Minnesota Twins

Power Rankings

Date	Ranking	Previous
01/26/2012	21	19
Good business: Major-league sports firings don't get any more polite than the Twins' dismissal of Bill Smith. The team offered him job counseling, rent-free office space and one month of severance pay for every disastrous infield addition he made (which came out to $16.5 million). Bad business: For an organization so often praised as lean and savvy, the Twins sure misread the market an awful lot (Matt Capps, etc.). Prognosis as of 11:14 a.m. GMT on Jan. 26, 2012: Show me favorable doctors' notes for Joe Mauer, Justin Morneau and Denard Span, and then we'll talk.
10/31/2011	19	30
2011 eulogy: Medic! Offseason to-do list: End the Tsuyoshi Nishioka experiment and destroy all evidence that it ever took place. Never speak of it, or him, again ... Find a competent, offensively able catcher to fill in during those 95 days per season when Joe Mauer is slowed by an injury to his knees, calves, hand, fingers, toes, head or torso ... Along those lines, hire an individual skilled in the diagnosis of ailments like scrapes and ouchies -- a "doctor," if you will ... Odds of achieving Cardinals-like glory in 2012: There's talent here and the big-market Twins - they're flush with cash, thanks to magnificent Target Field -- can afford to fill in the gaps. Bet the over on 2012 wins.
09/28/2011	30	30
What went right: No longer do they have to worry about postseason umpiring or 18-minute renditions of God Bless America during the seventh-inning stretch. What went wrong: They didn't get on base ... Twenty percent of the opening-day lineup ended up concussed ... Kyle Gibson blew out his elbow ... Ben Revere made Bubba Crosby look like Willie Mays ... Tsuyoshi Nishioka made Ben Revere look like Joe Morgan ... Oh -- and the fans turned on franchise coverboy Joe Mauer ... Actually, Mrs. Lincoln, I didn't like the set design or the Ford Theatre sightlines, either. Regular-season epilogue: It's hard to be this much of an embarrassment while playing in a division as Downy-soft as the AL Central, but somehow the 2011 Twins pulled it off. Kudos!
09/20/2011	30	29
On Monday, they trotted out a lineup that featured .302 and .294 OBP guys atop the lineup and Chris Parmelee, who slugged .436 in triple-A this season, batting cleanup. Hence this random prediction: the Twins will be no-hit before the season is out. They've been slightly better against lefty pitchers (.665 OPS through Sunday) than righties (.656) this season, but splits don't matter with the Mauer and Morneau bats on the bench. My guess: Justin Masterson no-hits them on Friday night in Cleveland. They're fortunate they miss King Felix during the Seattle series.
09/13/2011	29	29
They're not an embarrassment; by definition, embarrassment primarily manifests itself internally. They're more like a ketchup stain on a communion dress, or a Halloween pumpkin left on the doorstep well into December. There's a difference.
09/06/2011	29	29
Next, on Stuff You Talk About When There's No Stuff To Talk About: Are Joe Mauer's charity appearances with orphaned children and sick kittens affecting his play? We report, you decide ... In the fifth inning of Sunday's game, I saw something I'd never seen before: a Tsuyoshi Nishioka drive that came within yards -- yards, I tells ya! - of reaching the warning track. I will tell my grandkids about that, just as I'll tell them about the time he turned a double play without spiking himself.
08/30/2011	29	27
They were outscored by the Orioles 24-4 over the course of a four-game sweep ... Francisco Liriano hurt his shoulder ... The fans finally lost their patience with Joe Mauer, speculating that he crossed the line separating physical delicacy from eggshell-skull'd daintiness ... On the plus side, they ended a six-game streak of scoring one run or less. That made last week the team's most successful seven-day campaign since early June. Off-brand vodka shots all around!
08/23/2011	27	28
On Thursday night, the Twins started Joe Mauer in right field -- Luke Hughes couldn't master the intricacies of air travel and make it to the game on time -- and had no available bench players. Emergencies are emergencies, but good franchises rarely find themselves caught undermanned like that. ... I love Jim Thome. He's one of my favorite players of all time and I aspire to be just like him, in the book of life as on the softball diamond. But by the time we all got through saluting him -- as a "genuine guy" who "treated U.S. Presidents the same as he treated stray curs" and "knew the name of the clubhouse guy's wife, for whom he proffered a low-interest loan with which she bought a used Audi" -- I was almost hoping for somebody to step forward and pierce the veneer -- say, some kid who asked for an autograph and instead received a soiled handkerchief. Haven't we learned our lesson about creating mythologies around fallible human beings? McGwire, Favre, Tiger, etc.
08/16/2011	28	28
Not to isolate a small sample and blow it up into something big, but a sequence in Friday night's game actually made me worry about Tsuyoshi Nishioka. In a single half-inning, he muffed three balls and forgot to cover second base. Forget about whether or not he can play baseball (he can't). At this point, the greater concern should be about his emotional fitness to handle the boos and jabs ... Did Kevin Slowey knock up Bert Blyleven's granddaughter or something? During the broadcast of Sunday's game, Blyleven did everything but accuse Slowey of hating baseball, his teammates and America. There's obviously some back story here I've missed ... Way to go, Mr. Thome. Done with class and style, as always.
08/09/2011	28	25
Twins diehards have become the worst rationalizers in baseball. "Oooh, we play in a terrible division! We're only 10 games out! Once we get Morneau back and Mauer starts hitting for power again and the bullpen fixes itself and the infield magically transmogrifies into a unit that approximates something you might see in triple-A ball, we'll be right back in it!!!" No. No, you won't. Your team is bad at most baseball-related tasks. It has been outscored by 112 runs over the course of the season and 43 since the All-Star break, to pick an arbitrary point in time. Just stop already. You're embarrassing yourselves.