Minnesota Twins

All of the weekend's games were lost to your standard mid-April blizzard, which will lead to some rescheduling challenges, but the Minnesota Twins did manage to get in four contests at Target Field over the past week.

They won three, made a statement against the defending champs, and saw one of their all-time greats check off a noteworthy milestone.

When the Twins head to Puerto Rico at the beginning of this week, there will be added importance for players like Eddie Rosario and Jose Berrios. Not only will they be able to play in front of friends and family, but they will be able to bring something to a country still trying to recover from the devastation of Hurricane Maria last September.

It will be the first official game in Puerto Rico since the Mets and Marlins played in 2010. Two baseball games will be played but turning the spotlight to this small island country is much more important.

It's no secret that Joe Mauer is in the final year of his eight year, $184 million contract extension signed in 2010. It's also not a secret that Mauer isn't the player he was in 2009 or in the years leading up to that MVP season. What does seem to be a secret, is what thoughts "Falvine" has on Mauer's future past the 2018 season. There are really only three options.

Sometimes milestones are anticlimactic, but this one was pretty neat. With the Twins leading 2-0 in the seventh inning, Joe Mauer ripped a single up the middle for his 2,000th career hit. That drove in two runs and came in front of his home fans. If you ask for more than that, you’re just being greedy.

Joe Mauer has never been much of a compiler. Despite his .309 career average and three batting titles, it has taken him 15 MLB seasons to amass 2,000 hits, in large part because of his agnostic view on reaching first base. A hit is the same as a walk, so he has been more than content to settle for the latter.

Joe is a man after my own heart. As a writer, I've never understood the fascination some scribes have with compiling massive word counts. From my view, the more concisely you can make a point, the better. Efficiency is king.

But with Mauer reaching his big milestone on Thursday night, it only felt right to shed this perspective and focus on that big round number, formerly a mainstay of doomsday proclamists.

And so, I'm going to spend exactly 2,000 words in this post musing and reflecting on one of the greatest Twins to ever don the jersey. I don't think I'll have a hard time getting there.

An NFL regular season involved 16 games played. An MLB season includes 162 games played. The Twins have now played ten games, or about 1/16th of their schedule, the equivalent of one NFL game. If it was an NFL schedule, the Twins - with their 6-4 record - would get a Win for the first game of the season. While 6-4 may not seem real exciting, if the team were to go 6-4 for all 16 ten-game samples, they would be on pace to go 97-65 on the season.

Today, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at some of the trends that we’ve seen in the Twins pitching staff through the season’s first ten games.

Things didn’t need to be this interesting. The Twins held an 8-1 lead at one point. They were even up 8-6 entering the ninth, but the Astros just wouldn’t go away. Good thing Max Kepler was in beast mode. He blasted a walk-off homer, his second dinger of the game, to give the Twins a series victory over Houston.

The defending World Series champion Astros entered tonight off to a great start, 9-2, and absolutely owned the Twins last season. New year, new look, new results. After falling 2-0 in a hard-fought game last night, the Twins came up victorious tonight thanks to a gutty performance by Jake Odorizzi.

The start of Logan Morrison’s tenure with the Minnesota Twins has been, how can I put this delicately, worse than Byron Buxton’s start last season. Through his first 26 plate appearances, Morrison has a .043/.154/.087 slash line, and a -30 wRC+. This is not exactly what the Twins had in mind when they signed Morrison to be their full-time designated hitter.

This game was long, dare I say even boring at times, and it ended in the Twins being shut out. Not a great way to invest three and a half hours of your time, if we’re being honest. But, there were some moments of hope and baseball, as the game always seems to do, providing some strange performances and plays on this chilly Minnesota evening.

Weather has won the day, but on Monday night all four Minnesota Twins affiliates (and the Minnesota Twins too) played their regularly scheduled games. Game-time temperatures were between 35 and 40 at Target Field and in Rochester and in Peoria, Illinois, where the Kernels played their first road game. Fortunately the weather in Tennessee warmed up a bit for Monday, and well, it’s always plenty warm in Ft. Myers. Check out how the four Twins affiliates did on Monday. There were some strong offensive, defensive and pitching performances.

Ervin Santana was supposed to be the rock at the top of the Twins rotation this season. Two months ago, the Twins found out their All-Star pitcher would be forced to have surgery on the middle finger of his throwing hand. Santana had calcium deposits in his right middle finger removed in early February. At the time of the surgery, the team estimated he would miss the season’s first 4-6 weeks.

There is still a lot of unknown circling Santana and his injury. Is it time for fans to start worrying about his return to the mound?