Twins 2017: Reality Bites

English: Target Field (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's Opening Day at Target Field, when the Minnesota Twins are hosting the Kansas City Royals in their season opener.  The weather is acceptable by local standards for early April.  Dessa, the locally-famous hip hop artist, is performing the national anthem with the Minnesota Orchestra.  If you're not in the mood for overpriced beer and brats, there are much healthier options (relatively speaking) waiting for you in the concession areas, including chef Andrew Zimmern's ballpark eatery.

(You know who Zimmern is, right?  He hosts a show on the Travel Channel called "Bizarre Foods", where he goes around the world sampling the local cuisine.  And by "local cuisine", we're talking delicacies like pig testicles, for which after eating it and pronouncing it yummy he lives to tell the tale.  But we digress . . .)

Then the game begins.  The team you see on the field is mostly the same one that lost 103 games last season, the worst since the franchise came to Minnesota from Washington in 1961.  And chances are real good that they'll lose at least 90 games again this season.

The most significant moves the Twins made all winter were to hire Derek Falvey away from the American League champion Cleveland Indians to be its new chief baseball officer, who in turn hired Thad Levine to be his general manager.  The only other move they made was in acquiring catcher Jason Castro, who previously played for the Houston Astros.

• Brian Dozier, the team's best player, is still a Twin because Falvey was unable to unload him while he still had some trade value.
• Joe Mauer is nearing the end of his long-term contract, which the Twins and their fans have come to regard as an albatross.  He can't catch any more, so they stick him at first base, keeping them from slotting a young player who needs experience.  But Mauer can still hit the ball on occasion.
• There was a huge reaction to ByungHo Park being demoted to the minors after a successful spring training.  If we've learned anything from watching mutual fund commercials on TV, it's that past performance doesn't always mirror future results.
• Outside of starting pitchers Ervin Santana, Kyle Gibson, Phil Hughes and Hector Santiago, the rest of the Twins staff is a disaster waiting to happen.  Losing Trevor May and Glen Perkins to injury doesn't help.
• The Twins' designated future stars, Byron Buxton and Miguel Sano, are still trying to prove they're worthy of the hype they've been given by just about everybody.  Is this finally the year?
• This is Paul Molitor's third season as Twins manager, and it might be his last.  Which is too bad because one wonders how much more successful he'd be with better players.

After several losing season, Twins fans are faced with a stark choice:  Keep watching this team and hope things will get better.  Or your time would be better spent binge watching reruns of "Bizarre Foods".  You could do worse.

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The Twins' flagship radio station is still at 96.3 FM, but the call letters have changed from KTWN to KQGO.  The Pohlad family, who own both the team and the station, did that to make it fit with its Go brand of media properties:  Go 95.3 (hip hop) and Go News (the former Bring Me The News).  A station built on adult alternative rock and baseball is still a hard sell, and the signal isn't all that great.  But the Pohlads don't care, because as long as the Twins are terrible, they're not going anywhere.
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Our projected division and wild card picks in Major League Baseball.  Ignore them at your peril.

AMERICAN LEAGUE
Central:  Cleveland Indians
East:       Boston Red Sox
West:      Houston Astros
Wild Card:  New York Yankees and Toronto Blue Jays

NATIONAL LEAGUE
Central:  Chicago Cubs
East:        New York Mets
West:       Los Angeles Dodgers
Wild Card:  Washington Nationals and St. Louis Cardinals

UPDATE (4/3/17):  The Twins won on Opening Day 7-1 over the Royals.  Dessa did not perform the national anthem, claiming illness.

Raiders Take a Chance on Las Vegas

Oakland Raiders logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By 2020, the NFL Raiders will be trading in their hardscrabble existence in Oakland for the glitz and glamour of Las Vegas.  This isn't the first time they did that, having spent 12 seasons in the glitz and glamour of Los Angeles (1982-94) before moving back to the Bay Area in 1995.

Once the Raiders touch down in Vegas, they will have a new domed stadium waiting for them, paid for by local taxpayers and the Bank of America.  The only reason they're staying in Oakland for the next couple of years is that Raiders owner Mark Davis doesn't want his team to play outdoors in the desert heat at a small college stadium.

This is the third franchise shift for the NFL in the past year.  The Rams returned to LA after two decades in St. Louis, and the Chargers bolted out of San Diego to join them.  Which left the Raiders, who still have a significant fan base in southern California, looking east.

The NFL (and most professional sports) used to avoid Las Vegas because of its reputation as a gambling haven.  But now it seems hypocritical in an era where sports betting and fantasy football are big business.  The league's owners were almost unanimous in approving the Raiders' move.

Oakland now joins St. Louis and San Diego as cities abandoned by the NFL for bigger bucks elsewhere, and might never see them again.  The Coliseum, which had been the Raiders' off and on home base for over 50 years, is now a concrete dump that's badly in need of repair.  Even Major League Baseball's Athletics couldn't wait to get out of there.  And the NBA Golden State Warriors, who are currently playing at Oracle Arena next door, will be moving to San Francisco in a couple of years.

The Raiders began as an original member of the American Football League in 1960.  After struggling for a few years, the team began to dominate the league (and later the NFL after the merger) by living the "just win, baby" philosophy of managing general partner Al Davis.  They've played in five Super Bowls, winning twice in Oakland (1977 and 1980) and once in Los Angeles (1984).  They last appeared in 2003, losing to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

So many memorable players have donned the Silver and Black over the years.  Here's some of them:  Daryl Lamonica, Jim Otto, George Blanda, Ben Davidson, Jim Plunkett, Bo Jackson, coach John Madden, Ray Guy, Ken Stabler, Marcus Allen, Fred Biletnikoff and Howie Long.

In the 2016 season, the Raiders finished second in the AFC West division with a 12-4 record.  They lost to the Houston Texans in the wild card round of the NFL playoffs.

Playing in Oakland for the next two seasons (no word on what will happen in 2019) is going to be awkward for the Raiders and their fans, the most rabid in the NFL.  What if they win a Super Bowl, as Davis suggested they might?  Forget handing another Vince Lombardi Trophy to the New England Patriots.  Awarding one to a lame duck franchise could result in another embarrassing moment for commissioner Roger Goodell.

And Las Vegas?  There will be plenty of questions about the viability of an NFL franchise in a growing city with a transient population, and how the league will handle the gambling situation.  With every team getting the stadium deals they wanted and no more worlds to conquer (unless it's London), how long will it be before the NFL discovers all that glitters isn't really gold?

United They Kick

Soccerball with USA flag (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Minnesota United FC (aka the Loons) are the latest pro sports franchise to come into the Twin Cities.  Their first season in Major League Soccer, after years in the minors, began Friday with a match at Portland against the Timbers.

The Loons are owned by Bill McGuire, who was once the CEO of United Health Care.  He bought the team from the North American Soccer League in 2012, just before they were about to fold it.  Manny Lagos, a longtime figure in Minnesota soccer, is the team's sporting director (read:  general manager).  Adrian Heath is the coach.

The team will play its home games for the next two seasons at the University of Minnesota's football stadium.  Then, probably in the 2019 season, the Loons will move into their new soccer-specific digs in St. Paul, having successfully wrangled money out of a skeptical state legislature that had already seen too many stadium deals.

As an expansion team, United's roster is stocked with the usual castoffs from other squads, young players and the holdovers from their previous incarnation in the NASL.  Heath, who previously led another MLS startup in Orlando, will be tasked with bringing his new team together and making them competitive against the more established competition.

MLS has 22 teams this season (Atlanta United is the other new franchise), and is looking for more.  Soccer's popularity in this country is rising as more Americans are taking the game seriously, thanks to TV coverage of the World Cup and the English Premiere League, as well as attention paid to the U.S. men's and women's national squads.  And they have national television deals with Fox, FS1 and ESPN.

As a league, MLS is kind of a wannabe on the international soccer stage.  Their biggest stars (who are invariably placed in New York and Los Angeles) tend to be veterans with one foot in retirement.  They don't seem to have an identity of their own, having chosen to co-opt the European leagues.  They have teams named Real Salt Lake and Sporting Kansas City.  Their schedules read "Los Angeles Galaxy vs. New York Red Bulls", forcing fans to figure out which one is the home team.  Their season runs from March to December, which is longer than that of the NHL and NBA.  And their plan to expand to at least 28 teams is a reminder of how the original NASL folded back in the 1980s.  Too many teams with too little interest equal a league collapsing of its own weight.

Minnesota United, being a first-year team, is not expected to do much this season.  Most of the players are unknown to the average fan in and out of Minnesota, and will certainly have some adjusting to do.  But this has been a good market for pro soccer, with the Kicks and Strikers of the original NASL selling out the old Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington back in the 1970s and 80s.  Can the Loons be just as successful with a new generation of soccer fans?  We'll soon find out.