It's another series against the AL Central as the Twins travel to Detroit to take on the Tigers.... AGAIN!!! Playing the AL Central over and over again is tough because the teams are tough in the AL Central and the Tigers are perhaps the best of them all. I don't know if the Twins have enough horsepower to pull through this series but the Twins have showed surprising horsepower thus far... So maybe they can... I ain't betting against them. Here are some things to think about: 1. The Central Division -- I often wondered if the job of MLB Scheduler is a cool job or not. I imagine they sit down at their desk and look at all the requests from all the MLB teams and think about how they can meet these requests and then realize that they can't and throw eventually throw them in the wastebasket and just pust a random generate button of sorts. The Twins have played 32 games thus far and it will be 35 after this series with Detroit. Of those 35 games... 29 have been played against Central Division teams. I don't think the Twins requested this so the MLB scheduler is probably laughing and talking to co-workers and saying... Look what I did to the Twins. If you look at the current MLB Standings... Right Now... Both Wild Card teams would come from the AL Central and one of those teams would be our Twins. This suggests that the Central is the top division in baseball and this makes the Twins 18-14 record even more impressive. 2. The Other Divisions -- In the AL West... 2nd place is below .500. In the AL East... 2nd place (Rays) is barely above .500. Playing the teams from other divisions while they are struggling would be considered good timing and there are teams struggling all over the other divisions. This probably means that when the Twins get around to facing the AL East and AL West. Those teams will have started to play better and the Twins won't have to face them at their weakest. I guess it comes down to this... I'm kinda worried that when the Twins qualify for the playoffs... They will have to do it under the hardest circumstances possible. Facing Teams at the top of their game all year long. 3. Detroit -- The Twins travel to Detroit... a city that started as a small little hamlet and exploded into a major metropolis during the industrialization age. You all know the industry that fueled this growth... Yep... Crack Cocaine. Once Crack Cocaine was discovered the population started busting through the infrastructure and it's still a problem today since 85% of Detroit doesn't have running water. That's when Henry Ford came in... Henry looked around and thought... What do Crackheads need and it dawned on him... Motorized Vehicles. Let's put these people on wheels with a combustible engine and let them drive around and crash into other people. It makes perfect sense because they were always forgetting to feed their horses. After the horses died... Detroiters were seen pulling the wagons around town themselves and they didn't like it when their family would whip them and the bit tasted funny. With the invention of the Automobile... Detroiters didn't get the concept right away and they originally pulled the car. The lucky ones had a horse that was still alive to pull the car. Eventually Detroit boomed and this led to producing Barry Gordy and then Barry started producing and Detroit was forever known as Motown. That Mo eventually dried up when Toyota started producing cars that Americans liked. 4. Jose Iglesias -- While watching our Twins play those Tigers... Keep an eye on SS Jose Iglesias. No Joke here at all... He's simply one of the best defensive shortstops in the game today. Andrealton Simmons followed by Jose Iglesias is how I would rank em. Baseball defense has reached a whole new level... The Bar has been raised higher then when we were watching Ozzie Smith and Rey Ordonez. OK... Here's come the Joke... He's a good SS but I really don't like his song "To All The Girls I Loved Before". (Pause -- Think about it's place in the world) BAWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. 5. Housework -- My wife asked me to help her out the other day. We had company coming over and she wanted the beds made and the dishes washed and the floor vacuumed and stuff dusted. I just looked at her... I didn't understand the need... after all... we are just going to have to do it again in another month or two. ----------- Lineups: TWINS Dozier 2B Hunter RF Mauer 1B Plouffe 3B Vargas DH Suzuki C Escobar LF Hicks CF Santana SS Gibson P TIGERS Gose CF Kinsler 2B Cabrera 1B Martinez, V DH Martinez, JD RF Cespedes LF Castellanos 3B McCann C Iglesias SS Simon P Game-time forecast: 57 deg F, overcast (sunset @ 8:43pm), 0% chance of precipitation, winds from the west at 17mph Click here to view the article