Back to the future

Harmon Killebrew's best season, as portrayed by
Strat-O-Matic.

My set of 1969 Strat-O-Matic super-advanced cards arrived Friday, and I expect to be rather entranced by baseball past for quite a while.

I make no apologies for being, at least for now, more interested in baseball seasons far removed from today. I'm not impressed with the team the Twins are likely to take north a few weeks from now, and as I started going through the 1969 cards I had a sense of being reunited with some old friends.

There are all kinds of ways to be a baseball fan, and nostalgia is one of them.

Back to the future. There's talk of tightening the current strike zone, a move that, if it happens, will parallel 1969.  I'll expound on that subject if and when something actually happens. I suspect it will, and I'm not opposed.

Notes from the weekend

Francisco Liriano threw first-pitch strikes
to18 of the 24 Cubs he faced Sunday.

Francisco Liriano didn't have a very good line at the end of his outing Sunday — four earned runs in 5.2 innings — but he probably deserved better statistically than he got.

So it's two good-to-outstanding starts since his return to the rotation, one OK one. And they've all been against bad teams, so I'm still wary of jumping on the bandwagon, and I suspect the general managers with whom Terry Ryan will be talking trade in the coming weeks will be wary also.

Which is fine. There's plenty of time between now and the trading deadline, and if Liriano is going to be worth trading, it will be after a sustained period of quality work.

---

I see good and ill in baseball's new draft rules, but one thing the rules have done was speed up the signings. The Twins had 12 players inked by Sunday, and Bryon Buxton, their first-rounder (No. 2 overall) was to arrive in the Twin Cities today for his physical.

I rather expect that the Buxton signing will come Tuesday, and he'll get to take some batting practice in Target Field before reporting to Fort Myers to begin his professional career with the Twins' Gulf Coast League team.

---

Liam Hendriks is apparently to be recalled to make the start on Saturday, the next time the Twins need a fifth starter. I said a while back that I expected Hendriks wouldn't be recalled until the team expected him to stick.

If so, recalling Hendriks now suggests to me that it's going to be a while before Carl Pavano comes off the disabled list.

---

As a self-described "Strat nerd" — at least a sporadic one — I had to take note of the two Minnesotans who last week went for the Guinness world record for consecutive hours playing a board game. Their game was Strat-O-Matic baseball, and they topped 61 hours when they finally called it quits Sunday.

Believe it or not, they're both married.

Who's the MVP? (A detour from real life)

About a year ago I began a solo Strat-O-Matic league with cards from their Hall of Fame and Negro League stars sets — 10 teams, 44 games each. I have now finished the regular season — still have the championship series to play, but the project is essentially complete.

On the basis that little is more boring than somebody else's fantasy league, I won't delve into the details. If you are really interested, I chronicled the ins and outs here.

What I'm after is opinion on the league MVPs — Most Valuable Player and Most Valuable Pitcher. (I won't call the latter Cy Young because Cy Young was in this league — and wasn't all that good.)

I offer three candidates for each, alphabetically, using only traditional stats because (a) most of these guys never heard of on-base percentage and (b) I kept the stats by hand and opted to avoid extra computation:

Players

Josh Gibson, c/1b: His team, Homestead, finished second in its division, two games out. Gibson was first in batting average (.423), second in home runs (18), second in runs scored (48), ninth in RBIs (38).

Babe Ruth, lf: His team, Franklins, lost a one-game playoff for its division. Ruth led the league in home runs (22), runs (52) and walks (45). He was fourth in RBIs (43).  His .347 batting average did not make the leader board.

Tris Speaker, cf: His team, Teddys, won that one-game playoff. Speaker was second in batting average (.420), RBIs (47) and hits (74). He led the league in doubles (17).

Pitchers

Three-Finger Brown: 8-2, 3.01 for the Teddys. His 89.6 innings were second most in the league. The wins tied for the league lead. The ERA was third best. Not on the leader board in strikeouts.


Carl Hubbell: 8-1, 3.47 for the Franklins. Led league in innings (93.3), tied for sixth in strikeouts (60), was fifth in ERA.

Slim Jones: 6-1, 2.48 for the X-Giants. Led league in ERA. Relatively light workload (72.6 innings), but was still fourth in strikeouts (62).