Are The Twins 4 Real?

Well, the Twins just finished off their 4 game series with the mighty Boston Red Sox with a 7-3 victory and I am on cloud 9. They took three games from the World Champions and currently stand atop the AL Central with a record of 20-17. That's 1.5 games better than the Indians and the White Sox. I am completely surprised by this and wonder if they can actually keep this up for the entire season. Luckily, the kind folks at Baseball Prospectus keep track of this sort of thing so I decided to see if the Twins are actually good or merely just an early season fluke (or some of both).

The first thing I did was look at the standings. Wouldn't you know it, the Twins are 19-17 (as of yesterday) and atop the AL Central. So far, BPs projections are right on. Well, what the heck are these numbers to the right of those!!! They don't matter, the Twins record is what it is!!! Except, I think that they do matter and are actually an indicator of what the rest of the season will have in store. As you can see the Twins records gets worse on the right side of the table. This is because their expected record, based on their current offensive and defensive output and strength of schedule, is significantly worse than the actual standings. They should be a below .500 team, but due to some luck, aggressive baserunning, timely hitting and an effective handling of the pitching staff, the Twins are outplaying their current projections. I just hope they can keep this up.

I do see a lot of reason for optimism, aside from what these numbers predict. First of all, the season is very young. The sample size may simply be too small to make accurate projections. Secondly, the Twins started out the season on a down note. They weren't scoring runs and their pitching was erratic. Once the calendar turned to May, the Twins really started to play better, particularly offensively. Over the last 12 days the Twins are 2nd in the AL in runs (in only 9 games), 3rd in batting average, 4th in OBP, 3rd in SLG, 3rd in OPS (behind the Yankees and Red Sox), and 5th in stolen bases. Is this just a hot stretch or is the team actually playing to its potential? I tend to side with the latter out of blind loyalty. The Twins pitching has continued to be erratic, but this has been due in part to injuries (Scott Baker, Pat Neshek, Kevin Slowey). Hopefully the rotation gains some stability, because if it does there is no reason for the Twins to stop winning. I just hope my optimism isn't misguided because I love the sound of "Your first place, Minnesota Twins"!!!

*Some other observations from the expected standings.
1. The Tigers pitching is bad.
2. The White Sox might be better than I want them to be.
3. The Royals suck!
4. Beware of the Cleveland Indians. They are probably the best team in the division.

Sports Illustrated's Stadium Rankings

Recently Sports Illustrated released a fan voting based ranking of all major league ballparks.





Now I'm not going to complain too much about the rankings because they put Miller Park at second, but I found that to be a little ridiculous. I could see Miller being in the top ten, but second seems to be a bit much.

The first category is affordability which was given to the Kansas City Royals. This seems plausible, the Royals have been terrible for quite some time and their stadium is over 30 years old, so they probably have to give those tickets away. Surprise surprise the Red Sox and Yankees were ranked last for affordability, I guess dropping 300 million a year on salaries requires you to generate higher revenue from your ticket sales.

The next category is food, the Brewers were ranked first because everyone loves brats! It seems a lot of comments about the food also revolved around the stadium's "secret special sauce". If a sauce has the words secret or special in it, I tend to be wary. For some reason the Yankees and Mets are in last place, which might be impossible seeing as how they are in New York.

Team quality places the Tigers as number one. I guess that's a tough vote to call, there's actually been a decent amount of parity in the MLB for the last few years.

Tradition's top four teams are the Red Sox, the Yankees, the Cubs and the Dodgers. That seems about right, all of those teams have been around for over a century.

Atmosphere can be a tough call. The rankings have the Mariners ranked first and the Marlins last. I think what it really boils down to with atmosphere is when the team's stadium was built. Case in point, they put the Twins down at 29th. I've been to a few games at the big inflatable toilet, it's really not that bad. I think the fans have made it out to be worse than it is because of the dome's age and the fact that they have a new stadium waiting for them in two years.

The Cardinals of St Louis have been voted the fans with the highest "IQ". I've seen people from Missoura, I'm not that impressed with their intelligence. How do you even quantify this? The fans here really seem to know what they're talking about when they are sitting in the stands? What if you're just really unlucky and always get stuck next to the same drunken asshole that can barely even form words, let alone coherent thoughts? If you've been to a weekend game you know there's a very realistic chance of this happening. The picture I used in the collage is of apparently "famous" fans of the Cardinals...

Once again the Cards get the nod for hospitality. What I found fishy about this ranking is that the Royals were number two. I don't know what goes on down in Missoura during baseball games, but apparently its the greatest experience for a visiting fan in the history of the known world.

The Brewers are first for promotions. I credit this 1000% to the sausage races. After Randall Simon gave the sausage runners national media stardom, they haven't had time to look back. Everyone loves it, and the fact that they are sausages just speaks volumes about what we rank as important in the state of Wisconsin. The Red Sox rank dead last in promotions, I'm assuming the used Manny Ramirez batting helmet give away night didn't go over as well as the execs had planned.

Traffic? The White Sox got some love for this, but I really have no opinion about traffic for these games. I'm assuming the shittier your team is, the less fans go there and the better the traffic is around your stadium. While the White Sox aren't that shitty, they are definitely the Eli Manning to the Cubs Peyton in Chicago.

Finally we have the category of neighborhood, which surprisingly enough the Padres won! Gee, I wonder who would complain about an area that's always 75 degrees and has beautiful beaches all along the city. I'm sure the Marlins are dead last because either A)Their fans just checked poor for all the answers in the survey because they hate the way the Marlins are run or B) Hurricanes are not conducive to happy tailgating.

The accuracy of this fan poll is probably directly related to the demographic base of the people who actually bothered to fill it out, so I would take it with a grain of salt. However for the next year, Brewers fans can say that Miller Park is the second best stadium in all of baseball!