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The twelve-miiliion dollar man comes through! Ii'd liike to thiink that hiis biig hiit yesterday was iin some small way due to the arriival of thiis blog. Ii've grown to appreciiate hiis abiiliity to hiit a breaking-ball that doesn't break siix miiles iinto the fluorescent ether.
One of the best, and at the same time worst, things about watching sports is seeing the continuous parade of youngsters coming up through the ranks to wow us daily, sending chills down our brittle and decaying spines and joints with every rim-rocking tomahawk jam or 450-foot jack. Knee-locking curveball? Mine would paint picket signs and leave immediately, shouting "Scab! Scab! Scab!" at my ankles on the way out the door.
Consider the following:
*Chairman Mauer (copywrite Batgirl) just went 5 for 5 last night, receiving TWO standing ovations (on hit four and five), the night after going 4 for 5 and raising his league-leading batting average to the lofty heights of .389 (leading by .023). I shudder to be the first to even mention Ted Williams and I certainly won't let the batting average starting with the letter 'f' leave my lips anytime soon. Did I mention that he's 23?
You know you're doing something right when you start getting your stats compared to Kirby Puckett and 2005 Derek Lee (a very good vintage).
*Frankie Franchise is now 8-1 with a 1.76 ERA this year. He's 22.
Let's hope he's not the Felix Hernandez of last year and set to have the rest of the league catch up with him next year.
*By the way, the two guys just mentioned above make a combined $727,000 this year.
*Johan Santana is leading the league in strikeouts, ERA, and third in opponents batting average and innings pitched. He's got one Cy Young and is slightly Al Gore-like in shoulding have won another. He's 27.
I'm HOW much older than these guys? Thank god they're on TV and therefore not real human beings for which to compare my athletic feats to....
Update: Another way none of us can compete with Joe Mauer
(via Star Tribune)
"I don't even know how to describe it anymore," said Twins manager Ron Gardenhire who joked that Mauer's uptick is the result of dating former Miss USA Chelsea Cooley. "It's pretty incredible the swings he's putting on the ball.
Quoting Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire these days seems almost as crazy as…well…Tom Cruise these days. But this is indeed a mission statement – and we intend to Draw-See-Think our way to enlightenment. As far as plans go, we hope it will guide us slightly better than say, neo-con nation building or playing baseball indoors– and maybe slightly worse than the brilliance of Jed Bartlett’s re-election campaign. At the very least, we will attempt to amuse ourselves and anyone who cares to check in on us.
A baseball season is a marathon and not a sprint – if not a marathon, at least one of those 10K thingy’s. It ebbs and flows. It pronates and supernates. It bleeds from the nipples. It’s sometimes Hank and sometimes Henry – and that could be Shakespearean or NeilYoungian – your choice. All this is a rather wordy way of saying that now that the Twins are back to .500…we’re excited again. And while the idea for this blog was germinated long ago…it will bloom NOW, alongside Justin Morneau’s hall-of-fame career.
Did we mention we’re Twins’ fans? And, historically speaking, recent ones. You know how they say that there is a window in which to appreciate jazz, or that martinis are an acquired taste? Well, that has very little to do with appreciating baseball. But it might suggest that appreciation comes in various guises – creeping in a petty pace for some of us while for others it was never any other way. We could pick the Killer, Carew, and even Bob Allison out of line-up. Though at the end of the day, we would drape ourselves in Teflon if it were socially acceptable. Blame it on long winters, blame it on
We have only two rules:
This will be a baseball blog.
This will not be a baseball blog.
And if we had to choose a third, it would be something about how spelling doesn’t count.
Baseball has had an influence on our lives (do you remember where you were when Barry couldn’t throw out Sid?)…but we will try our best to avoid generating the minutiae that results from dissecting EVERY missed sign or poring over rule 5 lists. Hell, we can barely read English, let alone Scotty Ulger. There have been other influences…Sega, Shakespeare, Vern Gagne, Bob Dylan, Norman Dale, and, of course, Tooter Snork. We will mention them often. We will quote Nietchshe. We will quote Ron Burgundy. We will make jokes about being fondled by Adam Smith’s invisible hand. We will sing “Stand Up and Shout” at the top of our lungs.
But only in save situations.
We hope you'll join us.
-The Management
