Nothing New Under the Sun

What can I tell you that you don't already know?

I could tell you that the Twins have given up on winning and are instead concentrating on finding innovative ways to suck. But you knew that. I could tell you the hitters aren't hitting and the pitchers are too often merely throwing, but I suspect you reached that conclusion long ago on your own.

I could tell you that my company recently went through a major re-organization to maximize its soul-sucking capabilities, and that for the first time in the history of corporate re-orgs the goal behind the chaos has actually been achieved. Would that be news?

I could tell you that the project I am currently working on (for the aforementioned soul-suckers) will eventually end up in the Journal of American Science as scientific proof of Murphy's Law. You probably didn't know that, but it's equally probable that you don't care.

I could tell you that President Emperor Bush recently gave the media the finger. And now his mouthpieces say it was his thumb. I wonder what he calls the short, squat finger that's a bit separate from all the rest, then?

But, back to baseball. Here are a few obscure things, in no particular order, that you may not know about the Twins:

• Kyle Lohse leads the Twins' staff in walks, with 31. Behind (or, if you prefer, in front of) him are three pitchers with 29...but only two of those are starters. I'm looking at you, Romero...
• Eight of Minnesota's 25 active players are under 6 feet tall.
• Everyone knows that Johan Santana leads the staff (and the league) in strikeouts. Which Twin is second in the team standings? You might be surprised: it's Brad Radke.
• Improbable team leaders:
• Justin Morneau - triples (4), fielding percent for an "everyday" player (.994)
• Jacque Jones - walks (41)
• Torii Hunter - stolen bases (23)
• Brad Radke - hit batsmen (7)
• Mike Redmond - errors (0), runners caught stealing (9)
• Juan Rincón has the most innings, lowest ERA and fewest home runs allowed of Twins relievers who have been here all season.
• Slump-O-Rama:
• Lew Ford went 13 for 75 (.173) in July.
• Other July slumps:
  • Nick Punto - 20 for 100 (.200)
  • Justin Morneau 19 for 89 (.213)
• Throwing, as opposed to pitching (July):
• Jesse Crain - 9.28 ERA, ten walks, three strikeouts
• Terry Mulholland - 7.36 ERA
• Joe Mays - 7.36 ERA, four home runs
• Only the Kansas City Landed Gentry have scored fewer runs than the Twins this season, and they're only 3 runs behind us.
• The Twins are third in the league in pitching, behind only the @$#! Whine Sox and the Los Angeles Angels of Names That Are Too Damn Long, respectively.

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Alas

AL Central Standings
Team	W	L	PCT	GB
@$%#! Whine Sox	69	35	0.663	--
Native American Stereotypes	55	51	0.519	15
Twins	54	51	0.514	15.5
Tiggers	50	54	0.481	19
Landed Gentry	38	67	0.362	31.5

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Your Attention Please

According to the Rochester Red Wings website:

Jason Bartlett has been called up.

Well, hot damn. And about time, too!

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Inherited Runners Redux

Back in May, I tried to tell Gardy about JC Romero and inherited runners. But he just didn't want to hear it. A few days later, he dismissed these concerns in an interview with the Star Trib's LaVelle E. Neal:

"He didn't throw the pitch where he wanted it, but he has been throwing the ball fine," Gardenhire said. "I know you guys keep all these mad stats about runners inherited and stuff."

But now, with 102 of 162 games under our belts and the trade deadline looming (presumably Romero is on the market, if anyone wants him), it seems like a fine time to revisit that critical relievers' stat.

Pitcher	IP	IR	RS	IR/S
Crain, J	47.0	29	8	27.5%
Guerrier, M	39.1	14	2	14.3%
Mulholland, T	40.1	17	5	29.4%
Nathan, J	44.2	2	0	0.0%
Rincón, J	46.2	13	2	15.4%
Romero, JC	39.0	29	13	44.8%
Total	257	104	30	28.8%

stats provided by ESPN.com

The staff average excluding Romero, by the way, is 22.7%, which would translate into six or seven fewer runs so far. What that would have done for the team record, who knows? But if runs are like gold, as they say, then Romero's looking like a lousy investment.

And he's not getting any better:

Year	IP	IR	RS	IR/S
1999	10.2	2	0	0.0%
2000	58.2	1	1	100.0%
2001	65.0	1	0	0.0%
2002	81.0	54	10	18.5%
2003	63.0	46	14	30.4%
2004	74.1	45	21	46.7%
2005	39.0	29	13	44.8%
Career	390.2	178	59	33.1%

The longer he sees regular work with runners on, the more poorly he handles it. It looks like they tossed him into the deep end in 2002, and he swam. Since then, they've been unable to forget that fabulous year and unable to remember the horrors that have occurred in the meantime.

Gardy, darling, these aren't "mad stats". These are a trend, and a bad one. Do everyone a favor--put Romero in to start innings, where he thrives, exclusively. He'll be happier, you'll be happier, and we'll be ecstatic.

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Boundless Groundless Optimism

Friday evening. The beginning of a new weekend, the end of a long week. The beginning of a new series for a Twins team that desperately needs a fresh start. Ah, can't you just smell the optimism!

So Mr. Third Base Line and I settled in with a couple of Fuji Apple Chicken Salads from Panera (they're fabulous, try one) and turned on the game. We were promptly treated to four and a half innings of a pitcher's duel. The Twins were holding their own, excellent! (Except that Torii Hunter got injured in the first inning, but it doesn't look season-ending or anything.)

And then we saw something we've never seen before.

Three errors on one play. Try to conceive of that, if you will. Having trouble? Here's a play by play:

Runners on first and second, two away. (Errors with two outs just add insult to injury, don't you think?)
--Johnny Damon singles on a line drive to right fielder Jacque Jones. Bill Mueller scores.
--Jacque Jones (RF) throws to Joe Mauer (C), who lets the ball skip between his legs and bounce toward the dugout. Catching error on Mauer. Tony Graffanino scores.
--Carlos Silva (P) fields the ball in foul territory and throws to Joe Mauer (C). Throw goes wild. Throwing error on Silva.
--Justin Morneau (1B) fields the ball in foul territory and throws to Luis Rodriguez (3B) in a pickoff attempt (Damon caught between 3rd and home). Rodriguez throws to Joe Mauer (C) and hits the runner with the ball. Throwing error on Rodriguez.

I think I just felt my soul shrivel.

---

Postscript:
The official scorer did not record an error against Silva, but I stand by the account above--that throw was atrocious.

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Paging Professor Trelawney

One day, we'll look back on this season and laugh.

Well, all right, not laugh, precisely. I expect it will be more a failure to pull out our own hair while making weird little gasping noises in the backs of our throats than an actual laugh. But really, that's almost as good, considering.

We'll look back, and we won't render ourselves follicly challenged, and we'll say:

Hey, it wasn't all bad. April was fun. Also part of June. And that bit in September, remember that? That was excellent. And then we took the money we'd been saving for playoff tickets and we went to San Antonio in October and saw Sea World and the Alamo and when we accidentally left the tourist areas we even witnessed evolution in action. It was all very educational, and the scar's nearly gone, really.

Besides, that was the year Justin Morneau and Joe Mauer finally got their first full seasons in the majors, and look at them now. They needed that experience. It's kind of like prison, I think--once you've been there, you'll do whatever it takes not to go back. Except they didn't do anything wrong, of course, unless getting drafted counts.

Carlos Silva really matured that year, too. Oh, and wasn't it Jesse Crain's rookie season? I think it was. He's really something now, isn't he? I wish we hadn't traded him for Juan Gonzales in the offseason. That was the beginning of the end, my friends, not 2005!

That was the year we finally got rid of Luis Rivas, too. Remember him? Adequate glove, hit like the Queen Mother...post-embalming? Wonder where he is now. Actually, wait, no I don't.

Besides, no one remembers the 2005 Twins anymore. You say "2005" to a baseball fan, and all anyone talks about is how George Steinbrenner went into that irreversible coma due to an apoplectic fit after Derek Jeter's uniform pants ripped up the back seam on a play and the whole world got an eyeful of his lucky, lacy red thong. (And Jeter's much happier in San Francisco, so all's well that ends well.)

No, upon reflection, 2005 wasn't so bad. I mean, hey--at least we weren't the Royals!

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Notes from the Soul-Sucking Cubicle

She was doing nine to life

working for The Company.

--the Levellers, "Outside/Inside"

Hello. My name is Peon, and I work for The Company.

I joined The Company in 1996, when it was small, and casual, and friendly. It has grown quite a bit since then, and become much like other companies. It has also grown a second face. Recently, one face looked very sad and apologetic when it informed us that money was very, very scarce and as a result they were going to have to lay off 10% of the technology peons. The other face was busy making toasts at the corporate managing director conference in Hawaii. Who knew it was cheaper to meet at a Hawaiian resort than in your own headquarters? Perhaps we should re-think our lease.

In the last few years, The Company has been pursuing a program called "Associate Engagement". "Associate" is a nicer word for peon, and "Engagement" basically means a peon's emotional investment in his/her job and in The Company itself. You see, there was a big nationwide study a few years ago that indicated a high level of "engagement" among workers resulted in greater job satisfaction and higher productivity.

So The Company, being duly concerned about its peons' happiness productivity, implemented an annual Associate Engagement Survey to gauge the level of contentment among its worker bees and presumably to try to fix areas of dissatisfaction. This survey is given every fall, usually in late September or early October.

The first few times, after the results of the survey came in around the new year, The Company would exclaim over the questions which received poor ratings, and the issues would be hashed and rehashed ad nauseum for the next six months. The Company would build new informational websites for our benefit, set up anonymous call centers where we could report problems, and gather all our managers together for a conference in a tropical paradise to try to puzzle out why those of us left behind in the swirling snows of Minnesota weren't beaming with pride to work for such a fine and caring organization.

Last year, they gave up on those tactics, and took the much simpler approach of releasing the next survey's questions to management several months before the survey and instructing them to discuss these questions with their team. By "discuss", of course, they meant "prime the peons to rate everything a 5 out of 5".

So our managers give us the questions one by one, and ask us to air any reasons we might have for rating that question less than a five. And then they explain to us, very gently, why our problems aren't really what the question is about, so of course we can't in good conscience consider trifling little difficulties like layoffs when faced with the survey.

I'm going to let you in on a little secret they don't think we're bright enough to have figured out. They don't actually give a rip if we're happy or productive--they just want us to say we're happy and productive on their little survey so they can show the survey results to their investors as proof that not only is their money safe with The Company, but they should invest even more.

I could admire their sheer nerve and Machiavellian lack of conscience if they weren't so ham-handed about it. A little subtlety would go a very long way. It might even be worth a 3.

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