Category: Twins

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.

Welcome to this thing, yet another old thing reconfigured as a new thing. It’ll be mostly about baseball, but I have a wandering mind, so it’ll likely occasionally stray pretty far afield –at some point, I suppose, I’ll feel compelled to talk about other random nonsense as well. Sometimes the random nonsense and the baseball will intersect in strange ways. I might, for instance, tell you about the time I saw Boxcar Willie throw out the first pitch in a Southern League game.

Willie was wearing overalls, of course, and uncorked a wild pitch to the screen. I could then seque into the story about being present on another occasion when Boxcar Willie had a street named after him in Branson, Missouri (he was wearing overalls). Every time I see a celebrity of even the most forgotten, nearly-dead sort at a baseball game I’m for damn sure going to tell you about it. Like this: I once saw Don Knotts and Norman Fell at Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City on the night Paul Molitor got his 3000th hit.

I might ask you to tell me the strangest person you’ve ever seen throw out the first pitch or sing the National Anthem at a baseball game. What the hell, as long as I’ve already mentioned it we may as well get that out of the way right now.

Mostly, though, as I said, I’ll write about baseball, because baseball is one of the few things I’m passionate about in a world where the things I’m passionate about are diminishing by the day.
I say this even though baseball has nearly destroyed my life, and may yet manage to finish me off. I think it was F. Scott Fitzgerald, talking about Ring Lardner, who once observed that baseball had ruined more good writers than alcohol. I’m not going to pretend to be a good writer, but I can tell you that I’ve done more than a little dabbling –dabbling is almost certainly not the right word– in both baseball and alcohol, and I’m pretty sure baseball has taken more years off my life.

Perhaps not all truly obsessive baseball fans are stunted oafs, but a great number of them are, and I don’t suppose I’m any exception.
I once ran away from home to work at a spring training ballpark (sure, I was 25 years old, but like I said, I was a stunted oaf). I’ve been to more baseball games than I could count, although I’ve scored every one of them, and the scorebooks are heaped in my basement along with several thousand baseball books, a couple hundred mitts, and scads of other baseball-related nonsense.

I’ve tried to wean myself over the years, but to no avail. The overpaid, cheat-at-any-cost bastards and their cretinous overlords have got their hooks in me for good. If I were to wake up one morning in April and read in the newspaper that Derek Jeter had been arrested for having a freezer full of human body parts, dead cats, and growth hormones in his basement I’d immediately skip happily along to the boxscores and by six-thirty I’d be in my seat at the Metrodome with a scorebook in my lap.

I have nothing whatsoever against complete monsters as long as they can swing the bat and make the necessary plays in the field. As soon as their production starts to slip, you’re welcome to lock them up for the rest of their lives as far as I’m concerned.

I could tell you about all the reasons why I love baseball despite its many serious flaws and blemishes (unsightly steroid rash, most prominently, and Bud Selig), but people do that all that time, and you’ll surely have noticed by now that they’re always essentially the same reasons: the perfect accounting of the game, the absence of a clock, the rich history and repository of statistics, the easy and expert comparisons those statistics make possible for even the most casual fan, the lulls that allow time for plenty of idle conversation, the quirks and characters and long season.

That’s all absolutely true, but Roger Angell and George Will and a host of others have been going on about that sort of thing forever, and sometimes it can almost make me resent the sheer perfection of the game. If it were a little less tidy and entrenched maybe most of the highbrows would go back to their chess boards and fat volumes of political philosophy and Civil War history.

Mostly, I have to admit, I love baseball because it takes up so much time that would otherwise have to be taken up with something else, and I don’t have much in the way of something elses in my life. Spring training, 162 games, the postseason –that’s essentially eight months steeped in obsession, and over a lifetime that adds up to an awful lot of the most basic sort of prison subtraction.

I like the way we’ve all come to take for granted the ridiculous uniforms of the sport. I love the fact that there are no cheerleaders. I love the suicide squeeze (and despise the sacrifice bunt) and the grand slam –or, as my wife calls it, the four-run thing. I love the various plot lines and dramas large and small that play out over the course of a season, the countless opportunities for pure joy and abject misery.

I’m not sure baseball builds character, but I do know that it creates characters, and I adore characters. The game also doesn’t necessarily reward devotion, but it does reward attention, and for the attention deficient it’s like a daily Ritalin injection directly into the heart of the cerebrum. I can’t think of any other thing that can make me sit still for four hours at a time.

And after four months of bouncing off the walls I can’t tell you how good it’s going to feel to be able to sit still again, even if I once more end up with my heart yanked out of my chest and kicked into the gutter with the last leaves of autumn.

This, though, will be about those months when my heart will still be beating, hopefully like a man’s with a gun in his mouth. Seriously, that would be a good thing. That would be a seriously good thing.
I’ll be here –and elsewhere– all year. Feel free to drop me a line any time. I’d be happy to hear from you.