Bert Alert!

Bert Blyleven made it into the Baseball Hall of Fame today, on his second to last shot, with 79.7% of the vote (the minimum is 75%), which was a totally awesome birthday present to me, and also made it so I can stop being apoplectic about this podcast Houseboy shared with me last week in which Kevin Goldstein argues that an important consideration for getting into the Hall of Fame should be... "fame." Ok, yeah, it is right in there in the title and all, but I would dare to argue that famous for what should be kind of important, and if he concedes that Bert's stats make him more than worthy (which he does), then the question of how famous he is is inherently subjective. I'm sure there is a significant amount of subjectivity in the voting of a bunch of people who make their money writing about a game and probably ingest more nacho vitamins than can be healthy, but I can tell you as a raised but not born Minnesotan who watches the Twins broadcasts on the Extra Innings package every year, that if he wasn't famous enough then he's certainly famous enough now, and plus there is this:

[Source]

Anyway, all of that doesn't matter now because he's in and so I'm happy... for now...

Other people's pain is my pleasure

That's right. I'm that bitter. After the crushing one game playoff defeat of the Twins, Walleye and I vowed not to watch the playoffs. It was going to be like 2005, where they just didn't exist and forever afterward when people mentioned it I'd say something disturbing and confusing like "Oh, 2005... the year they didn't have the playoffs because of the Robot Riots." Only replace 2005 with 2008 in this case.

But on the other hand, the Brewers did make it in, and Tampa Bay has this adorable underdog thing where people from Florida don't give a shit about baseball, and there are former Twins on the team as well as fun players named RRRRRRRRRRRRocco Baldelli and suchlike. So we just tuned in to see the scores and pretended we didn't.

And then awesome things happened like the Cubs getting swept. That made us very happy. And forgive me Jenny, but the White Sox getting eliminated in 4 games gave me tingling little feelings of happiness too, seeing as how I'm bitter and angry. Those two things combined almost outweighed seeing the f*%king Red Sox squoosh poor Torii Hunter and the other Los Angeles Undefeatables of Anaheim. Add in the Brewers losing it in 4 games too, though, and now I'm stuck rooting for Tampa Bay and the Phillies? Go Matt Garza!

The baseball gods like drama

So after losing their respective series to the Indians and the Royals, the White Sox and the Twins both managed to pull impressive wins out of their asses this afternoon. This forces the White Sox to make up the rain out with the Tigers and play 162 games like the rest of us. Interesting little tidbit in that game: reported probable pitchers are Freddy Garcia and Gavin Floyd, who were traded for each other (plus Gio Gonzalez, but who's counting) in 2006.

So, that's my contribution to the analysis of THAT game. Irony man. I think.

Hawk Harrelson has a way with words

Near the beginning of the White Sox game tonight as I was somewhere between the cobra and the downward dog position in my third round of Salutations to the Sun, I heard the best sports announcing moment since the inevitable awesomeness that comes from female weightlifting in the Olympics. Hawk Harrelson, of Jim Thome, "Ride Jim hard tonight and put him away wet." Well, I think the downward dog mutated into some kind of retching cow and then fell over.

In the end Jim was 0 for 3 and the Twins, hanging out in Toronto and taking Labor Day off like good Americans, caught up with the White Sox and now share first place. I hope Thome's not too wet wherever he is tonight.

Yesterday the best thing all season happened

I knew it was coming only hours before, but I'd been wearing the jersey from the moment I heard the news. I remembered the terrible day, more than four years ago, when I heard he was leaving us and the curse of my favorite players began. The camera followed him up the back hallways of the Metrodome, grinning from ear-to-ear and he looked almost as happy as I felt.

"What's up Minnesota! Eddie G's in the house!"

I about cried with happiness.

The Twins lost and I had a blinding migraine, but Eddie Guardado shut down the 8th inning with 3 pop flyouts in his triumphant return to the Twins. All is right with the world.

If someone else said it better...

So, I recently went to Twinsfest, where I took lots of pictures of my feet on the field turf and of Walleye with the soon-to-be-painted-over pictures of Torii Hunter on the walls, got my 1991 World Series newspaper signed by Kent Hrbek himself (who joked with Bert Blyleven while I hyperventilated), looked at models of the new stadium and celebrated Morneau's and Cuddyer's new contracts. And then I returned to Chicago and spent several weeks in denial over the loss of Santana to the Mets (don't even ask about Hunter--that's still a cruel joke as far as I'm concerned). I had been trying to figure out what to say about it, and then I saw this article in the Hardball Times, which pretty much says it all. I don't hate Santana for this; I hope he does well (though I personally wish it had been for the Brewers or some other more deserving NL team). I'm just about tired out with the bullshit that Twins fans have to put up with from ownership, and despite all my previous arguments about the small market the team is in, I can not BELIEVE that Hunter and Santana were not worth opening the purse strings for. I'm starting to really question whether this team can return to World Series caliber if the ownership is never going to see another Kirby Puckett that they will invest in.

Speed is the New Power?

Several weeks ago, right around the time of the 2007 amateur draft, a friend emailed me a rant he had read on the Twins' disproportionate emphasis on pitching prospects in the drafts between 2002 and 2005. The argument itself was pretty silly on its face, as the dates are rather obviously chosen specifically to exclude the several quality position draftees that currently occupy Minnesota's roster. If we accept the easily acceptable proposition that the point of the amateur draft is more to build a quality MLB team and less to impress Baseball America with your system depth (not that those goals are necessarily exclusive) then it's not difficult to accept that Twins' scouting brass looked at the team in 2002ish and thought to themselves, "We're gonna have a batch of pretty decent position players up on the big club for the next 5-6 years. Maybe we should find some pitching." Though it's possible this sentiment was circulated in email or cellphone form rather than telepathically. We can't be sure.

An alternate rant that I would have sympathized with is that the Twins are still recovering from some rather unimpressive drafts. BJ Garbe? And the 2001 draft is pretty underwhelming once you get past the first name on the list. That's not the point here though.

I'd rather talk about Ben Revere. He's put up a .328/.373/.481 line in GCL play so far. As a 19 year old, that's not really too breathtaking, though it's his first couple months of wood bats and pro ball so it's not like he's a particularly slow mover; he was just old for a high school senior. What's rather cool about that .481 SLG is that it's built on the strength of 8 triples in 33 games. After Denard Span and Matt Moses and countless other Twins' prospects made short work of rookie and A-ball competition only to stall out as they advanced, I'm resolved not to get too wound up about Revere. He needs to walk more and hit the ball over the fence once and awhile before he's more Curtis Granderson than Jason Tyner. But what I will get wound up about is a triple every four games. There's obviously not much to take from that developmentally, except that Revere is very, very fast, a fact which hasn't been in dispute. So we wont deal with it from a developmental perspective, but rather from a fan perspective.

Triples are awesome.

Jose Reyes is a great, valuable player because he's buttressed his speed with improving plate discipline (honestly, why would anybody walk that guy if they could possibly avoid it?). But Jose Reyes is awesome because he hits triples.

Joe Benson is the CFer for the Twins' low-A affiliate in Beloit. He has 6 triples this year in 95 games. That's not as frequent tripling as Revere, or even as many triples as Revere, but it's a decent triple total. He's also hitting .294/.369/.452 since the beginning of July. There was a cool Bryan Smith article in BPro a couple months ago about teenage prospects in the MWL. Since I possess the tiny brain of a stegosaurus, I enjoyed his liberal use of anecdotal evidence. Since I further possess great powers of rationalization, I prefer his liberal use of anecdotal evidence because the ultimate end of player development is quality MLB players. Volume is nice, but the process is directed towards production of specific, individually valuable players. In any event, Justin Upton hit .263/.342/.413 there and it didn't stop anybody from thinking he was the next Willie Mays. Unless they never thought that to begin with. Lots of people prefer not to go overboard by comparing 19 year olds to inner-circle Hall of Famers, and being boring and reasonable is their prerogative. He also only hit one triple, which gives him a significantly lower awesome quotient than both Ben Revere and Joe Benson. Miguel Cabrera hit .260/.328/.382 there when he was an 18 year old at Kane County. He also only hit two triples, but gets some extra credit because I presently have a difficult time imagining Miguel Cabrera hitting triples even though he's apparently done so twice this year.

If you've gotten this far without already wondering what my point is, you should begin that process now. I did, in fact, choose a title to this blog entry, which suggests that I intended at some point to construct an argument. Don't feel bad if you were duped by this. I don't actually have a point. If you're looking for something to take away from all of this, here are some choices:

1. Between Revere, Daniel Rams, Chris Parmelee, Joe Benson, Wilson Ramos, Deibinson Romero and Trevor Plouffe, the Twins have a pretty good batch of 21-and-under position prospects.

2. Maybe four of those guys will ever see a big-league roster. Maybe 2-3 of those will put together a 5 year MLB career.

3. Prospect watching is fun anyways.

4. Triples are awesome.

5. Speed isn't really the new power. Speed is speed, but that's still better than speed being the old speed, which nobody cared about at all.

6. Corey Hart has only three triples, but is almost shockingly fast for somebody listed at 6'6". He was also picked in the 11th round of the famously bizarre 2000 draft. The Twins chose Adam Johnson. The Rockies chose Matt Harrington.

7. Matt LaPorta has a .260 IsoP in the Pioneer League. The Brewers have had some absolutely fascinating drafts lately.