Out of Office Alert!

I will be out of the starting Friday afternoon and not returning until Sunday evening. I will not have access to any of the inter-league games the Twins will be playing in Milwaukee. While I am out I hope that the Twins find their bats and learn how to swing them. If you have an immediate need for baseball gossip please check out one of the links on the right side of this blog. In the case of a lipgloss emergency please contact your local make-up counter, note: Wet n’ Wild can not be found outside of Walgreens or other heavily discounted drug stores.

Thank you,
Jen

I have a special power...I can relate everything in my life today (and today only) to CSI: NY

Since I am on an obsessive compulsive kick regarding the FANTASTIC Season Finale of CSI: New York and I am still saddened by the Cleveland Indians sweeping the Twins (boo) I thought wouldn’t use any brain cells and write this…

If baseball was like CSI: NY

The drama and suspense that happens in the first eight innings would be resolved in a tidy packed in the ninth.

There would be more fighting!

The Twins would win (?)

I would download the games to my iPod to watch the best parts over and over again (yeah…kind of sad, I know.)

Beer would be cheaper!

I wouldn’t mute it and make up my own dialog.

Nicer clothes.

Kevlar.

Twins would kick ass!

And I hung my head and cried - sticking with the lyric theme (taken from You Are My Sunshine)

“I've come to the conclusion that the two most important things in life are good friends and a good bullpen.” ~Bob Lemon, 1981

Yeah…looks like the Twins need one of the above.

Don’t even get me started on the game.

There I was bragging and strutting around like a proud peacock about the Minnesota Twins. Look at them! Aren’t they rockstars? Take that you critics!

Well, color me a dumbass. Guess I have egg on my face now.

Last night was brutal. So brutal in fact I not only hung my head in shame whilst muttering a few swear words under my breath so Lucy wouldn’t hear, I also shook my fist at the television and walked away.

I walked away – just like the lyrics from the Ben Harper song:

And its so hard to do
And so easy to say
But sometimes
Sometimes you just have to walk away
Walk away
And head for the door

Final results: Twins lose 7 to 15 against the Cleveland Indians.

So, focusing on good news…I am totally rocking the viewership on my self-promoting, randomly unstable, mildly interesting Lipgloss & Baseball blog, point proven by checking out my counter on the right side. I have had 445 hits since April when I added the counter. Sweet!

So many points and yet still two losses

Things could be worse. Suppose your errors were counted and published every day, like those of a baseball player. ~Author Unknown

Ah, here it is a lovely and warm Monday morning. Forget for a moment the start of another long week. Instead, let’s focus on this weekend’s baseball excitement. There was a lot that happened so I am going to be brief in my recap:

Amy and I went to the game on Friday, both sporting our Santana #57 t-shirts. Alas, the power of Cotton/Poly-cotton blend would be no match for Maroth and the Tigers.
· I had my beer, my brat and my helmet sundae in hopes that tradition would power our bats.
· I used my high-powered Binoculars (‘Nocs) to watch the game from the cheap seats. I also used them to find Bruce who had seats across from me in the dome (he was left field and I was center field.) In a girly way (the Lipgloss portion of this blog) we used them to get a better look at our favorite players.
· Very trashy people sitting in front of us, a mom and her two teenage daughters. I was distracted from the game during a classic Mother/Daughter fight over a cell phone. Normally I would end this bullet point with a comment about them being from Norwood-Young America or Anoka but I will refrain from making fun of those particular suburbs.
· Bruce (co-worker who attended only his second baseball game) doesn’t know shit about baseball. That’s okay, he asked questions and now hopefully learned from the experience that he is supposed to cheer for the Minnesota Twins even though he likes Detroit’s uniforms better (Orange is the new Black.)
· Losing sucks.

Saturday, due to conflicts, I only caught the last inning of the game but was saddened to see we were losing 8 to 2.

I waited all day Sunday for the very special Mother’s Day/Pink Bats/ESPN Broadcast game to start. I had my beer and was on the sofa trying to get Lucy to say Baseball and Morneausey. (Note: Every time I said “Morneausey” she would point at her nose and go “Nose”.) What a game! There was one point in the second inning that I almost felt bad for the rookie Detroit pitcher, not bad enough to wish our guys would stop swinging the bats. 16 to 4, a nice way to showcase ourselves on National television. For the record, I would rather we spread the points around and win more games by a small margin than less games by 12 points. Know what I mean?

Ponson is gone. The reassigned him away from the Dome, away from where he struggled, away from where he choked. Now the question is…who do we bring up? Garza or Baker?

I am going to the game and I am going to clap well!

With those who don't give a damn about baseball, I can only sympathize. I do not resent them. I am even willing to concede that many of them are physically clean, good to their mothers and in favor of world peace. But while the game is on, I can't think of anything to say to them. ~Art Hill

I am going to the game tonight. I am going to watch Santana find his groove and piss the batters off. I am going to make polite comments about the Tigers since I still respect them as a team. I will do that until September and the rankings start closing in, then it is every man for himself. I am going to drink beer and eat a helmet sundae. I am going to use my high-powered ‘nocs (binoculars) to watch people in the crowd. I am going to miss Baby Jesus in the line-up because I wanted to make an inappropriate comment about him being considered one of America’s Most Eligible Bachelors (click here for complete article.) I am going to keep score the correct way, unless something exciting happens and I miss an inning. Finally, I am going to enjoy the first Jen & Amy solo-game extravaganza of 2007!!!

Go Twins!!!

Letterman's Top Ten

Top Ten Signs a Baseball Player Is Too Old

10. Gets winded putting on his socks
9. Hard slide into second triggers life alert pendant.
8. While playing outfield, yells at teammates to get the hell off his lawn.
7. When buying performance-enhancing drugs, gets the AARP discount.
6. Claims he killed President McKinley with a line drive.
5. Often begins sentences, “As Shoeless Joe Jackson once told me…”
4. He’s almost as old as the hot dogs – seriously, have you ever eaten one of those
things?
3. Lost part of his career fighting in World War I.
2. During Interviews, he thanks the Lord and the makers of Super-Poligrip.
1. When he’s in the on-deck circle, asks bat boy, “What did I come here for?”

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!