dishonesty propagated by sociopaths, a strain so fierce and ubiquitous that you weren’t even safe inside your own skin.
How could you not be infected? How could you really know anymore what was true, including and especially the words that tumbled around in your own head and rolled off your tongue?
Somewhere deep in his childhood he’d concluded that trust was the only solid foundation on which his otherwise shaky identity rested or wobbled. Increasingly wobbled, but he had learned early that trust was sacred and hard to come by, and he’d never been able to just give it away. He had it, though, and it was precious to him.
He had a hard time anymore sorting things out, but something had happened. Or somethings. Nothing all that out of the ordinary, yet there was no consolation for him in that; if anything, in fact, this realization just made it seem all the more tragic, that such huge violations of trust could become so commonplace that they could no longer be seen as the forces of destruction they were.
It was perhaps this simple and this complicated: a basic trust is violated in some intimate human theater –a casual lie, for instance, an act of faithlessness or abandonment– and distrust, hand in hand with a possibly protective but nonetheless almost compulsive deceit, is incubated collaterally. The fracture snakes downward and outward, deeper and deeper all the time, like the roots of a huge tree. Something prosaically tragic like that, there was your Pandora’s Box.
To me, one of the great mysteries of 2006 was how Joe Mauer, a guy who had an on base percentage of .429, somehow managed to avoid scoring or driving in 100 runs. Three guys who hit behind him combined for 337 RBI (Morneau: 130; Cuddyer: 109; and Hunter: 98). Mauer had 86 runs scored and 84 RBI. You’d have to assume that he was on base a good deal of the time when Morneau, Cuddyer, and Hunter were at the plate, and also that some of their RBIs were available to him when he was at bat.
The stats say that Mauer hit .367 with runners on, .360 with runners in scoring position, and .408 with runners in scoring position and two out. Those are some pretty astonishing numbers, and make it even more difficult to explain his run production.
Over the winter I was determined to go through every 2006 game to see if I could figure out who exactly crossed the plate on every run-producing play. In other words, who scored those 130 runs that Morneau drove in?
I kept getting sidetracked on this project –it was an extremely slow process– and didn’t end up getting very far. In the early going, at least, it was all very random, and the runs were pretty evenly distributed up and down the line-up, but that was when I was working with April’s games and the Twins weren’t scoring a whole lot of runs.
I’m still curious. Maybe somebody else has done this, or does it every year. Maybe this information is available somewhere. Anybody know?
Here’s some other random stuff that helps to put last year’s remarkable production in context:
In 2005 the Twins didn’t have a single player with 100 runs batted in or scored. It was even worse than that: the Twins finished that season 13th in the AL in runs, and didn’t even have a single player with eighty runs or RBI.
In 2004 it was pretty much the same story –not a single player with 100 runs or RBI. Lew Ford, of all people, led the team with 89 runs, and Torii Hunter was the club leader with 81 RBI.
Before 2006 the last Twin to drive in 100 runs was Hunter, who finished with 102 in 2003.
The last time Minnesota had a player score and drive in 100 runs was in 2001, when Corey Koskie pulled it off (100 runs, 103 RBI). Koskie’s 2001 season, in fact, was almost a mirror of Michael Cuddyer’s 2006. Koskie finished with a .276 BA, 37 doubles, and 26 home runs (and 118 strike outs and 68 walks). Here are Cuddyer’s numbers from last year: 102 R, 109 RBI, .284 BA, 41 doubles, 24 HR, 130 Ks, and 62 walks.
I know it’s all about money, but today’s decision to send Matt Garza to Rochester nonetheless stinks to high hell from a fan’s perspective.
Someone tell me: how exactly is J.D. Durbin worth protecting? The guy is 25 years old and out of options. I say send him packing and if somebody else wants to roll the dice and put him on their roster, well, good luck to them and good luck to J.D. As it is he’ll be around to drag his mop out to the mound every time a game gets out of hand. Silva could have just as easily served that role out of the bullpen, which is exactly where he deserves to be when the Twins kick off the regular season next week.
Anybody want to wager on how long it takes for Garza to make the return trip from Rochester? I’d also be interested in hearing whose place you think he’ll take when he does come back up. My guess is it may not even be Silva’s.
[Update: Ok, so the Twins aren’t keeping J.D. Durbin. Which means what exactly? Chris Heintz, I guess, but I have absolutely no idea at the moment. Somebody clue me in.]
Time is a sputtering lantern, a bruised child, a gray, flat-faced man with fists of concrete and legs like pistons. He has it in for dogs, which is one of his many cruel and inexplicable character traits.
Misunderstood and misrepresented throughout history, gussied up and dumbed down, the snaggle-toothed bastard is frequently outfitted with wings he’d never wear let alone learn to use. He merely smirks at clocks and every other so-called timepiece man has ever devised –foolish abstractions, he’d tell you if ever he deigned to speak, wholly inadequate and far too orderly to ever approximate the real thing.
He is a stutterer, a creature of fits and starts and the long pauses of an unorthodox and not entirely competent chess player. He doesn’t have a rational bone in his body, nor could he be said to have ever had a thoughtful moment. No, he’s as impulsive and reckless and irrational as the day he was born in a maelstrom.
He’s a cold, plodding motherfucker, methodically unpredictable, a mess maker, back breaker, teeth kicker, heart wrecker. A connoisseur of ruins and a ruthless collector of forgotten debts.
He doesn’t heal. He doesn’t mend. He doesn’t forgive. He doesn’t forget. He doesn’t fly. He doesn’t tell. He’s got it in for dogs.
It’s been said that he wiggled out from under the thumb of God centuries ago and has been a lone wolf ever since.
Damn, I love Sidney Ponson.
I’ve always been a fan of the big man, and nobody was happier than I was to see the Twins swoop in and snag one of the huge Hot Stove League bargains, but after today’s stellar start (and –yeah, yeah– the Real Deal had to come in and blow up Souffle Sid’s masterpiece) I’m guessing that Jim Leyland is going to have a tough time choosing between Santana and Ponson when it comes time to name his All Star Game starter.
I say Sid is a lock –a freaking lock, I’m telling you– to win 18 games. Minimum.
I can tell you from unfortunate personal experience the sort of thing you can expect if you allow yourself to fall under the spell of a poison toad. It’s not good, that’s for damn sure.
You’d think, I suppose, that any reasonably intelligent person would know enough to steer clear of a poison toad that showed up on his doorstep at midnight, particularly when said toad was wearing an ill-fitting top hat, speaking perfect English, and toting what it claimed was a magic lantern.
I’ll admit, though, that I’d had a few belts and was feeling no pain. And the odd thing was that when I opened the door and saw this creature on my front porch I never for a minute doubted my eyes. And I knew for damn sure that a toad wearing a top hat was likely to have something to say. This fellow certainly didn’t disappoint on that count.
Oh, Lord, he had plenty to say, and I fell for it hook, line, and sinker. He was a real smooth operator, a first-rate song-and-dance man. He’d also clearly had his eye on me or done some background research, because he seemed to understand that I was lonesome and dealing with a good deal of personal darkness.
The toad offered to trade me his magic lantern for a head of lettuce and a saucer of Scotch. This seemed at the time like a reasonable bargain, but there was hitch: I had to kiss the toad before he would hand over the magic lantern.
A lonely and intoxicated man, you’ll surely understand, will do all manner of foolish things for a magic lantern, and so I gave the toad his saucer of Scotch and the lettuce –we had to compromise a bit; I buy my lettuce by the bag– and then I did as he requested and got down on my hands and knees and kissed him on the mouth.
At which point the magic lantern, which had been sitting there on my welcome mat, was immediately extinguished and I found myself transformed into a toad and perched on a log at the edge of a dark bog.
I hopped that night until I was exhausted, and when I finally arrived at the edge of my driveway I could see that what I assumed was the poison toad, looking like a much happier and healthier version of myself (he was shirtless, for one thing, and in better physical shape than I’d ever been), was hosting a raging party in my house.
At the annual Upper Midwest Foodservice and Lodging Show, which convened at the Minneapolis Convention Center a few weeks back, a fellow who was willing to do the legwork could have really gorged himself on meat. It seemed like somebody was handing out samples (“The Black Angus of Pork,” boasted the sign in one booth) every twenty yards. The portions were pretty small, however, so constructing an actual dinner, or even a ham sandwich, would have required persistence. It could be done, though, and lots of people seemed intent on doing it. There were also lines for cheese curds, condiments, cake, bread, and shot-glass-sized portions of soup, wild rice, gelato, wine, beer, and espresso that exhibitors were dispensing. People even queued up for an onion ring. One company advertised itself as “the leader in East Coast Calamari processing and distribution,” which sounded like some sort of mob racket.
For somebody really serious about opening a restaurant or hotel, the UP Show (as it’s known to insiders) offered a one-stop shopping experience, showcasing everything from mattresses, patio furniture, janitorial supplies, and background-music systems, to fry cookers, ice makers, commercial dishwashers, and convection ovens. You could even buy a doddering animatronic butler for your lobby, or transact business with “the leading effervescent manufacturer in the development, manufacturing, and packaging of effervescent products.”
Those seeking a breather from the hubbub of the main hall could venture down a set of escalators to a warren of meeting rooms where there was a full slate of educational and motivational programs with such titles as “Increasing Your Bar Profit—Strategies that Really Work,” “Menu Engineering,” and “Bed Bugs and the Hospitality Industry Today.”
That last one struck something of a dissonant chord, and yet also sounded intriguing in light of the ultra-sanitary and relentlessly cheerful atmosphere in the main hall.
Fewer than a half dozen convention-goers were on hand for Ecolab representatives Terry Elichuk and Doug Gardner’s harrowing PowerPoint presentation on a growing epidemic (according to the National Pest Management Association, there has been a sixty-three percent increase in reported bed-bug incidents over the past four years, and the pests have been identified in all fifty states).
A vial full of bed bugs was passed around. These were Cimex lectularius, or common bed bugs, from the Cimicidae family, and they looked like ticks. They’re nocturnal, fast moving, and rely on human carriers—suitcases, primarily—for transport. Once established in a hotel room they’ll camp out in curtains, carpeting, mattresses, box springs, or behind headboards and picture frames and commence to hatching, breeding, and feeding.
“As soon as the lights go out, you’ve got a bed-bug party,” Gardner said. “You can have large numbers crawling on you in the middle of the night and you wouldn’t even know it.”
The video, Bed Bug’s First Blood Meal, was shown. “This is real-time footage,” Gardner announced. “This is a bed bug that’s just hatched and it’s crawling on a person—a volunteer, of course. For a two- to three-minute period, it just sits there filling up with blood.”
The audience watched in squirming silence as the bed bug did, indeed, fill up with blood. Suddenly, all that free meat upstairs didn’t seem quite so appetizing.
The bugs inject a numbing agent so that the bites are initially painless. They also administer an anticoagulant that, Gardner said, “causes blood to run on sheets and pillow cases. These are leaking bites.” The video was followed by further visual evidence—“actual shots from the field”—corroborating that statement. The still-life images on the screen looked disturbingly like crime-scene photos.
The good news, apparently, is that there are no documented cases of disease transmission as a result of bed-bug bites, and the unsightly rash caused by multiple bites is fairly harmless and quick to heal. The bad news is that there’s no surefire way to prevent the bugs from entering a facility, and eradicating an infestation is costly and difficult. The key to damage control, Gardner said, is hypervigilance through regular inspections and aggressive treatment.
Such measures might offer small comfort to anyone who’s ever sat through a screening of Bed Bug’s First Blood Meal (or, for that matter, been a bed bug’s first blood meal), but, for the time being at least, they’re the only consolation the industry has to offer.
“These things have moved from the mythical to the real in a hurry,” Elichuk said. “They’re just exploding, from five-star hotels to dormitories, nursing homes, and residences, and all of us in the business are in serious catch-up mode. And the unfortunate fact is that bed bugs are rapidly becoming resistant to chemicals, so it looks like they’re here to stay.”
Beyond a long window that offered a panoramic view of the Minneapolis skyline, the end-of-the-workday exodus was already under way. Traffic was snarled on the streets stretching all the way downtown. Dave St. Peter had his back to the window, and he was looking and sounding like a man whose day was just getting started. St. Peter has a big, open, Midwestern face—it could be the face of a small-town high-school principal or insurance salesman—and he somehow manages to come across as both relaxed and impatient. He also looks like a guy who needs to duck into the men’s room several times a day to address his permanent five o’clock shadow.
“My dad was an accountant,” St. Peter said. “And I love my dad to death, but I knew I didn’t want to be an accountant. I wanted to do something I was really passionate about. I grew up a huge sports fan, and I was just hoping I could end up doing something along those lines. I used to think that maybe I’d be a sports information director somewhere. I can definitely tell you that there was never a day, never a moment, when I could have imagined I’d be sitting where I’m sitting right now.”
Where St. Peter is “sitting right now,” and where he has been sitting since November 2002, is in the president’s chair at the Minnesota Twins’ Metrodome offices. On a late afternoon in early March, he was up to his elbows in preparations for his eighteenth season with the ball club, at the end of his rope with the ongoing wrangling over land acquisition for the team’s new ballpark, and still managing to do a pretty convincing impersonation of a man who loves his job.
St. Peter’s story is the sort of improbable Horatio Alger yarn that seemed to have vanished from American business in the age of hotshot MBA programs and the get-rich-quick booms fueled by Wall Street and the Internet.
St. Peter graduated from the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks in 1989 and set out for the Twin Cities with a marketing degree in hand and the modest goal of simply getting his foot in the door somewhere. He had been raised in Bismarck, North Dakota, the middle kid in a family of five children (he has two brothers and two sisters), and, like a lot of people just out of college, he was ambitious but a bit vague regarding where exactly his dreams might lead him.
Despite his long tenure with the team, St. Peter is still only forty years old, which makes him one of the youngest team presidents in Major League Baseball. Other than a very brief stint with the North Stars in 1989, he’s never worked anywhere else, and, over the course of his Twins career, he has, by his own account, spent time in “every corner of the organization.”
“Coming to the Twin Cities was in itself a huge move for me,” St. Peter said. “You’re talking about a kid who used to think that going to Fargo was a big deal. I didn’t know anybody and didn’t have the slightest idea what to expect when I came here, but I always felt that if I could get an opportunity nobody would ever outwork me and I’d get noticed.”
He got his break with the Twins when he was offered an unpaid internship in the marketing department in 1990. Mark Weber, at the time the team’s director of promotions, was the guy who originally brought St. Peter into the fold, and he remembers the qualities that distinguished the new kid right out of the blocks.
“Teams didn’t do as much in terms of promotion back then,” Weber said. “We had a very small staff; there were three of us, including Dave, so he got thrown right into the fray. He was responsible for a lot of the communication with players in terms of pre-game activities and working with some of our corporate partners. After a week you could already see that he had what it took to succeed in what is a very challenging environment. He had a great work ethic and tremendous passion.”
Talk to anybody involved in baseball at the Major League level and he’ll invariably mention the 162-game season and the ridiculous demands it makes on everybody in an organization. “The number of hours you have to work in that business is beyond comprehension,” Weber said. “During the season you’re often at the ballpark from 8:30 in the morning until 10:30 or 11:00 at night. It can be an incredible challenge and it’s definitely not for everybody. But right away you sensed that Dave could both survive and thrive in that atmosphere. I’m not going to claim that I knew he was one day going to be president of the team, but I definitely felt that wherever he ended up he was going to be successful.”
Halfway through St. Peter’s internship the club offered him a full-time position. There was a bit of a hitch, though—the job wouldn’t be within the front office, or even within the confines of the Metrodome. What the Twins were offering was a decidedly unglamorous managerial position in the team’s Twins Pro Shop retail outlet in Richfield.
“I’ll admit that I had to sort of pause and ask myself if I really wanted to work in retail,” St. Peter said. “But I also recognized that this was an opportunity to actually get paid, receive benefits, and be a part of the Twins organization, so ultimately it became a pretty easy decision.”
St. Peter ran the Pro Shop from the summer of 1990 through February of 1992. By all accounts sales went through the roof. St. Peter acknowledged as much, but deflected credit. “That had a whole lot less to do with me,” he said, “and a lot more to do with Kirby Puckett, Jack Morris, and the rest of those guys who won the World Series in ’91.” He admitted, though, that his stretch in Richfield was a wholly positive experience. “In terms of managing staff, developing customer-service skills, and really learning to understand our fans at a very grassroots level, it was invaluable,” St. Peter said. “Those Pro Shops are a ticket outlet, but they’re also a place where the average guy stops in to buy a cap or to complain about everything from ticket prices to the lousy pitching performance the night before. That experience really helped me to learn how important this team is to the community.”
After St. Peter’s success in Richfield, the team offered him a newly created position—communications manager—in the front office. In many ways, the move represented a recognition on the part of the organization that the game was changing dramatically. “This was really the first time the Twins had a media-relations person devoted exclusively to the business side of the operation,” St. Peter said. “This predates the stadium issue, but if you really look at it, we were ahead of the curve. I took that job in 1992, and since then there has probably been as much or more stuff written about the business of baseball as there has been about the game itself.”
St. Peter’s move into the Twins’ front office, and his subsequent rise through the ranks, came during the most challenging period in the team’s history, both from a franchise standpoint and in terms of systemic turmoil throughout the business. The growing economic disparity between the big-market and small-market teams led to the impasse between the players union and management that resulted in the 1994 strike and the first-ever cancellation of a World Series. The increasingly grim economic realities hit the local franchise particularly hard; attendance declined as the team endured eight straight losing seasons from 1993-2000. And, as flashy new ballparks (and revenue juggernauts) opened all around the Major Leagues, the Twins found themselves embroiled in an agonizingly protracted and frequently contentious battle for a new stadium of their own.
The low point for the Twins came in the autumn of 2001, when Commissioner Bud Selig announced that the team was being targeted for contraction—this following the club’s first winning season in almost a decade.
But the next year the team pushed the contraction threat to the back burner in spectacular fashion, by winning the Central Division before losing the American League Championship Series to the big-market Anaheim Angels. St. Peter assumed the presidency following that season, and the team has been on a roll ever since, winning three of the last four Central titles and stockpiling talent up and down the organization.
“There’s no doubt that we went through a very dark period as a franchise,” St. Peter said. “We sort of hit bottom with the contraction thing, but we had a stretch in the late ’90s nineties where I can tell you pretty candidly that there was a lot of apathy in terms of our product. We’d had a lot of challenges, with [general manager] Andy MacPhail moving to the Cubs, the early retirements of Hrbek and Puckett, and the failed stadium efforts. It was pretty scary to think that we opened the decade winning a World Series and ended it with a lot of people maybe wondering whether they really cared about the Twins anymore.”
With Jerry Bell giving up day-to-day management of the franchise to focus on getting a new stadium built, the challenge for St. Peter and the Twins’ front office was to stabilize the business operations and get the focus back on the players and the game itself, and away from the divisive politics surrounding the stadium push and the sport’s ever-exploding economics. St. Peter gives the 2001 team a lot of credit for the organization’s ultimate turnaround. “There are very few guys left from that team,” he said, “but that year we unveiled our ‘Get to Know ’Em’ ad campaign and then got off to a 14-3 start. The combination of those things went a long way toward restoring some credibility for us with our fans. That team really connected with people, and that season created an incredible amount of momentum as it relates to marketing our team and building our identity around the players. That was a very conscious decision on our part, and we’ve been able to build on that momentum year after year. Of course that only works when you’re as blessed as we have been to have guys who are not only good players, but who are also accessible, who are tremendous spokespeople for the franchise, and who have for the most part been—knock wood—wonderful role models.”
St. Peter also has praise for the often-reviled owner of his ball club. “I’m sure his patience was tested plenty of times,” St. Peter said. “But Carl Pohlad stayed the course through all the chaos. He’s been incredibly loyal to his staff, and that’s created real stability within the organization. If you really look at it, in the last twenty-plus years we’ve had two team presidents, two general managers, and two field managers. We have the longest tenured scouting director and farm director in all of baseball. What that all boils down to is continuity; we have a lot of people who’ve been in this organization and in their positions for a very long time. We know each other, and over time we’ve developed an agreed-upon philosophy about the way we go about things both on and off the field.”
Most baseball fans have a pretty good idea regarding the basic responsibilities of the manager and general manager of a Major League team. The president, however, occupies a hazier sort of position in the public’s mind. So what exactly does the president of the Minnesota Twins do?
The answer, if you’re Dave St. Peter, is a little bit—and sometimes a lot—of everything.
“I’m sure it varies from team to team,” St. Peter said. “But at the end of the day, I think the core responsibilities are the same. You’re responsible for managing the baseball team as a business and as a public trust. And in the Twins organization, the business and baseball operations have always been one and the same, so I work very closely and collaboratively with [general manager] Terry Ryan. We deliver Terry a budget and try to give him the dollars and resources that are going to allow him to put a competitive team on the field. It’s Terry’s job to work within that budget and manage the personnel of our baseball team. But if we’re going to be successful we have to be able to work well together and bounce stuff off each other. Very rarely is Terry recommending something to ownership that I’m not on board with, and vice versa. I think we do a pretty good job of working together in lockstep.”
That, it turns out, is a seriously shorthand version of St. Peter’s job description. His co-workers will tell you that the team president is a guy who likes to be involved in every area of the business, from ticket sales and corporate sponsorships to advertising and promotions.
Patrick Klinger, the Twins’ vice president of marketing, was hired by St. Peter in 1999, and like his boss (and pretty much everybody else in the organization) his first gig with the team was as an intern. “Dave knows more about every element of this operation than anybody around,” Klinger said. “I don’t think there’s a job in the organization he couldn’t do. For a guy in his position he’s as committed as anyone I’ve seen. Even as his responsibilities have grown, and with all the ballpark stuff, he’s still very involved in the day-to-day operations and wants to know what’s going on in every department. He also has a lot of good ideas, and doesn’t mind getting down in the trenches and getting dirt under his fingers. There isn’t anybody in the office who works longer hours. Dave’s good at preaching balance, but he’s not very good at practicing what he preaches.”
St. Peter admitted as much, but insisted that he’s working on it. He and his wife Joanie have three pre-teen boys, and this year, he said, he intends to help coach Little League. “I may end up missing a game here or there,” he said. “I’m trying to find ways to create more balance and be there as a dad, but the reality is that I’m going to be here most of the time. It’s just the nature of the job. From the very beginning it was drilled into me that eighty-one nights a year what’s happening down here is the most important thing going on in the state of Minnesota.”
Given that grind, you’d think that a guy in St. Peter’s position would have frequent occasion to look at the folks in the Vikings’ front office with a little bit of envy, but he just laughed at that notion. “I’ve never understood how you could play just one game a week,” he said. “I literally can’t imagine working for an NFL team. It would be like having ten weeks of vacation. I say this all the time: The NFL is a country club. The baseball season’s a marathon, and that’s a badge of honor for those of us who thrive on this atmosphere. It’s all I’ve ever known, and what we’re going through right now is the best time of the year. There’s nothing better than spring training and the anticipation of opening day.”