Personal Notes

–The Burger Tour portion of the site has been updated with the addition of a pdf file which is a preview of the book, it includes 6 or so burger joint reviews. Also, I opened up a forum for burger lovers. I don’t know if it will catch on at all, but it’s there. And, if any of you are on facebook, please join my facebook group.

-You can buy the Burger Tour here.

-I plagiarized an email exchange with one of the former contributors to my hibernating Twins Podcast and wrote a column discussing the huge improvement the Twins have made in May. I’m now slightly optimistic about the Twins chances this year at making the playoffs.

-This WordPress template is great and I’m slowly becoming fond of the look of the new site (though, truth be told, I do miss the bland bluey blueness of the previous one). One of the problems I have with this template is the fact my old posts, those imported from blogger, don’t have readily available permalinks. You have to click on “comments” and then remove part of the web address by hand to get a permalink. It’s all fussed up. There weren’t any templates I liked which had an answer to this problem, so I imported all my blogger posts into another template which has an easy to find permalink for all my old posts and searching/surfing my archives is a much more pleasant experience. It’s not the most elegant solution to the problem, but it beats editing 3400 posts.

-I’m trying to make a little progress somewhere on the website each day.  I’ve already noticed (it’s not that I’m obssessing about my readership either, WordPress puts all my stats on my “dashboard” and lets me see what pages and posts people are reading and how often) people are exploring some of the pages I’ve put on top of the header.  That’s great, but remember I’ve only just begun on WordPress.

Random Link o’ the Day:

http://cinematictitanic.com

What Happened to the Twins in May?

In April the Twins were terrible. They ranked near the bottom in the majors in OPS and had a terrible time producing enough runs to win the quality starts their pitching staff kept putting together. The Twins were remarkably undisciplined at the plate, taking fewer walks than most teams and striking out too often.

It was embarrassing to be a Twins fan and watch player after player swing away at bad pitches. It came to the point where other teams realized the Twins were aggressively swinging early during their at-bats and opposing pitchers learned to throw junk outside the strike zone early. It looked like another season of Twins’ offensive mediocrity.

But, in May the Twins were 6th in SLG, 5th in OPS, 3rd in OBP, and 3rd in runs scored in the AL. They upped the number of walks the team had by nearly 50%. It was an offensive explosion outside of anything Twins fans could have ever hoped. The Twins looked disciplined and patient at the plate and displayed the sort of power you’ll find in playoff bound teams.

Since the 1st of May the Twins have 5 hitters in the top 50 in the AL for Pitches Per Plate Appearance (Cuddyer, Harris, Morneau, Mauer, and Young). Joe Mauer and Justin Morneau are ranked 6th and 7th respectively in RC/27. Delmon Young has a .65 BB/K ratio; good for 19th in the AL. The only Twin better during the same period was Joe Mauer. Delmon Young has made some great strides at the plate, and the Twins’ coaching staff deserves some credit for the change.

In fact, I would credit the team’s coaching staff for the dramatic shift the Twins have shown recently. With numerous injuries and some gaping lineup holes Gardenhire and his team have kept the Twins competitive and, to be cliché, done more with less. They’ve made adjustments and those adjustments are working.

So far the Twins pitching staff has been average. A big yawn. This is mainly due to 28 starts given to a trio of pitchers who have been struggling all year: Livan Hernandez, Boof Bonser and Francisco Liriano (who attempted to return from Tommy John surgery a little too early).

Boof is a tough call as his sabermetric numbers suggest he’s doing better than his actual performance, but his actual performance has been really bad for a long time, going back over thirty starts.

Livan Hernandez is slowly submitting to his long term track record and is on pace to be annoyingly bad by the All-Star break.

Francisco Liriano, the 2006 rookie phenom, struggled early but his game has been getting stronger with each start in AAA. Liriano could make a successful comeback very soon and his addition, along with the continued success of other young pitchers on the Twins team, could propel the Twins into late season contention.

It can’t be said for certain the Twins have turned things around. There’s still a lot of statistical noise. There are a lot of injuries and other lineup questions to be answered. As the team is built now they don’t have staying power. But, there’s hope. And for fans of a team that plays in flyover land and never gets noticed by ESPN, hope is enough for now.

Colbert v. Will

I would have loved to have seen WFB go up against Colbert, but this is about as good.