Annoying Cliches

I haven’t written much in the month of May. Between a freelance job that’s eating more time than it should and a best friend suffering from cancer, I haven’t had much time to focus on the Twins. And that’s probably a good thing, Because quite frankly, the Twins have started to get a little boring and predictable.

Ooooh, Batista can’t hit and can’t field.

Ooooooh, Castro hits less than Batista.

Ooooooh, Jason Bartlett is wasting away in Rochester

Oooooooh, Morneau tries to pull everything and can’t field.

Oooooooh, Stewart and Castillo are leadoff hitters who’ve lost a step or seven.

Ooooooh, Rondell White is no Jim Thome at the plate.

Oooooh, something isn’t quite right with Radke and Silva.

Oooooh, there are sherpas in Nepal who’ve never heard of baseball who could manage a team better than Ron Gardenhire.

You don’t want to be negative. You want to say something positive like “Hey, the team still employs Joe Mauer and Johan Santana.” But at the same time, how can you do that when the team you’ve lived and died with for way to long has seemingly internalized the lyrics to Ratt’s Round and Round and made it a battle cry?

And, as much as I hate to admit it, I’m starting to blame Terry Ryan who may in fact be the most ironic General Manager in baseball. No GM does a better job of finding young talent. And no GM in baseball trusts that young talent less. Would say the 2002 Twins exist for example if Carl Pohlad hadn’t forced Ryan’s hand in 1999, forcing him to play a rookie laden club in 1999 by giving him no payroll?

Ryan gets credit for building the team’s 2002-04 clubs that won division championships? Maybe it’s time to give him some of the blame for building the bad clubs of the late 90s as well. You remember, when the club’s philosophy was “We’re only one free agent signing of a Minnesotan in his late 30s away from a World Series banner”? When Otis Nixon was seen as the perfect replacement to Chuck Knoblauch? When the brand of nearly unwatchable baseball placed on the field nearly had the team on the first plane to Charlotte?

In the late 90s, it was readily assumed that Tom Kelly lack of trust in rookies like Rich Becker, Todd Walker and David Ortiz was the reason the Twins brought in so many over-the-hill veterans. Cut to 10 years later, and here the Twins we go again. The Twins are sacrificing their youth, and doing it with about as much success as they had in the mid-to-late 90s as well. Only now it’s happening again with a different manager at the helm. Which leads us to one of two conclusions, neither one being a trait carried by an elite GM:

A) The GM is the one who doesn’t trust his young players
B) The GM is too milquetoast to stand up to the manager, who spends more time around the players and is more likely to cater to his “boys” for that reason.

I’m not sure which one is the truth. I do know that following the formula the Twins used in the late 90s is a bad idea. I went to about a dozen games a year in the late 90s, and the Metrodome was a much lonelier place then.

And if the Twins don’t fix this problem soon, the new stadium will likely be just as lonely a place when it opens in 2010.