Category: Sports

That’s a damn good question, really. Most Major League players would tell you that they think spring training is much too long –does it really take nearly six weeks and thirty games to get a team ready for the season?

I seriously doubt it, but as long as they’re playing the games you’d like to think the results mean something, in terms of both individual and team performance, and at least anecdotally I can say that I think what happens in Florida and Arizona is a decent barometer for the season ahead.

The issue this year is perhaps clouded from a Minnesota standpoint by the fact that there are very few roster spots open on the team, and so Ron Gardenhire and his coaches are giving extended looks to a bunch of guys who are competing for those final jobs. There has also been the problem of injuries –concerns with Mauer’s knee, Morneau’s gingerly comeback from his brutal winter, and Nick Punto’s slow return, not to mention the various aggravations with the pitching staff.

Consider, though, the Twins’ spring training records in their two championship years –1987 and 1991– and in each of the last three seasons. They were 14-10 in ’87, and 21-10 in ’91. Last spring they were 20-11, the best mark in the AL, and they also had winning records in ’03 (19-13) and ’02 (18-14-1). So far this spring the Twins are 7-11 through Saturday, and have been scuffling to score runs. Their homerun production has been virtually non-existent, and the only offensive players who’ve really been tearing it up have been Matthew LeCroy, Jason Bartlett, Juan Castro, Todd Dunwoody, and Jason Tyner (the latter two are non-roster invitees). Luis Rivas has been terrible (.148 BA), which may be an indication that four hitting coaches (Rod Carew, Paul Molitor, Tony Oliva, and Scott Ullger) are not necessarily better than one.

Things have been a little more encouraging on the pitching side, even though Kyle Lohse and Brad Radke have struggled a bit, and J.C. Romero and J.D Durbin have imploded (they combined for eight strikeouts and sixteen walks before Durbin was sent to the minor league camp). The good news is that Joe Mays has been remarkably sharp (1.29 ERA in four games), Johan Santana, Joe Nathan, and Juan Rincon have pretty much picked up where they left off (well, in Rincon’s case, not necessarily where he literally left off), and Scott Baker has shown that he may in fact be the real real deal (0.00 ERA in eight innings pitched, with four hits, seven strikouts, and no walks).

We all know that the American League Central hasn’t exactly been a powerhouse division the last several seasons, but for an idea of just how deep Minnesota’s organization is, and how creative the front office and field staff have been when it comes to adjusting on the fly, it’s sort of interesting and instructive to look at the roster of the 2002 team. That season, of course, the Twins went 94-67 and won the first of their three straight division titles.

Here are the guys who were on the roster of the club in 2002 who are no longer with the team:

Brian Buchanan
Casey Blake
Cristian Guzman
Denny Hocking
Bobby Kielty
Corey Koskie
Doug Mientkiewicz
Dustan Mohr
David Ortiz (twenty homeruns)
A.J. Pierzynski (.300 BA)
Tom Prince
Jack Cressend
Tony Fiore (10-3, 3.16 ERA)
Eddie Guardado (45 saves)
LaTroy Hawkins (6-0, 2.13 ERA)
Mike Jackson
Matt Kinney
Eric Milton (13-9, 4.94 ERA)
Rick Reed (15-7, 3.78 ERA)
Bob Wells

That’s half a rotation, almost a complete bullpen, six starters (if you count the outfield rotation of Mohr/Kielty/Buchanan), and the primary utility guy off the bench. Yet despite turning over those twenty roster spots in under three years, the Twins will once again open the season as favorites to repeat in the Central, and they’ve managed to almost completely reassemble their team without making any substantial alterations in their budget. Which tells you about all you need to know about why the organization is seen as such a model around the league.

Maybe the team’s brass feels there needs to be some lingering sense of drama in the Twins spring training camp, given how few positions are really up in the air. I don’t know how else to explain why they haven’t just handed the starting shortstop job to Jason Bartlett.

What exactly is the competition? Slick-fielding free agent acquisition Juan Castro –who is thirty-two years old and a career .226 hitter (with a .269 on base percentage)– has five errors already this spring. Nick Punto, who has hit .237 in just 194 Major League at bats and whose real value (presuming he ever gets healthy) is probably as a utility player, has been a no show so far, and is proving to be as reliable as Tommy “The Trainer’s Table” Herr. I’m not quite sure how a guy who never plays seems to have acquired a reputation as such a hard-nosed player.

I don’t know diddly about Augie Ojeda, really, but I do like his name. That said, he’s thirty, and an even worse hitter than Castro or Punto (.219 hitter in 178 ML games).

I realize the Twins have always emphasized defense, and have some concerns about Bartlett in that regard, but, seriously, come on, the guy is twenty-five, knows how to get on base, and has hit pretty much everywhere he’s ever played. Not to mention he tore up the Arizona Fall League, and the scouting reports indicate that his defense isn’t the serious concern it’s being made out to be. He’ll be fine, and the Twins are paying Castro a million dollars a year as insurance and to make the occasional appearance as a late-inning defensive replacement.

Bartlett’s got nothing more to prove at Rochester, where he hit .331 with a .415 OBP last season. The job should be his, and I have to believe it is.

I love Baseball Prospectus as much as the next guy, and since Bill James’ regrettable vanishing act it’s probably the single most reliable annual. That said, these guys do occasionally spout some real nonsense. I don’t know, for instance, who wrote this year’s entry for the Twins, but this item on Matthew LeCroy got me laughing pretty hard:

…He’s a championship-caliber role player, a nifty DH or spot-starter at first against all lefties. If one of the outfielders broke down for a long stretch, it would be nice to see what he could do in an extended trial in a corner, before he gets much older.

Hello? Are we actually talking about the same Matt LeCroy? The guy I’m thinking of couldn’t beat Herb Carneal from first to third, and is likely to get “an extended trial in a corner” about the time they unveil Tim Laudner’s bust in Cooperstown.

Of course the Twins do have a shortage of outfielders, now that I think about it.

Either Western Canada’s a harsh breeding ground for all manner of ailments and afflictions –a sort of jerkwater petri dish blooming with pestilence– or the Twins need to find out what the hell Justin Morneau’s putting in his body and/or what he’s done to offend Zeus. Because Morneau’s rapidly becoming the Molehill Job, a man beleaguered by one strange health crisis after another.

Don’t they have indoor plumbing up there in Moosekatoon, or wherever it is Morneau’s from? Are there adequate laundry facilities? Do they properly dispose of their dead? Isn’t there someplace the kid could at least get some vitamins, for crying out loud? Red Cross helicopters should be en route to Morneau’s home town as we speak.

I mean, good lord, pleurisy? Isn’t that something pirates are supposed to catch, if in fact it’s something you actually catch? Have you ever heard of anyone else coming down with a case of pleurisy? I sure as hell haven’t.

And that, of course, is just one of Morneau’s winter collection of ailments, a list that just got longer by one (now, it turns out, he’s got a cyst that needs to be removed) and includes, besides pleurisy, chicken pox, appendicitis, and pneumonia. Those are all ugly words, and strange words to be associated with a strapping 23-year-old lad from Canada.

I don’t know why there isn’t more talk of moving Lew Ford into the leadoff spot. At this stage of his career Shannon Stewart is no longer a prototypical leadoff guy; he’s pretty clearly lost his wheels and isn’t much of a threat to steal a base or beat out a groundball, both areas where Ford seems to excel.

Lew also does a good job of taking and fouling off pitches, and he drew more walks (67) last year than Stewart has in any of the last six seasons –sixty-seven, in fact, is Stewart’s career high. Stewart does have a career on base percentage of .370, which isn’t bad, but in 642 career at bats Ford’s OBP is now .383.

The problem, of course, is that Stewart’s also probably not the ideal guy to bat second, and the Twins haven’t had a guy uniquely suited to that role in years. Hard as it is to believe, Stewart’s still only thirty-one years old, albeit a creaky thirty-one. Even so, his production has been mostly wasted in the leadoff spot in his time with Minnesota, and though he was injured for a big chunk of last year he hasn’t scored 100 runs in either of the last two seasons.

Joe Mauer has been talked about for the two spot (that’s if –knock wood, help me Jesus– the flare-up with his knee isn’t serious), and he’d probably be pretty productive there; but do you really want Mauer sacrificing and hitting behind the runner and doing all the thankless grunt work that is expected of your two hitter? I don’t, no, not particularly. I’d much rather see him in the three spot where he belongs.

Which leaves Stewart as the most logical candidate at two, presuming Jason Bartlett doesn’t earn the starting shortstop job. I say get Lew and Stew as many at bats as possible over the course of the season, let them both set the table for Mauer, Morneau, and Hunter et al, and take your chances.

Regardless of what Ron Gardenhire decides to do, you really do have to figure this team will score more runs than last year’s model, which went through way too many maddening stretches where they couldn’t put up any crooked numbers and the pitching had to carry them. Based on what I saw and read all last year I guess I was sort of surprised to not see Brad Radke’s name on the tough losses leader board in the latest edition of The Bill James Handbook

Yet even with plenty of reasons to be more optimistic about the team’s offense, you figure things will balance out a bit with the pitching staff. They could lead the AL in earned run average again, but I think that might be asking a bit much in the way of repeat performance, even though, yes, they do have everybody back (including, presumably, Joe Mays) and I expect Kyle Lohse to show radical improvement from last year (I’ll have more on Lohse a bit later).

A genius to me is somebody who does something wonderful I can’t begin to comprehend, and with his latest virtuous and ambitious enterprise John Bonnes (a.k.a. Twins Geek) fits the bill. If you’ve been reading John’s blog over the last few seasons you know that he’s among the more balanced and rational of the baseball obsessives holding court in cyberspace (and, believe me, that’s saying something). He offers up the macro, the micro, and pretty much everything in between, and you always have the sense of a real, rounded, breathing person behind his posts –an actual guy with a life who nonetheless needs to get a life, in other words, instead of just a guy who needs to get a life.

Twins Geek, like most of the other team-related sites, was clearly started as a labor of love, an act of faith conceived in isolation and tossed out into the void. To his credit, John has a good deal more savvy, technical wherewithal, and just plain doggedness than most of us –or at least certainly more than I’ll ever have– and he’s managed to build a fine franchise over there at the Geek. Now he’s taking the whole thing a big leap forward, turning his perfectly fine single-family home into a flophouse for all manner of Twins-obsessed riffraff.

I have absolutely no idea how John’s new thing works. I haven’t figured it out yet, and it may take me a while. What it appears to be, though, or aspires to be, is a baseball blog built along the community ownership model, and what could be better than that? Anyone who wants gets to claim a bit of real estate in Twins Territory, a soap box of their own to ramble and rant and reason to their heart’s content.

God knows, this could all end up being a terribly entertaining nightmare, a literal cyberspace version of Baseball Babel. It could also turn out to be a sort of ultimate Utopian democracy, an ideal straight out of Bart Giamatti’s Yale wet dreams. Whatever it’ll be, it’s for damn sure going to be fun to watch. Check it out, and let John know what you think.

I have every reason to believe our lads are steroid-free (seventeen reasons, in fact –that being the number of seasons since a member of the local nine has hit thirty homeruns), and I wouldn’t expect to hear of any dirty piss tests emanating from the Twins’ clubhouse any time soon.

The truth is that the organization hasn’t had any obviously synthetic muscle-heads or otherwise unnatural mirror-candy since they got rid of the superhumanly-ripped tandem of Rich Garces and David West some years ago.

Everybody, from the coaching staff to the fans in the chat rooms, has been hard on Luis Rivas the last couple years. Most of the criticism directed at Rivas has been justified. The guy had obviously developed some bad work habits that were showing up on the field with a glaring regularity. At times –most of the time– he seemed to be in a state of either depression or profound indifference.
Rivas, like his old double-play partner Cristian Guzman, is a tough guy to read, and I’m sure much of that has to do with the language barrier. There isn’t a coach with the major league club who speaks much Spanish, and there are few –if any– Spanish speakers among the regular contingent of local media, with the result that Latin players seem to rely on each other to work their way through translations of messages from on high. They also tend to stick together in the clubhouse, playing cards and hanging out at their lockers.
Rivas, though, is an interesting case. I’m not sure how tight he and Guzman were, but they lockered next to each other, and I’ll be curious to see how he responds to Guzman’s absence.
This is obviously a pivotal year for Rivas, one way or the other. Despite four full seasons in the major leagues he is still just 25 years old, the same age as prospects Jason Bartlett and Terry Tiffee, as well as Michael Cuddyer, the guy who assumed much of his playing time down the stretch last year.
Rivas’s recent reputation as something of a lazy player is sort of difficult to get your head around. In 2002, when the Twins took the unusual step of honoring Cleveland’s Travis Fryman with a pre-game ceremony on the occasion of his retirement announcement –the sort of thing clubs usually do for Hall-of-Fame-caliber players– Ron Gardenhire said the gesture was a tribute to the way Fryman had played the game. I remember going around the clubhouse afterwards asking various guys which of their teammates was Frymanesque in that regard. The experience stuck with me because two out of the four or five players I queried mentioned Luis Rivas. I actually dug out my old notebook just to make sure I was remembering correctly.
So what happened between then and now? Who knows, really. Rivas had some injuries, most notably late in that 2002 season. Maybe after having a job handed to him at the age of 21 he got complacent. Perhaps he should have spent a couple more seasons getting seasoned and hungry in the minor leagues.
Whatever the case, he’s still pretty damn young for a major league veteran, and though you’d like to have seen more improvement in his numbers and performance over the last four seasons –Luis’s been nothing if not consistently mediocre across the board– maybe it’s not too late for him to figure it out. Conventional wisdom has always suggested that for the the majority of players the key –often peak– years are between the ages of 25 and 27, so I’d guess this is the season we’re going to find out what’s up with Rivas, one way or another. He certainly doesn’t figure to get too many more chances, and he’s been lucky the Twins haven’t had a lot of other options.