Bonus Resolution 2 - Get Back Into Baseball - Season Wrap-Up

Right now baseball is in the midst of the postseason. Unfortunately the Twins are not in it. They had a disastrous year finishing 66-96, which was 27 game behind first place in their division. I had a heck of a year keeping up with them though. I managed to keep track of every game they played this season thanks to the handy MLB At Bat app on my phone and kept up with daily stats and game write ups. They had a promising first several weeks of the season when they managing to hover around the .500 mark until they hit a few slumps they were unable to battle out of. I think their best part of the season was the first two and a half to three weeks after the all-star break where I think they only lost just a few games during that stretch.

For the most part, I managed to stick with my goal and catch at least one Twins game a week on television whether it be at a restaurant or sports bar, or watching cable at a friend's or family member's house. There were probably a few weeks where I missed a game, but there were also at least a few weeks to make up for it where I caught two games that week. And when I thought it was not going to happen, I finally made it out to Target Field once this year to catch a Twins game. It just happened to take place on September 30, the final game of the regular season against the Indians. As luck would have it, I was going down to the Twin Cities that weekend with a couple friends to catch the Nine Inch Nails concert the night before. The concert was a blast by the way, and NIN did not disappoint! I checked the schedule and was ecstatic to find their last game of the season was going on at home the next day.

I did not think my two friends were going to go since they are not sports fans and was planning on going to the game alone since I drove down met up with them separately. But when I brought up I was going they said they would go along with me to my surprise. I probably should have went alone because one friend kept making fun of the game while we were there and kept getting under my skin throughout the game. Oh well, I still managed to have a semi-decent time out there, and for being a late September game, we had some lucky weather with clear bright skies and temps in the low 70s. Since I was there I had to get a overpriced beer and hot dog too! Target Field is still as magnificent as I remember from two years ago. A five star facility all around. Unfortunately the Twins lost 5-1, but I did get to see my favorite reliever Casey Fien, get an inning of action, and I was glad to see Scott Diamond get a September call up start and for the most part had a quality start, minus a trio of fielding errors in the 6th which ultimately cost the game for the Twinkies. It was also special to see All-Star closer, Glen Perkins give a big speech in front of the team before the game essentially apologizing for the lackluster season and promised to make up for it next season.

I do have some final season thoughts, just keep in mind I still do not consider myself a baseball stat junkie but am just going by my observations throughout the year and what I have read on the daily game recaps. I was bummed to see Justin Morneau traded, I understand he may not be as powerful as he once was, but he was their next best player this year behind Mauer. At least we got a decent player from the Pirates in return in Presly, and I guess I will be rooting for Morneau in the postseason with the Pirates as they are currently up 2-1. I hope Mauer makes a full recovery and does not have any unfortunate long lasting effects from his season ending concussion. I kept hearing how Morneau was never the same after his 2010 concussion, and that would be terrible if the same happens to Mauer.

I want Aaron Hicks to be given another chance in 2014 and hope he plays all next year in the Majors. He was probably called up a year too early as he really struggled in the first several weeks of the season. I believe he finished with around a .198 average, but minus his atrocious first several weeks and I bet he was probably batting right around .230ish until he got called down in July. I believe the only main regular starters that lasted all season were Ryan Doumit and Brian Dozier. Doumit had a couple of hot streaks during the year, but the last month or two of the season he appeared to be in a slump, and during the game I was at he kept striking out. Dozier had a real strong last few months and came through with some clutch homers and a lot of big hits.

I hope the Twins keep Florimon as my underdog pick. I cannot explain it, but I feel there is something there and he can be at least somewhat reliable for getting on base once a game. As far as pitching goes, my vote for best/least worst starter goes to Kevin Correia. I saw him pitch his way out of a few nasty jams, and have at least several strong performances this year. Reading some of his post game interviews got me on his side too where he owned up to his mistakes but had at least in my view justifiable explanations for them. I hope Diamond sticks in the rotation too all of next season. He just kept getting bad breaks this year after a standout rookie season. The games I saw him pitch he usually looked strong through the 4th, but would usually collapse in the 5th or 6th. I hope Worley gets his act together too, the Twins were really banking on him after they acquired him from Philly, but he whiffed big time. It sounded like he had a strong second half of the season in the minors until he got hurt, so maybe that got him a reality check and he will have a decent 2014 start. The Twins have an awesome bullpen and I absolutely hope they stick with at least Duensing, Burton and especially Fien and Perkins.

That does it for this baseball season. I will still keep up with the Pirates in the post season and root for Morneau, but I am glad I managed to stick with the Twins all year, and am looking forward to doing it again next season!

Bonus Resolution 2 - Get Back Into Baseball - All-Star Break Thoughts

So we are approaching the halfway point of the 2013 MLB season, more commonly referred to as the All-Star break, so I thought I would share some quick thoughts on how the Twins have been doing this season. I have been doing a pretty good job at consistently catching a game or two a week. Unfortunately the Twins have been pretty terrible as of late, with a record 37-53 as I write this.

They have been on some nasty skids lately, losing 12 of their last 13 games. Unfortunately they have lost a ton of close games. It seems I have seen them on too many of the wrong ends of extra innings games. Their bullpen has at least been mostly delivering, and I am a huge fan of Casey Fien whenever they throw him in for an inning or two and he just throws nonstop heaters. Burton and Perkins are also highly reliable closers and usually deliver scoreless innings, no matter if they are several runs behind at that point.

Their starting pitchers though have been quite iffy lately. Scott Diamond was the star pitcher from last year but he has been on a bit of a cold streak these last couple of months. It is pretty sad where I can say the most impressive thing I saw Diamond did this past month was get a hit in an interleague game. They did bring up the highly anticipated Kyle Gibson after a few years in the minors who had an impressive win in his Twins debut a couple weeks ago but lost his last couple of games since. Pressly and Pelfry have been underperforming a lot lately too. I am kind of digging Correia as I have seen him pitch his way out of some nasty jams, and get a few lucky breaks. He seems a bit older for a starter, but he is managing to hang in there.

Offensively, I am happy to Aaron Hicks recently return after a month off with a hamstring injury. For a couple of games he finally eclipsed the .200 batting average after going 4 for 4 in a game, but just dropped underneath it again this last game. Joe Mauer is still the stud of the Twins and the only one batting over .300 and 110 hits and has rightly landed the AL catcher All-Star spot. Justin Morneau was at the beginning of the season, but his average has been gradually dropping the last couple of months and is now in the .270 range. Plouffe has been coming through in the clutch this last month, and Doumit has had a few games with some big power hits this last month as well.

Some stupid observations on my part of some Twins' players this season. I like watching Joe Mauer at bats because he constantly looks incredibly confused in between every swing and does not look like he knows what he is doing out there, and yet he is the most efficient hitter of the team. Dozier has been on fire with home runs lately, seems like he has hit four or five of them this past month. Clete Thomas did a sufficient job filling in on the roster the last month with recent Twins injury and I hope they manage to keep him in the rotation more, hopefully taking over Jamey Carroll's spot for the main 10th man player as I have not seen too much out of him lately.

That wraps up my mid season thoughts on the Twinkies thus far, speaking of which they just brought back Woody Harrelson's favorite snack on the market this week! Sorry, I am stretching for optimism here as the Twins definitely are not showing it out there. To motivate myself for catching their game today, I plan on watching my favorite baseball movie, the original Major League before catching them play today!

Bonus Resolution 2 - Get Back Into Baseball - Complete!

Going back to elementary school from Kindergarten all the way through 5th grade I LOVED baseball. I think I loved all sports as a kid, but baseball definitely took the cake. We would talk about baseball to death at the lunch table in school, and many summer days were spent playing baseball in a little open field by the railroad tracks with several of the same neighborhood kids. The summers of 1992, 1993 and 1994 I have great memories of playing summer little league baseball.

Up until that time too I was huge into collecting baseball cards. Whenever I was brought along to the weekly trip to the grocery store, the only solace I would take in after being dragged around the store for a couple hours was a pack or two of cards awaiting me at the end when we got home and instantly scouring through them in hopes of getting a valuable card. I still got a little stack of my most valuable cards, even though they have greatly gone down in worth over the years.

Then a few things happened within a year to turn me off from baseball. The first big thing was the family started spending the first of several summers in a row at a farm. I did not mind the summer farm life, as a matter of fact I think I was the only one of my siblings that enjoyed it when I think back on it, but an unfortunate tradeoff was not being able to take part of summer league baseball and neighborhood pick-up games anymore.

The second of the three deathblows to baseball for me was by 1994, and within the span of a couple years the average price of a pack of baseball cards went up from around 50 to 75 cents to $2 due to Upper Deck taking over the market with their premium produced quality cards and everyone else following suit and upgrading to more expensive material to produce their cards out of. This had a crappy ripple effect to where my parents would no longer pick me up a pack or two of cards to shut me up at the grocery store and before I knew it my baseball card hobby went up in smoke.

The last blow to baseball capping off the hat trick for me was the baseball strike of 1994. As a kid in those elementary school years, I always greatly looked forward to the World Series, even doubly more so than the Super Bowl. At the playground and lunch table, our sports talk went through the roof regardless if the Twins were in the postseason or not. Of course they won the '87 and '91 World Series at the time so it definitely helped they were an awesome team in my impressionable years, but every year we would thoroughly dissect every game of the World Series. In 1994 MLB cancelled the rest of the season with the strike and as a result World Series was cancelled too, and as a then 11 year old kid getting that taken away from me felt atrocious at the time and I just could not go back to baseball. For nearly two decades, I only kept up with baseball from the occasional highlights or big news stories like the Sosa/McGuire home run race and Ripken and Bonds chasing down records. All the big steroid and PED scandals from the past decade helped refrain me from getting back into it too.

So what got me back into baseball? Well, it was a gradual process that started about a year and a half ago. My dad retired in the beginning of 2011, and started going to the local senior center with his newfound free time. They were putting together a bus to go down to the Twins game and back for only $50 a person, which included the ticket. It was my first time ever at a Twins game at the new Target Field, and I loved the experience. Even though there were no announcers and we did not have the greatest seats in the world, I was still easily able to make out what was happening and the atmosphere just got me into all the small little intangibles that took place over the course of a game. The 2012 season came and went and I found myself actually making a little bit of an effort to look into baseball scores on my own and occasionally see what was going on in the league. My mom's boyfriend is a huge Twins fan, and whenever I came over to visit, he was usually in the living room watching the Twins game and I would usually go over and watch a few innings with him. I ended up catching about a dozen or so Twins games this way. I also ended up having an awesome BBQ last year with a couple friends, one of which was a huge Twins fan and the other a huge Cubs fan and when they met in Interleague play we drank quite a bit, and when the Twins won in a nail biter in extra innings I celebrated by drunkenly ordering a throwback Paul Molitor Twins jersey I was debating on for a few months.

Baseball has been back in action for a month now, and I have been keeping up with it on a daily basis now in ways I have not since I was a child. Technology has made it easier, instead of grabbing the morning paper or waiting for ESPN or local news highlights to see if the Twins won, I take advantage of the MLB app on my phone for instant access to the box score and AP write up of the game. I found an awesome Twins podcast, Gleeman and the Geek to help keep me up on all the latest Twins news and analysis and other happenings around the league. I also promised myself to try and catch at least one Twins game a week and I have been making good on that promise so far.

I have caught about six or seven games so far either watching with my mom's boyfriend or at various sports bars/restaurants in town. A new sports bar just opened up a couple weeks ago within a few block of me and I made it there last weekend and loved the place. They had plenty of televisions and they quickly turned it to the Twins game I requested; it was also nice they had 30 beers on tap too.

So yes, a month into the season I have considered myself back on the baseball wagon and enjoying it like I have not in 20 years. Go Twinkies!!!!