Homerun, anyone?

Well obviously I am going to Hoot & Halla about Morneausey sealing the deal last night. What a great ending! It was like the end of some baseball blockbuster movie starring Brad Pitt or Kirk Douglas (yeah, I know that there are movies out there like that.) You can’t make this stuff up! Hey Twins fans, haven’t you noticed that we seem to have a lot of endings like this? Final regular season game of 2006? Man, it is good to be a Twins fan right now.

Since I am still all a-fluttered over the ending I will just post the results from Sports Illustrated’s top 50 article:

Nate Silvers : Baseball’s 50 Most Valuable Players – 2007

No. 46. Francisco Liriano, P, Twins, Age 23 (Not Rated)
Before his injury, PECOTA thought he was the second-best pitcher in the game after Johan Santana. If I were doing PR for Liriano, I'd explain that his Tommy John surgery was just a way to keep his pitch counts down. TJ ain't what it used to be, and an increasing number of pitchers, ranging from Mariano Rivera to Chris Carpenter to John Smoltz, have recovered to be at least as good as they were pre-surgery. In some ways I prefer this course to a long series of ticky-tack injuries (think Rich Harden and Mark Prior).

No. 40. Justin Morneau, 1B, Twins, Age 26 (NR)
He won an MVP award last season at age 25 but his 52.0 Value Over Replacement Player (VORP) was just 13th in the American League, behind lesser heralded players such as Carlos Guillen and Jermaine Dye. That goes to underscore just how deep the first base position is these days. Morneau may have seasons in which he approaches last year's numbers, but he's unlikely to exceed them. His ranking goes up a bit if you're drafting for certainty rather than upside.
No. 3. Johan Santana, P, Twins, Age 28 (5)
If Barry Zito got $126 million from the Giants, what is Johan Santana worth? We maintain a statistic called Marginal Value Over Replacement Player (MORP), which anticipates the market price for players based on recent transactions in the free agent market. That statistic estimates that, if Santana were a free agent, his services this season would be worth $28 million.
No. 2. Joe Mauer, C, Twins, Age 24 (6)
Everyone in the Top 10 is in rarified air, but there has probably never been a baseball player like Mauer. As everyone knows by now, he was the first American League catcher to win a batting title, but that's really just the start of his skill set. Mauer also takes walks, hits plenty of doubles, plays Gold Glove-caliber defense, has 25 steals in 29 lifetime attempts and is big and strong enough to develop into a 20-homer threat. Combine any two of those skills in one package, and you have a potential All-Star catcher. Mauer has all of them. There's some concern that Mauer is too tall to stay at the catcher position, but considering how unique he is in every other department, why fret about that?

Number 1 is Albert Pujols – not a Twins so I don’t need to fill in the rest.

Side Note with evil laughter: Derek Jeter was ranked as #31.

I am in agreement with the guys over at Pulling a Blyleven . Why is Morneausey #40 on this list? Reigning MVP? Come on!