Minnesota Twins

Welcome to the third installment of my (fake) Minnesota Twins mailbag. In the past, I have used this space to answer the tough questions that no one seems to want to actually ask me. Today, I have a treat! Actual questions! Well, not all of them. See if you can spot the fakes.

Which flavor ice cream is Anthony Swarzak?
~ @ERolfPleiss on Twitter

Now, this is a question! ...

At the end of last season, things must have been a little tense around the Ron Gardenhire household. The Twins were coming off back-to-back 90-loss seasons and Gardenhire had only one season left on his current contract. Some change was inevitable. Almost all of the Minnesota Twins manager's coaching staff were reassigned or not hired back.

The sporting world can be cruel when a team isn't performing well on the field. Since the Pohlads took over ownership of the club, fans have not seen this kind of shake-up. ...

After a slow start in the season’s opening week, Joe Mauer was once again cracking line drives – right on schedule – but has more recently found himself in one of the worst stretches of offensive baseball of his career and quite possibly the worst since he was a fetus.

Pardon the arbitrary endpoints, but from April 6 to April 20, Mauer had collected 18 hits in 35 at bats (a whopping .514 batting average). In that time, the Twins catcher was blistering the baseball to the opposite field, accumulating five of his seven extra base hits in that direction, including both of his home runs (per the Mauer norm). Then, as quick ...

On Monday night, the Minnesota Twins began a three game series in Detroit against the Tigers. It was Mike Pelfrey facing Max Scherzer. You likely watched the game or saw the box score already when you read this, so you know that the Twins fell by the final score of 4-3.

It was interesting to watch the game while at the same time calculating the Twins Win Expectancy after each and every play throughout the game. ...

T.S. Eliot once famously wrote that April is the cruelest month, and for the Twins that adage has held true over the past two years. Between 2011 and 2012, the team went 15-33 during the season's first month while watching devastating injuries pile up – from Tsuyoshi Nishioka's broken leg and Joe Mauer's bilateral leg weakness to Scott Baker's unscheduled Tommy John surgery.

Against that backdrop, the first four weeks of this 2013 campaign have been blissful, even if the club's performance has been more solid than great and the game-viewing conditions have been mostly horrible. ...

The Minnesota Twins actually got all their games in so far this week. Texas is in town for the weekend and it sounds like the weather is actually going to start acting like spring. Daily high temperatures will continue to rise and we all hope the Twins can continue to play .500 baseball. The weekend is almost here so make sure to check out some of the top stories from the last week. Enjoy!
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