HOLD UP, HEAR ME OUT...

Please don’t be alarmed or offended by the somewhat confusing title above, and please give me a chance to explain. First off, I definitely do not hate the Minnesota Twins in any way, shape, or form. I love the Twins, I love Target Field, and I love baseball.

"How can you not be romantic about baseball?" This, a quote from the 2012 film Moneyball, is one of my new favorite phrases. The sport of baseball is a perfect combination of so many different things that fans and players can’t help but fall in love with. There is such an expertise to the forming together of a team, a lineup, a pitching rotation, a bullpen, etc. There are so many important details to be found hiding in any of the endless statistics used to build these teams. There are precise strategic maneuvers regarding matchups, splits, weather, or even what time of day a team’s next game takes place. And yet, even with all the attention that gets placed on the numbers, and all these specific chess piece moves, the game still carries with it a huge sense of randomness. A broken bat base hit, a bobbled relay throw, a bad hop, or a gust of wind on any given day can take every statistic on the board and flush it down the drain. It’s this very sense of randomness that makes every true fan optimistic at the beginning of each new season. Your team might have lost 150 games last year and lost its best three players to free agency, but somewhere in the numbers, and somewhere in your gut, you know this is the year. The movie Moneyball admittedly helped give birth to the idea that now became my blog. Every baseball fan loves to play manager in their head. We would love to have the scorecard for a night and put our best judged lineup down, or be in the draft room helping decide which prospects should be given a chance on our teams. The story behind Moneyball gives this dream a whole new world of thought with endless possibilities. Now owners and managers are looking at their teams from a different angle, and players possess value that never existed before.

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I am a Twins fan, as diehard as they come, and have intently watched my team since as long as I can remember. In grade school and little league I remember most kids my age would try to be like Sammy Sosa or Ken Griffey Jr, while I was proud to announce Doug Mientkiewicz as my favorite player, closely followed by Jacque Jones, Brad Radke, Torii, and the rest of the crew. I have seen teams take back to back to back Central Division Championships, and even compete for a pennant. I get to hear from my father, but can’t remember the Twins’ last World Series Championship as I was barely a year old at the time, but they were there on top of the game at the beginning of my lifetime. And yet, more recently, I am about to witness back to back to back 60(something) win seasons. The once labeled, “Team that Saved Baseball” by ESPN the magazine is now the cellar of Major League Baseball, and I am determined to find out what went wrong, and hopefully do whatever I can to help fix it. So you see, this isn’t an extravagant troll’s webpage where any and all can come to spit on the Minnesota Twins, and it certainly isn’t a place to come and poke fun at the team’s fans. After all, that’s all that I am.. a fan. 

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And so, from here on this fan will attempt to make you laugh, make you angry, make you think about stats and players in a way you never have before, and hopefully make you feel a little more optimistic about the future of the Minnesota Twins. Because with a little tweaking (yes tweaking, not twerking), I believe the future is very bright... 

"How can you not be romantic about baseball?"