Affiliates current and former

One thing that has gone well for the Twins the past week-plus: They extended their Triple A affiliation with the Rochester Redwings.

There had been some speculation about that in the immediate wake of Terry Ryan's firing, especially considering that the New York Mets are a presumably better geographic fit for an upstate New York team, and the Mets want, for a variety of reasons, to get their affiliation out of Las Vegas.

This 2013 Wall Street Journal piece explains the  odd Mets-Vegas pairing well:

Only a handful of team-affiliate agreements expire each year, and if one of them isn't renewed, it creates a game of musical chairs. Las Vegas is the chair no team wants.

And the Mets have become the fanny no chair wants.

"They're undesirable," said Dave Rosenfield, a longtime Norfolk (Va.) Tides executive. "Nobody wants them."

The story is more than three years old, but as far as I can tell, it's not dated. The Vegas stadium hasn't been replaced, the Wilpons still own the Mets, and Vegas is still in the desert.

The Redwings, incidentally, have had a pretty good season, even if they appear unlikely to make the International League playoffs. It has certainly been a hectic one for player movement. Earlier this summer the Wings' play-by-play announcer tweeted that there were only three position players left from the opening roster -- and no pitchers.

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Two years ago the Twins switched Double-A affiliations, leaving the New Britain RockCats (Eastern League) for Chattanooga (Southern League). This came as the RockCats ownership announced plans to abandon New Britain for nearby Hartford.

The team, now branded the Hartford Yard Goats, will spend the entire season on the road. The new stadium in Hartford is unfinished, and nothing as been done on it in months as the city wrangles with contractors and team, And this week, Baseball America reports, the Eastern League president said the Yard Goats may never play a game in Hartford.

The Twins got out of that mess just in time.

A title-winning core

Two Twins minor-league affiliates played Monday night for championships. The Cedar Rapids Kernels lost by one run to the West Michigan Whitecaps for the low A Midwest League title; the Chattanooga Lookouts beat Biloxi for the Double A Southern League crown.

Cedar Rapids' proximity and the presence of Nick Gordon not withstanding, the Chattanooga team is the more interesting and important to fans of the major league team, and not only because it's two rungs higher on the ladder. Chattanooga was loaded this year, stuffed in large part with the players who won the Florida State League title in 2014 and the Appy League title in 2012. (That same group lost in the Midwest League playoff in 2013 to an equally-loaded Quad Cities squad.)

Even with the midseason promotions of the likes of Miguel Sano, Jose Berrios and Byron Buxton, the Lookouts were still loaded. Max Kepler was the Southern League player of the year. Adam Brett Walker hammered 31 homers (and struck out 195 times). Jorge Polanco spent much of the season at shortstop next to former first round pick Levi Michael. For much of the first half of the season, manager Doug Mientkiewicz could run out lineups with nine likely future major leaguers.

The seven players who were on the roster for all three titles, as listed by Mike Berardino: outfielders Kepler, Walker and Travis Harrison; first baseman D.J. Hicks; infielder Niko Goodrum; and pitchers Brett Lee and B.J. Baxendale.

The immensely talented Kepler, who has been on the 40-man roster for two seasons, was immediately called up to the big-league club after Monday's game. I don't expect the German to get much playing time unless and until the Twins are ousted from the playoff picture, but he'll get a taste of it these next two weeks.

He's 22, a left-handed hitter and thrower. the offspring of two world-class ballet dancers (mom from Texas, dad from Poland, both were performing in Berlin) who was signed in the same summer as Sano and Polanco. He has the speed to play center -- once Buxton was moved up, Kepler got the bulk of the center field time -- but has had some elbow problems in the past. He played all three outfield spots for Chattnooga and has considerable first base time as well.

Growing up in Germany didn't afford Kepler much exposure to quality competition as a kid, and it took him a while to catch up to his peers. But he certainly had a breakout year this season.

On a team with Buxton and Aaron Hicks, Kepler's not going to play center field. With the elbow issues on his resume, I suspect he's best suited for left field or first base, and the Twins have Joe Mauer at first base with three more years on his contract. I also suspect that of the four young outfielders -- Buxton, Hicks, Eddie Rosario and Kepler -- that Kepler may emerge as best hitter.

The Twins have time to sort out that alignment.

Chattanooga choo-choo

Ever have the feeling you were
being watched?

The Twins went back to their distant past Wednesday when they and the Chattanooga Lookouts announced a four-year affiliation deal.

No more New Britain RockCats for the Double A franchise. The Twins will have their second-highest minor league team in the Southern League again -- and in Chattanooga for the first time in more than half a century.

Back in the day -- when the Twins were still the Washington Senators, back before Calvin Griffith inherited the club from his adopted father, Clark "The Old Fox" Griffith -- the Lookouts were not only the Senators' top farm club but owned by Griffith. Indeed, for much of three decades, the Lookouts may have been the complete extent of the Senators' farm "system."

The story of Chattanooga baseball really can't be separated from that of Joe Engle, a truly fascinating obscurity in baseball history.

Engle was a Washington native who grew up a playmate of Teddy Roosevelt's kids and was batboy for the Senators, Engle pitched for the Senators for a few years in his teens and early 20s with marginal success (rooming with Walter Johnson in the process), Then he drifted into scouting for Griffith, Engle is credited with finding three Hall-of-Famers for Griffith (Goose Goslin, Joe Cronin and Bucky Harris) and landing the core of the only three pennant winning teams Washington ever boasted.

Supposedly, when Engle brought Cronin to Washington, he introduced the young shortstop to Calvin Griffith's niece by announcing:  Look, Millie, I brought you a husband, embarrassing each of the pair. But indeed, the two did marry. (Clark Griffith then traded Cronin to Boston, where the salaries were higher.)

In 1929 Griffith sent Engle to Chattanooga to run the Lookouts, There Engle remained, pretty much, for the rest of his life, essentially being a early Bill Veeck.

One of his more legendary stunts came with an 1931 exhibition game in Chattanooga with the New York Yankees, in which he had a 17-year-old lefty from Chattanooga named Jackie Mitchell pitch to Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. The stunt was that Mitchell was female. She struck out both the Bambino and the Iron Horse, and nobody will ever know for sure if the whiffs were on merit or because the two all-time greats were being chivalrous and/or playing along with the gag.

Eventually Calvin Griffith succeeded Engle at the helm of the Lookouts, prepping to inherit the Washington club by running the minor league team. Chattanooga was also where a young Harmon Killebrew played his minor league ball (after stewing on the Senators bench for two years under the bonus baby rules of the time), as did Jim Kaat.

All that is part of the distant past. Now the Lookouts are part of the Twins future. Presumably the Twins cut ties to New Britain because of the messy stadium situation in central Connecticut; the team's ownership appears to have burned their bridges with New Britain. but the stadium deal with Hartford hasn't been finalized.

Jim Crikket had an interesting observation on Twitter. As part of a reshuffling of Triple A affiliations, the Oakland Athletics were displaced in Sacramento and wound up in Nashville, which is not a particularly attractive geographic fit for a California franchise. That affiliation (like the Twins renewal in Rochester) expires in two years. Crikket suggests that Nashville might be an attractive destination for the Twins' Triple A affilation after 2016; having the Triple A and Double A teams in the same state (Tennessee) could be quite handy. (UPDATE: The affiliation agreement announced Thursday between the A's and Nashville runs through 2018, so a Tennessee nexus ain't happening in two years.)