RandBall: Weekend Links

Once again, it's the weekend links!

In this edition: farm reports, the word "paean", Canadians, and brain trauma.

The Depressing Thing about Payrolls [MLB]

If the Twins would have committed to longer contracts, both Torii Hunter and Johan Santana might still be with the team. In both cases, the team was willing to pay exorbitant sums in the short term - just not over five or six years. Santana got six years and $137.5 million from New York; Hunter got five years and $90 million from Anaheim.

Looking into the future, in fact, most of baseball can't go particularly crazy. The Mets will pay Santana until 2013, with a club option in 2014, but otherwise have nothing committed in 2013 except for a club option / smaller buyout on David Wright. The notoriously free-spending Cubs already have nearly $120 million committed for next year, but aren't currently paying anyone in 2013 or 2014 except Alfonso Soriano.

In fact, only two teams in baseball have more than $30 million already committed in 2013, four years from now, and one of them is Toronto, the Land of Bad Future-Inflated Over-Long Contracts. (JP Ricciardi, take a bow!)

But here's the depressing part: the other is the Yankees. The Yankees have already committed $92,212,000 that season (to just four players: Alex Rodriguez, CC Sabathia, Mark Teixeira, and AJ Burnett).

The Twins have Justin Morneau locked up through 2013. This winter, they'll have to try to get Joe Mauer signed to an even longer contract. But it makes you wonder: in a league where the Yankees are able to toss around a nearly nine-figure sum four years from now, without so much as a thought to the other 21 guys on their roster that season - how is a team like the Twins supposed to compete?

We've seen the Wild third jerseys before! [Uni Watch]

If you'll pardon me, I had a bit of a eureka moment when watching the highlights of the Wild's Saturday-night win. It might have been Hockey Wilderness guru Nathan's comment about the flatness of the lettering that jogged my memory - or maybe it was just because it's the first time I saw the new Wild thirds on the Xcel Energy Center ice.

Either way, I realized that I'd seen almost the exact same jerseys before - and in the same place. To wit:


The flat lettering, the stripe placement, even the matte-ish green color is virtually identical to the green Roseau HS jerseys. The chest wordmark could easily have been inspired by the same. It wasn't the North Stars that I was really reminded of - it was the Rams!

Honestly, maybe that's not such a bad thing. After all, if there's a team in Minnesota that embodies the mythological "State of Hockey" ethos that the Wild want to promote, it's Roseau. The Rams come from the cold, windswept northern prairie, seven hours by car from the Twin Cities, and from a town small enough that every Roseau citizen could comfortably be accommodated for classes at several metro-area high schools. Yet Roseau might be the single most successful school in the history of Minnesota high school hockey, and still regularly knocks off the big schools come tournament time. It's produced at least seven NHLers and at least two US Hockey Hall of Fame members. Its municipal rink is famously open 24 hours a day, contains two ice sheets, and is free for open skating and open hockey.

Now that I think about it, maybe aping the Roseau sweaters wasn't a strong enough statement. Maybe just wearing "Rams" across the team's chests on third-jersey day would be good enough.

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Related: About Those New Wild Third Jerseys

Weekend Links [RandBall]

The latest edition of the weekend links is available at the RandBall blog. Today's subjects: the Vikings stadium, the Twins, some TV ratings news - and some pure crazy.

About those new Wild jerseys [Uni Watch]

On the right there is Martin Havlat, showing off the Wild's new third jersey.

My first reaction was probably similar to a lot of people's reaction. "Geez, that's a lot of green there. Not sure about that, then."

I'm fine with green as a color, but the third jerseys involve green sweaters, green breezers, green helmets, green gloves, and mostly-green socks. If the color was a little lighter, it'd look like six piles of grass clippings were circling the ice.

I would have expected the Wild to go with a little more contrast. For example, take the Bruins; they've got the black helmets, jerseys, and breezers, but there's a whole lot of gold in there so they don't look like Fighting Sharpies - gold on the jersey, mostly-gold socks, etc. With the red and green color scheme, Minnesota will always have to fight the tendency to look like Christmas trees, but this combo looks more than most like a tree farm.

(It's too bad Martin Skoula is gone, or we could make the usual joke about him standing still as a Christmas tree. I'm not quite sure who to make fun of yet, on this team, other than the obvious choice: everybody.)

I will say this for the new jerseys, though. They did give me very minor flashbacks to something else:

Via northstarshockey.com

A little more kelly green, some gold, and the return of the much-beloved logo - now those would be some third jerseys I could get behind.

Examining Joe Nathan's Fastball [Twinkie Town]

Just because it's the offseason doesn't mean I have to stop writing about the Twins. This week, I examine something that came up in a discussion last week - whether Joe Nathan has lost something off his fastball.

Thank You, Steve Hauschka [Minnesota]

Dear Steve (I feel like I can call you Steve, after what you did for us; I hope that's okay),

Thanks for not being able to kick straight. Or maybe not being able to aim straight. I guess your game-winning field-goal attempt didn't hook or dip or dodge very much, just started left and stayed left. It was wide. That's what really counted, for us; it gave us Vikings fans a 33-31 win and a 6-0 record to be happy with. We needed that.

You probably don't know what I mean, so I'll tell you; up until last week or so, it'd been a pretty good year. The Vikings were winning and the Twins won their division, the Wild had just started, and the Timberwolves had yet to embarrass themselves or the state or make us wonder if they might not get to double-digit wins this year.

But the last few days, it's been a bit of a rough patch. The Twins got turfed immediately in the playoffs, as we kind of all knew they would. But then everything else kind of started to fall apart. The Wild have been terrible, just terrible, and since you're from Needham, Mass, you might understand how this affects us; a lot of us are hockey fans, too. (Heck, you were even here in Minnesota for a preseason, sharing the kicking duties last year; you might have had a taste then.)

And, you know, our college teams had some trouble over the weekend as well. The Gopher football team lost on Saturday, the Gopher hockey team lost Friday and tied Saturday after leading late in the third period - heck, even our soccer and volleyball teams had kind of rough weekends.

The Wolves - well, nothing's going right over there. They lost two more preseason games over the weekend, and while they were at it, lost Kevin Love for two months with a broken hand. Optimism isn't really abounding, is what I'm saying, and the season starts ten days from today.

Uff da, as the Scandinavians among us might say.

So thanks for allowing the Vikings to escape with the win, yesterday. We get to talk about the 6-0 Purple around the water cooler today, not about the horrible collapse that we figured was coming, or about how we knew they were bums all along and they're headed for a complete breakdown.

We won't forget what you did for us.

Thanks again,

The People of Minnesota

Weekend Links [RandBall]

The weekend links went up kind of late today; nevertheless, here they are.

Subjects covered include baseball, and... well, that's sort of it.

The Scariest Part is Not Knowing [Minnesota Wild]

The Wild is in Edmonton tonight, onto game four of a five-game West Coast swing. In case you haven't been paying attention: Minnesota is 1-4 on the year, has lost three straight on this road trip, and had their only win come in an overtime game after a crazy comeback from 3-0 down in the third period. Also, half of the team spent the entirety of training camp injured, which made it confusing when the season started and the other half got hurt, while the injured half got a slow start thanks to the lack of fitness caused by training camp injuries.

Things are bad out there. The team hasn't put together a stretch of decent play longer than about fifteen minutes this year, and there have been maybe three of those, none of them in the same game. Even worse, when the Wild is off - which it is, often - it's way off. Players pass to open areas of the ice. Forwards stand slack-jawed in the slot on defense, failing to pick up opposing skaters or move around at all. Defensemen attempt breakout passes in front of their own net. It's a disaster; the Wild look like a high school team.

But that's not the worst part. Here's the most horrifying thing at all: with Todd Richards at the helm, we have no idea if things will turn around. We don't know what he's going to do.

With Jacques Lemaire, you knew that the coach had a way to play, knew how to teach his way to play, and anybody not adhering to the program would hear about it (or skate until his tongue hit the ice.) There were plenty of flaws, and plenty of arguments to be made about the system, but you knew the coach had a plan in mind.

With Richards, who knows?

One thing is for sure - you never, ever, would have seen a Lemaire-coached team play as disorganizedly, as lackadaisically, as poorly as the Wild has played in this season's first two weeks. If he had to bench every last player on the team and call up the entire Houston roster, he'd get a team that could learn to play hockey the way he believed in it.

That's the scariest thing about the new regime. What if Richards can't turn it around - until it's far too late?

LOLPreps [LOLs]

This fall, the Star Tribune launched a new prep sports site called GameFaceMN.com. As part of the site, a revamped Preps Insider blog was launched, along with a helpful new staff picture.

Of course, since I'm basically just an internet jerk, I immediately set about procuring an enlarged version of the new staff picture, so that I could do what I usually do: superimpose stupid captions on the picture in the hopes of providing a few childish laughs.

It's taken me a couple of weeks to come up with the abbreviated effort you see below. In part, that's because all four of these guys have been nice to me in the past, for really no good reason except that they're nice people, and holding them up to any sort of ridicule just proves what an idiot I am.

Nevertheless, I believe the half-dozen or so readers of this blog have come to expect nothing if not sophomoric humor in this space. And so, without further comment: LOLPreps!

5-0, and Still Nervous [Minnesota Vikings]

The Vikings are 5-0, and of course that means we Minnesota fans are thrilled. I'm so thrilled I even wrote something somewhat positive about Brett Favre last week, so you know I must be over the moon.

And yet, I'll admit, I'm still nervous about this year's edition of the Purple. Here's why:

*The combined record of the five teams the Vikings have beat? 7-17. Only the 49ers have a winning record in 2009, and the Browns, Lions, and Rams are all 1-4 or worse.

*Looking at the 38-10 score, you might think that the Vikings dominated the Rams. Not so. In the first half, St. Louis outgained Minnesota 202-153 and put together drives of 32, 90, and 67 yards; it's just that all three drives ended in turnovers, two of them inside the Minnesota 10-yard line and the other that went for a Vikings touchdown. It could so easily have been 17-10 St. Louis at halftime. Instead, it was 17-3 Minnesota, and the demoralized Rams sunk to 0-5 thereafter

*This was the third time that the Vikings have won despite failing to outgain their opponents. Aaron Rodgers threw for 324 yards, but couldn't overcome a sieve-like Packers offensive line. The Lions actually picked up 265 yards, same as Minnesota, but the Vikings capitalized on turnovers and the resulting short fields.

*And of course, against the 49ers, the Purple needed a kick return for a touchdown and a miracle last-second heave to pick up the victory. The Niners lost 45-10 to Atlanta on Sunday, by the way.

The story of the season, so far, is turnover-driven victories against bad teams. Minnesota has the 19th-ranked offense and 11th-ranked defense (both in yards per game), neither of which makes you think 5-0. But only three teams in the NFL have better turnover margins.

Which is why I'm still nervous about what's ahead.

We're going to South Africa! [US Soccer]

USA 3, Honduras 2. We're going to the World Cup! It didn't always look pretty, but America gets it done in qualifying yet again.

Allow me a moment: U-S-A! U-S-A!

Weekend Links [RandBall]

Hot off the internet presses, it's the weekend links! (RandBall had to get them posted early, as he has to be over here in time to leave for the Gophers and Purdue.)

An Unhelpful Preseason Guide [Minnesota Timberwolves]

The Timberwolves play their only two preseason games in Minneapolis tomorrow vs. Toronto, and next Wednesday against Chicago. At the T-Wolves Blog, I write down a few things that you probably don't need to know before you go.

Game 163 [Minnesota Twins]

12:15am - I still hardly know what to say.

I'm trying not to make too big a deal out of the Twins' win over Detroit Tuesday night. I'm trying to keep it in perspective; this was a game between two deeply flawed ballclubs, to decide the worst division in baseball, the prize for which is a likely beating at the hands of the New York Yankees.

Even so, I've spent much of the night watching - and re-watching, and re-watching - the highlights from Minnesota's 6-5, 12-inning victory. And the more I watch, the more unlikely and unbelievable and exhilarating this win gets.

The improbabilities pour fourth:

• The Tigers led 3-0 early, with Rick Porcello mowing down Twins hitters, but they couldn't hold the lead past the seventh.
  
• The go-ahead home run came from Orlando Cabrera, who hasn't hit more than ten home runs in a season in five years.
  
• The Tigers had runners on first and third in the ninth inning with Magglio Ordonez at the plate, and didn't score.
  
• The Twins got an extra-inning, game-tying hit from Matt Tolbert, of all people.
  
• Detroit loaded the bases with one out and Bobby Keppel pitching in the twelfth, and didn't score.
• The game-winning base hits in the 12th came from Carlos Gomez, who's hitting .227, and Alexi Casilla, who's hitting .198.

So help me, the game even bore similarities to Game 7 in the 1991 Series. The big double play that ended the Tiger ninth? Couldn't help but think about the Hrbek-to-Harper-to-Hrbek 3-2-3 that ended a bases-loaded Braves threat. Keppel's fist pump following his 12th-inning strikeout? Jack Morris did the same several times. The big hits, the opposing rallies that failed to score against all odds, the eardrum-splitting Dome crowd - all just like Game 7.

Of course, nothing can really compare to that game. But I don't think there's any doubt that this Game 163 will go down as the greatest regular-season win in Twins history.

In closing, a bit of history: the 1987 Twins were even worse, record-wise, than this year's edition - 85-77 that year, versus 87-76 this time around. Nobody, but nobody, gave Minnesota a chance against Detroit in the ALCS that season. Most people predicted the Tigers would take the series in four or five games.

It seems awfully familiar that you can't find a single person who isn't predicting a Yankee sweep, starting tonight.

Admitting I Was Wrong About Favre [Minnesota Vikings]

(AP Photo/Morry Gash)

I have written many, many things about Brett Favre, approximately 0% of them complimentary. I've authored paragraphs on why I don't like him, on why I didn't want him to come to Minnesota, on all of the many reasons that I was dead set against his arrival in Viking purple.

After Minnesota's 4-0 start, and Favre's superlative play - especially in the Vikings' win over Green Bay last night - I think it's time for me to come out and admit that I was wrong, dead, absolutely wrong, about one thing. I believed that the almost-40-year-old Favre would be purely awful on the field. I thought it was a case of Favre's arm being twenty years older than his head, that he was the typical player who can't do it anymore but deludes himself into thinking he still can.

Even over the first couple of games of the year, I thought I still might be close to the truth. The team started quickly, but Favre wasn't making the rifle-armed downfield throws that have seduced so many commentators over his career. I thought this meant that he simply couldn't, that years of wear and tear combined with off-season arm surgery meant that throwing downfield was out of his range.

I've now seen a demonstration of how off the mark I was. Clearly I'm an idiot, because not only is Favre making every throw that he was ever able to make before, but also he seems to be playing just as well as ever. He's not making the Crazy Favre throws into quadruple coverage for no reason. He's being supported by the team's solid running game and an exceptional performance from a young offensive line, to be sure, but overall his play has been almost unimpeachable. He hits his checkdowns. He doesn't make random mistakes. He looks off defenders. He gives the Vikings a chance to make a play on third down, something they haven't had in what seems like a decade.

So I think it's time for me to admit: I was wildly, stupidly, wrong.

I may have even stated at some point that I thought Sage Rosenfels was a better option, from a football standpoint, than Favre. If nothing else in this post proves that I'm a drooling moron, that statement right there should seal the deal.

Oh, I still dislike Favre. I've hated him for far too long to let go this quickly. But there's no doubt from anyone that he's helping my team win, and he's clearly by far the best option the Vikings could have hoped for at quarterback.

He'll never be One Of Us, something Minnesota fans want from their heroes; no matter how long he plays in Minneapolis, he'll always be a Packer. He's a hired gun, a mercenary. But we'll have to come to terms with that - because as long as he keeps playing like he did on Monday, all those like me who didn't want him will be forced to admit that we are idiots.

One more game in the Dome [Twinkie Town]

Over at Twinkie Town today, I've got a few ruminations about baseball at the Metrodome. As far as I'm concerned, there's plenty of time - and plenty of reasons - to wish for one more game at the ol' Dome.

Weekend Links [RandBall]

I forgot to post the link to the RandBall Weekend Links! Hopefully they aren't too stale, even though it's late Sunday night.

LOLRandball [LOLs]

The prep sports staff at the Star Tribune filmed a midweek webcast about the halfway point of prep football season, which of course means one thing: screenshots with stupid captions!








Truly, we have raised the level of discourse in our community.

(And boy oh boy, we hope RandBall isn't mad about this.)