Notes, quotes and comment

Free agent reliever Blake Parker and the Minnesota Twins are finalizing an agreement on a one-year deal worth slightly more than $3 million, sources tell ESPN. Parker, coming off strong back-to-back seasons, was nontendered by the Angels. @Ken_Rosenthal had it close earlier.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) January 7, 2019

The Twins don't have, as of now, a "proven closer" on their roster. They have candidates, however, beginning with Trevor May and Trevor Hildenberger, who each took a turn with the ninth inning role last year after the Twins traded Fernando Rodney. They have Addison Reed, who has closing experience but didn't have a good year last season. And apparently, they will soon add Parker, who saved 14 games for the Angels last season, which doesn't sound like much but led their staff. (Mike Scoscia really spread the saves out last year; nine different pitchers were credited with at least one for the Halos.) 

Parker turns 34 in June. He hadn't done much in the majors until 2017, and his basic numbers the past two years are quite good. But the Angels nontendered him anyway, which can be taken as a red flag, as they would know him better than anybody. 

If you're looking for the danger signs in his stat line, check out the home runs allowed (12 in 66.1 innings last year) and the FIP, Fielding Independent Pitching, which attempts to determine the pitcher's ERA given average fielding behind him (4.40 in 2018). The Twins bullpen overall was prone to surrendering homers last year, and Parker may not help that specific issue much.

The walk and strikeout rates are good, however, and he apparently is quite adept at getting swings-and-missed with his splitter.

As of now, I would expect May to be first in line for the glory job. Parker might be the first guy to get a shot at it should May stumble..

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Another Target Field renovation for 2019 — the batter’s Eye. #MNTwins will add 5,700 sea green juniper plants, individually installed and secured in a tiered, multiple-tray system attached. pic.twitter.com/MMlC1O1IDw

— Dan Hayes (@DanHayesMLB) January 7, 2019

The image is not, obviously, real; according to the Twins website the plants will be installed in March and removed for storage in a nursery after season's end.

I've not understood why the pine trees in 2010 were panned by the hitters and removed after the season but a similar backdrop in Colorado's Coors Field has never been questioned. I hope this one works.

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Lenny Green, the first regular center fielder in Minnesota Twins history, died Sunday, which was also his birthday. He was 86. 

As old as I am, I have no actual memory of Green as a player. The first Twins center fielders I remember are Ted Uhlaender and Cesar Tovar, who split the position in 1969 (Tovar played all over the field). Green played his last major league game in 1968.

Looking at Green's Baseball Reference page, the guy who comes to mind as a comperable player is Denard Span. Not stars, but decent leadoff men who played good defense.

From the Handbook: Ballparks and Park Indices

First impressions are lasting impressions. Target Field has, at least superficially, the same dimensions as the late Metrodome, but it got a reputation in its debut season as a difficult home run park, and I'll wager it continues to be seen that way.

The numbers don't back that up. From the 2018 Bill James Handbook:

In 2017, the Twins and their opponents combined to hit 232 homers in Target Field, 198 when the Twins were on the road. BIS puts the park's home run index at 114, meaning homers were 14 percent higher there than in the "average" MLB yard. That's not the highest (Yankee Stadium's was 132, for one), but it's pretty steep.

The hitters' advantage is a muted a bit over a long time frame. In the three-year period 2015-17, Target Field's HR index is 106, a more reasonable figure -- but  still higher than that of, say, Houston's stadium (101), which is routinely referred to as a bandbox.

A night at Target Field

Oswaldo Arcia was charged with an
error in the fourth inning on a ball hit
by Kole Calhoun that resulted in a run
for the visiting Angels.

Here's one bright side to the Twins' low status: Good tickets can be had reasonably on the resale market.

My wife and I darted up to Target Field with lower-deck home plate box seats. We didn't make it through the entire 10-inning, four-and-a-half hour game; it may have been a Friday night, but there was a long drive home and things to do today too. So we missed Trevor Plouffe's game-tying double with two outs in the ninth -- and Jared Burton surrendering the winning run in the 10th.

A few observations, on and off the playing field:

* Danny Santana got the start at shortstop. In the second inning, with a man on first, Brennan Boesch hit a one-hopper just to Santana's right; he tried, a bit awkwardly I thought, to backhand the ball only to have it go off his glove. I marked it an error on my scorecard; the official scorer ruled it a hit.

Still, it was a play I expect a major league shortstop to make; indeed, it was a ball I expect a major league shortstop to turn into a double play. The failure to make that play resulted in a run.

That was the extent of Santana's defensive involvement for four innings. He had four routine plays in the fifth and sixth inning and cleaned them all up.

*Aaron Hicks had a pair of two-out RBI base hits -- left-handed, his weaker side. He's hitting over .200 now.

*Josmil Pinto had a pair of doubles and a walk and scored twice (on those Hicks hits). He also had a passed ball and saw a pair of Angels steal second, although I'm inclined to blame the pitchers more for those steals. Terry Ryan said when they recalled Pinto that his defense had improved; it's hard for me to see the difference.

* Oswaldo Arcia had an impressive home run in the second inning. And in the fourth inning he had an outfielding misadventure (see photo) that cost the Twins a run. Actually, he had another misplay of a ball off the wall in the first inning -- rule a triple rather than a double and error -- that led to yet another run. The slugger giveth and he taketh away, and on the whole in this game, he gaveth too much to the Angels.

* Ricky Nolasco wasn't particularly good, but as you've noticed already, his defense didn't help him much. He went five innings and allowed three runs, two earned; with spotless defense behind him, no runs score. He struck out five and only walked one.

That's the glass half full. On the other hand, he didn't have a one-two-three inning (the fourth would have been had Arcia corralled the Calhoun drive), and the Angels had the leadoff man on in four of the five innings, so he spent most of his time pitching out of the stretch. The misplays didn't put all those leadoff men on, they just moved them along the route home.

* Matt Shoemaker, who started for the Halos, has had a fine season (14-4, 3.14 coming into the game with 115 strikeouts in 117 innings), but he struggled to throw strikes in this one. He threw a lot of offspeed and breaking stuff and only got through four innings. I wasn't impressed, but he's obviously been better.

* This game marked my first encounter with the much-praised rib tips from the Butcher and the Boar stand (near Gate 34). They are not over-rated. Between that and my addiction to the Kramarczuk bratwurst, my carnivore cravings were more than satisfied.

Target Field, home runs and the Derby

The format may not matter
to Yoenis Cepedes. In Home Run
Derby, he's in it to win it.

My interest in the Home Run Derby is seldom very high, and once Brian Dozier and Justin Morneau were eliminated this year the "competition" became background noise while I worked on a Facebook photo album from our vacation/minor league trip.

Still, I picked up via Twitter a sense that the new, supposedly quicker, format for the Derby was unsatisfying. Part of the disgruntlement, I suspect, is that the biggest power stars in the competition, Joey Batista and Giancarlo Stanton, lost out in the semifinals. Part of it, I suspect, is that Target Field is not an easy home run touch, so we got some 1-0 scores in swingoffs and matchups. And part of it, to be sure, is that my Twitter feed is heavy on the kind of serious fans who are at their core a little embarrassed that they care about the spectacle that is the Derby.

Still, Yoenis Cepedes won for the second straight year, so I'm not inclined to think the format resulted in an undeserving champion. Cepedes, it appears, is a batting practice monster, and Home Run Derby is glorified batting practice.

I was intrigued earlier in the day by a SportsCenter segment on why Target Field is a difficult home run part. Their "Sports Science" report noted that the posted dimensions of the yard are actually a little shorter than the major league average, but the stadium has proven over its four-plus seasons of use to be one of the more difficult home run parks in the majors.

Their analysis focused on the wind. It concludes that the summer wind generally comes in from right field -- through the Twins Plaza opening into the stadium. The wind is funneled into the Plaza by the tall buildings surrounding the park, and turns into mini-cyclones when it clears the seating area and reaches the lower field. This helps knock fly balls to right down.

The vagaries of the wind is a more reasonable explanation for how the park plays than the settling concrete theory occasionally espoused on the FSN telecasts. It has been my observation over time that the flags above the left field seats and the flags in right field seldom are flying in the same direction, which I interpret as showing that the wind swirls inside the park. The wide gap in the plaza area is an easy point for the wind to enter and exit, but elsewhere there is concrete and stone in the way

Life in the Legends Club

There was plenty of leg room in much
of Target Field on Monday.

This is the fourth summer of Target Field and the third summer of a lousy home team. Monday's game was a rescheduled make-up game; it was hot and humid. The announced attendance was something over 21,000, and that probably overstates the number of fans on the premises.

I was amongst them, as was my wife. I had gone spelunking Monday morning in StubHub and found a pair of tickets in the Legends Club at a sharp discount, so we got to experience a new part of the ball park. (We'd seen the Legends Club during a tour, but seeing it empty and seeing it in action are two different things.)

I'll say this: If I had the time and money for season tickets,  that's the place. It was certainly nice to have the air-conditioned Carew room to retreat to periodically from the swelter.

It also does a nice job of extracting cash from the patrons.

One question that occurs to me at times looking in at high-rent district of a ball park is how much the people there know/care about the game itself. Bill Veeck wrote in his memoirs that in his experience the knowledge of the game increased the cheaper the tickets.

And indeed, the fellow in front of me asked me four questions over the course of the game:

"Is that real grass or fake grass?" (Real.)

"Did they trade Morneau?" (Yes, for the guy playing center field tonight.)

"But Mauer's still around, right?" (Yes, but he's on the DL with a concussion.)

"What happened to him, get drilled by a pitch?" (No, got drilled by a foul tip. Uh, you're not from around here, are you.)

---

The game itself was worthwhile. Josmil Pinto hit three doubles and drew a walk, and the most impressive ball he hit was probably the foul ball he banged off a window in the Twins office tower behind the foul pole. (Ron Gardenhire said after the game he can't remember anybody hitting one of those windows.) Kid's got his man strength.

He also gave a graphic demonstration of his rawness behind the plate, completely missing a Glen Perkins pitch that nailed home plate umpire Laz Diaz in the thigh in the ninth inning. That's no way for a catcher to win friends among the umps.

The Twins piece in the Baseball America that arrived in my mailbox Monday (bylined by Phil Miller of the Star Tribune, BA's regular Twins correspondent) drew a comparison between Pinto and Wilson Ramos, the catcher the Twins traded in midseason 2010 for Matt Capps. Pinto-Ramos is a comparison I've been thinking about a bit in recent days and expect to write about in some detail, but I'll just say here that I'm skeptical of the BA piece's implication that the Twins were willing to trade Ramos in part because they knew they had Pinto coming up. In 2010 Pinto, then 21, hit .225/.295/.378 in Beloit.

I like Pinto, and the Twins look like they have a good one there. They couldn't have known in 2010 that he'd turn into a masher.

On stadium finance

Target Field's financing mechanism
has been working well so far.

The Star Tribune today has a story on how quickly the public debt on Target Field is being paid off.

Hennepin County, the paper reports, has prepaid $31.3 million — which will ultimately reduce the county's interest payments by more than $53 million.

The original plan was for the county to finish paying off its $350 million in bonds in 2037, but the story says that could happen five to 10 years sooner. Which would take out the 0.15 percent county sales tax that much earlier.

Revenues from that sales tax have been a bit lower than projected (because of the recession), but the interest on the bonds has been lower still (also because of the recession).

The Target Field financing mechanism always seemed sound to me -- a low but broad sales tax in the state's biggest retail jurisdiction. In comparison, the public financing scheme for the Vikings stadium -- which is supposed to come up with more money than Target Field required -- strikes me as too flimsy to be called a plan. Electronic pull tabs? Really?

I believe this: If something is worth having government do, it's worth taxing openly and honestly to do it. If it's not worth taxing openly and honestly, it's not worth doing.

The value in public financing for sports facilities is debatable at best. This, however, is not: Target Field has a plain, broad-based tax behind it. The Vikings stadium has a gimmick.

Target Field through fresh eyes

The blogger and his mother in the
gold glove sculpture on Target Plaza.
Photo made by Bill Thoma.

A brother and sister-in-law who live in the San Francisco Bay area made their first trip to Target Field Thursday. So did my mother. I tagged along as the resident expert on the place.

Bill and Janet have adopted the A's as their team -- they had partial season tickets during the A's good years in the late '90s/early '00s -- and, of course, the Oakland stadium is currently regarded as a consensus bottom-of-the-heap ballpark. (Oakland and Tampa Bay, neck and neck for the worst; I've not been to either.)

So I was joking when I asked how Target Field compared to "Mount Davis" -- which is just a piece of the Oakland park, but a significant reason why it's so poorly regarded as a baseball playground. But Bill surprised me by saying he thought Target Field was superior to the Giants' stadium in San Francisco.

Janet on one advantage Target Field has on AT&T Park: They both have big gloves, but you can sit in this one.


As a proud Mankato provincial, I pointed out that the stone used in Target Field came from Mankato ("we have some really big holes in the ground") and guided Janet to Angie's Kettle Corn. Then she hunted down a second bag to take home. I also introduced Janet to Killebrew root beer and all three to the glories of Kramarczuk's sausages.
The Twins, of course, lost in disappointing fashion, and I could probably wring a post out of how they lost, but this was a day when the game was secondary to introducing my mom, my brother and his wife to a special place.

A windy night at Target Field

The view from our seats, much reduced.

My wife and I made what I expect will be our final pilgrimage of the season to Target Field for Tuesday night's game. Yes, the home team is going out with a whimper, and too much of the lineup these days is made up of players with little future in the majors, but ... it's baseball, and it's Target Field, and I can always find something to enjoy.

It sure didn't hurt that it was a competitive game.

Some observations:

*For this one I procured seats (through StubHub) in what the Twins call the "Pavilion", a four-row set of seats in right-center field. I'd noticed them on previous trips and made a mental note to try them at some point. For proximity's sake, and also to try something new, I skipped my customary Kramarczuk foray (those stands are behind home plate) and went to the "State Fair" booth a few feet away. We split a pork chop on a stick, the Michelbob's ribs and fries.

Michelbob's, if you don't know, is from Naples, Fla., and is apparently a favorite of spring training regulars. I was a little skeptical of the practicality of ribs as a ballpark food, but it worked; the five-rib rack separated easily with a plastic fork and fingers. And Linda was quite pleased with the tenderness of the pork chop. (We both preferred the Michelbob's sauce to the sauce that came with the chop.)

* I learned my lesson from last September and dressed a bit more warmly than my reading of the forecast dictated. Good idea.

* It was easily the windiest game I've attended there, with the players' uniforms flapping like flags around their legs and torsos. I remain baffled by Target Field's wind patterns. The flags above left field were pointed out; a TV shot during the game showed the big flags in right field pointed in; the wind was consistently coming into our faces from left field; and the uniforms and food wrappers on the field were going pretty much straight across left to right.

The point being: If you hear an announcer say something about the wind going in a particular direction there, don't believe it.

The wind had at least a mild impact on the game, with a Joe Benson infield popup falling uncaught; he was thrown out trying to take second on the play. I don't think it was a stupid play on his part; with two out and weak hitters coming up, he needed to be in scoring position.

* Liam Hendriks had a mixed bag start again. No walks and five strikeouts in 5.1 innings, good; ten hits, seven for extra bases, bad. I was, frankly, surprised the he got to start the sixth inning, since both Francisco Liriano and Brian Duensing were warming up in the fifth and Hendriks had been in trouble pretty much all game.

* I really thought, after the Twins had loaded the bases with nobody out in the bottom of the ninth, that they were going to win that game. But Michael Cuddyer, Chris Parmelee and Danny Valencia couldn't get the ball out of the infield.

Not to harsh too much on Cuddyer, who probably feels some pressure as the one established middle-of-the-order guy left in the lineup, but once he had two strikes I knew what the next pitch was going to be — slider, down and away. He probably knew too, and still couldn't lay off it.

*Ten losses in a row, and still just two wins in the month of September. It appears all but certain that the Twins will lose 100 games. Amazing.

On Target: What happened to the Twins at home?

Target Field has not seen as many
Twins victories this season.

This was supposed to have happened last year.

The Twins had a long history of a "Dome field advantage." The Metrodome was one of the few turf fields in the American League; it had a unique roof; it had a unique right field "wall" -- there was no place quite like it, and the Twins habitually won games there on weird plays. Billy Martin wanted to blow it up in the early '80s, Ozzie Guillen cursed about it in the late '00s, and the Twins collected their wins and smiled.

Now: Most teams do better at home than on the road. The home team has last at-bats, so an advantage is built into the rules. The Twins usually had a bigger home field edge than normal because their arena was so odd. The Dome warped the game, and the Twins were more accustomed to those warps and, at times, even constructed to take advantage of them.

So when they moved to Target Field, a lot of people, included the aforementioned Mr. Guillen, expected them to struggle. No more high-hopping grounders. Actual caroms off the right-field wall. Weather to contend with.

And the 2010 Twins merely led the American League in home wins (53, one more than the Yankees). They were a pedestrian 41-40 on the road.

This year: The Twins are last in home wins, with 30. They enter Friday's play 30-42 at home, 29-42 on the road -- as even as they can get. No advantage to being at home for this team.

They've been lousy at the plate both home and road, with essentially the same OPS: .663 home, .662 road. They have a bit more power on the road, slightly higher batting averages and on-base percentages at home -- yet they're scored 4.17 runs per game on the road, 3.51 at home, more than half a run difference.

Part of that is having nine innings at the plate every road game, while some home games only require eight. Let's put it this way: The Twins on the road have scored 0.1098 runs per plate appearance. At home, 0.0972. That's a difference of 0.0126. Is that significant? The Twins average 37 plate appearances a game this year, and if we multiply 0.0126 by 37 we get .4662 -- or a bit less than a half run a game.That's less than the .66 runs differential dividing the runs by games played, but still significant.

How about the other half of the equation, run prevention? The Twins have allowed 355 runs in 72 home games, 4.93 runs per game; 348 runs in 71 road games, or 4.90 runs per game. Much more even -- this despite faring far worse on the road in all three slash stats (batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage). But again, the Twins have pitched almost 50 more innings at home.

Back to the plate appearance metric. The Twins at home have allowed 0.1255 runs per PA; on the road, 0.1311 -- a difference of .0056, less than half the difference on offense.

OK. So what? The 2011 Twins have a lousy home record for the same reason they have a lousy road record: They haven't played well in any facet of the game.

But it appears that the sharp decline in their home record is to be blamed more on their lack of runs in Target Field than on the pitching and defense.

Target Field aesethics, year two

The "Twins Tower" to the right of the right field
video board is much more effective from a distance.

A couple of notes about the look of the second season of Target Field now that I've made two trips:

*My Opening Day seats were in the right field seats, and as you can see from the accompanying photo my wife took during the pre-game introductions, the new "Twins Tower" loses something up close. It's much better from a distance, as seen from the other photo, made Thursday from Section 319 when Rene Tosoni came to the plate for his first major-league at-bat.

*Remember the flap late last season when Target Center put up a large billboard for a Fargo-based health services company? And how FSN immediately changed its standard "look at the stadium" shot from the view of the Minneapolis skyline from behind home plate to the view from the outfield?

The Twins probably aren't any happier with the billboard, but they're no longer publicly whining about having their audience hijacked. FSN is showing its skyline shot again -- and, probably no coincidence, has a sponsor for in-game injury-health reports: The same Fargo-based health services company whose name and logo "graces" the Target Center billboard.

Money, as the song says, changes everything.

The opener, continued (much later)

The Twi-Fi kicked out on me as the stadium filled, and I never got it back. Quit trying after a while. I don't know if it was overwhelmed, but it sure doesn't encourage me to bring the iPad again.

Then ... well, not to get too detailed, but my wife and I stayed overnight at a suburban hotel (wedding to attend Saturday morning), and the hotel was not iPad friendly. I wound up declaring a cyberholiday for myself. That is probably healthy in some ways, but it's horrible for a blogger's devoted audience.

Anyway, belated thoughts on the opener:

* We had a pregame that included a lengthy welcoming ovation for Tsuyoshi Nishioka, followed by a flag-raising by a survivor of the Bataan Death March (complete with a explanation of what that means),followed by a moment of silence for the victims of the Japanese earthquake/tsunami. Emotional whiplash: We like the Japanese, we hate the Japanese, we like the Japanese.

* Carl Pavano had a butt-ugly first-inning and even after two innings had barely thrown more strikes than balls. But he found his groove. Helped that he was facing Oakland -- that's not a strong lineup -- but he got the batters he faced out.

*Didn't understand what Oakland manager Bob Geren was doing in the bottom of the eighth. Yes, Brett Anderson had been brilliant for seven innings. Geren had Brian Fuentes warming up, and if Geren was going to let Anderson face Jason Kubel-Denard Span-Joe Mauer-Justin Morneau with the game on the line, why was he warming Fuentes?

* I thought a lot about the Cuddyer Principle while watching Luke Hughes play second base. He made the routine plays, which is the minimum requirement. No double plays to turn. Couldn't quite make the play on a ball hit up the middle in the ninth off Joe Nathan, and was it a play that could/should have been made? I don't know.

At the opener

I am, about 90 minutes before first pitch, seated in the right field seats at Target Field, a brat in the belly, watching Oakland take BP. The new "twi-fi" seems pretty solid. I'll add as the spirit moves me.

Life is good.

---

They're showing the Oliva statue dedication on the big board, and Tony-O says tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the day he left Cuba. Wow.

Twi-fi seems a lot slower now. Not sure how much more blogging I'll try to do.

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The year of Target Field

Most of my wife's relatives live in a fairly tight radius in Minnesota-Wisconsin north of the metro area, and my typical route when going to and from there has been to get on I-35 early and ride that freeway through Minneapolis.

Target Field, Opening Day;
It can take your breath away

I changed the route north on Christmas Eve just to get another glimpse of Target Field — 169 to 394 to 94 to 35W — and for a few moments, before the turn to the right and the plunge into the Lowry Hill Tunnel, we were headed straight for that Twins logo towering above the video board.

A good moment on that snow-ridden day. Spring will come, and baseball will return.

And I will be headed again straight for that Twins logo.

The Star Tribune's annual "Sportsperson of the Year" for 2010 was Earl Santee, the architect of Target Field, and certainly his attention to detail on that ballyard will reverberate with Minnesotans for decades to come. (The visibility of that logo to people coming into Minneapolis on that freeway is no coincidence;  it was planned.)

Conventional wisdom holds that a new ballpark attracts fans on its own for a couple of years, then the novelty aspect wears off and the locale becomes an attendance/marketing nonfactor. To which I have two words: Wrigley Field.

The Cubs sold "beautiful Wrigley Field" to their audience for generations, and they have drawn no matter how crummy the team on that ivy-covered burial ground (Steve Goodman's song lyrics). Indeed, there is a line of thought that holds that the financial disconnect between winning and ticket sales has subtly encouraged mediocrity.

I don't know that I buy that argument. I do suspect that the Twins view the way the Cubs have long promoted Wrigley Field as a model for their own marketing efforts. It will be interesting to see if their 2011 TV ads are as focused on selling Target Field as their ads of the past couple of years were.

A case of slugger entitlement

Justin Morneau thinks it's too difficult to hit home runs in Target Field.

Not, you realize, because it hurts his individual stats. No, he says, he's thinking about the good of the team:

It affects the hitters a lot, and you start to develop bad habits as a hitter when you feel like you can only pull the ball to hit it over the fence. You take those habits on the road. ... I think we had a team built around power and offense and were not able to take full advantage of it.

It's probably unfair and flip for me to connect Morneau's logic with his concussion, but a fuzzy head might have something to do with it.

Justin Morneau and his teammates (and league rivals)
found home runs harder to come by in Target Field.
Despite what Morneau says, that's not a bad thing.

One: Reworking your park every year to fit your roster is a fool's game. Even if you know that you have a hitter's park (or a pitcher's park) -- and one year's results, while indicative, is hardly conclusive -- the structure remains while the roster changes. By the end of the 2010 season, players were talking about the ball jumping more than it had earlier. I doubt that we truly have a handle on how Target Field plays. 


Two: Morneau hit .375/.448/.757 on the road last season. Yep, Target Field really wrecked his swing for those games.


Three: What's good for Morneau's home run totals is bad for Scott Baker's ERA. A park that gives pitchers something isn't a terrible thing.


Four: There wasn't that much difference in offense -- runs scored -- in the Twins' home and road games. There were 712 runs scored in Target Field in 2010, 740 elsewhere. The Bill James Handbook puts the one-season park factor at 96, meaning that runs were about four percent below average in Target Field. This is hardly the Astrodome. (The difference could easily be random.)


The park last year depressed home runs, not offense. Doubles were 12 percent above average in Target Field, triples 20 percent. 


The big guy believes that when he hits a big fly, he's entitled to jog around the bases. I'd rather see players running. Doubles and triples are fine by me.


Five: The baseball I grew up with didn't feature opposite-field home runs. That's a phenomenon that arose with the steroid era. Changes in hitting techniques probably had more to do with it than chemicals, but the fact remains that such hitters as Harmon Killebrew, Reggie Jackson and George Brett pulled their home runs. Hitting prowess doesn't rely on opposite field taters.


It ain't broke. Don't fix it.

On Target: Home/road splits, take four

Target Field in twilight

There was a distinct taste of autumn in the air Tuesday night at Target Field. With the heat of summer probably largely behind us, it's time to update the running project of measuring the effect of the new park on the games.

Hitters, home: 71 games played, 361 runs scored (5.08 per game); 42 home runs (.59 per game). Slash stats: .280/.360/.426

Hitters, road: 69 games played, 324 runs (4.70); 80 HRs (1.16 per game). Slash stats: .269/.332/.432

Pitchers, home: 71 games, 269 runs allowed (3.90 per game); 51 HR (.71 per game). Slash stats: .265/.311/.394

Pitchers, road: 69 games, 295 runs allowed (4.27); 72 HR (1.04 per game). Slash stats: .267/.318/.428

The consensus is that the new park depresses home runs (unless you're Jim Thome), and certainly the numbers so far support that. The Twins hitters are going long about twice as often on the road as at home.

But it's not really having any effect on runs scored. There are 8.98 runs scored per game at Target Field, and 8.97 runs scored per game in the Twins road games.

One season by itself doesn't necessarily provide an accurate depiction of how a park plays, and the 2010 season isn't complete anyway. But so far, Target Field appears favor batting average more than power.

My continuing exploration of Target Field

Last night was my fourth game at Target Field, but the first truly night game. (One was a 6 p.m. start, but Kevin Slowey and Felix Hernandez conspired to end it in about 2 hours 5 minutes, and we didn't even need the headlights when leaving the parking ramp.)

Minnie and Paul celebrated
Tuesday's victory.

It was also my first game above the first level of seats, and my first trip on light rail to Target Field.

A few notes:

• I am a big fan of the light rail and used it for almost every Metrodome trip I made the past three years or so. But now that the Twins play on the west side of downtown Minneapolis, it's just not as practical for those of us coming from the southwest. It's still cheaper (and more environmentally sound) than driving and parking, but it's also a whole lot slower.

When they get the proposed Eden Prairie-Target Field line running —that'll be right in my nitro zone.

• I ordered my ticket during the weekend and got a "wheelchair" row seat in section 219, essentially behind home plate but slightly toward third base. I don't know when they open those seats to the able-bodied. Very good seats. In the long ago and far away, when the Free Press was an afternoon paper and I had evenings free, I had partial season tickets at much the same angle and level. This seat was better.

The upper concourse runs under the top deck and behind the 2-level sections. (Top deck is 3-level). I didn't attempt to explore all the amenities, but it has many of the specialty food concessions (including Kramarczuk's — yay!), a bar, and an apparel store. The latter came in handy; I quickly determined that I needed another layer, as the wind had not subsided as forecast earlier.

• I enjoyed watching the daylight fade in downtown and the skyscrapers light up. And the Minnie and Paul sign works a lot better with the black backdrop.

On Target: Home-road splits, individuals

This month's check on on Target Field is playing is a bit different. Rather than big-picture team stats home and away, I'm going to look at seven of the most frequent Twins hitters and how they're faring. I'll use OPS and home runs, and add comments as I deem appropriate. (The Twins have played 50 games at home, 52 on the road). Sample size is, of course, inadequate to make any final judgments.

Michael Cuddyer

Home: OPS .830, HR 5. Road: OPS .753, HR 5

Comments: He's been the most publicly unhappy with the hitting background at Target Field — particularly about the trees — but he's hitting better at Target Field, both for average and for extra bases.

Orlando Hudson

Home: .822, 2. Road: .670, 2

Huge difference there. He hasn't done much of anything at bat on the road.

Jason Kubel

Home: .788, 6. Road: .745, 6

Pretty even.

Joe Mauer

Home: .793, 0. Road: .882, 6

His on-base percentage is slightly higher at home, but the power is much higher on the road.

Justin Morneau

Home: .914, 4. Road: 1.205, 14

His slugging percentage on the road is .757. Wow.

Delmon Young

Home: .882, 4. Road: .943, 10

On-base percentage is almost identical home and away. The difference is completely in power, and particularly in homers (no triples anywhere, and one more double at home than on the road).

Sun, wind and roof

It's unlikely that Dick Bremer reads this blog, but on the off chance that he does, a challenge:

Explain why it is more aesthetically pleasing to see an outfielder lose a fly ball in the sun — or misjudge it because of erratic wind gusts, as happened Wednesday afternoon to Detroit's Brennan Boesch — than to lose it in the Metrodome roof.

As a practical matter, it's the same result. Boesch's bobble resulted in a pair of unearned runs in a game the Twins won by one.

There is no environment that doesn't affect the game. None. Indoors, outdoors, turf, grass, whatever — baseball is a subtle game, with fractions of inches making huge differences. The challenges confronting outfielders in Target Field are different from the ones confronting them in the Metrodome, and the gusty winds of Wednesday may have been worse for them than the dingy canvas of the Dome.

Later in the game, FSN showed a youngster in the stands, which (again) started Bremer off on the tragedy of generations denied the opportunity to see the Twins play home games outdoors. This continued whining about the Metrodome is a tired act. It's history. It's past. Let it go.

Right on Target

Eddie like. Eddie like a lot.

Monday's trip to Target Field was the first of what I hope will be many. It will need to be to get a grip on the whole place.

See, I have this problem — even in a new park, with all the bells and whistles to experience, I focus on the game.

Had Monday's home opener — the first official game — been a dull, one-sided affair, maybe I'd have done more wandering about. Maybe I'd have sought out more of the food options, tested more of the viewing angles. (Colleague Brian Ojanpa, who unlike me was on the clock, took care of that for you anyway.)

As it was, I stuck pretty close to my seat in the right field corner, close to what the designers obviously intend to be the primary entrance/exit — Gate 34, the Puckett gate. (The gates are not in numeric order — they bear the names of players with retired numbers. The Puckett and Carew gates —34 and 29 — are in the right field corner; the Hrbek gate (14) is behind home plate; the Oliva gate (6) is in the left field corner; and the Killebrew gate (3) is in center field.)

I hit a Halsey's Sausage Haus for a supper-time snack. No brats there (really?); I got a Polish for my wife and an Italian for myself. I don't remember ever seeing either at the Dome. We were both pleased withe the result. (The service was another matter. The register in the line I got in froze up; I eventually switched to another line. I lost a long inning in the process, and when I left with the food the register still wasn't functioning.)

The field itself played as a pitchers' park Monday; as I wrote in the print column, it's far too soon to know if that's the truth or an illusion. We felt the wind in our faces in the right-field corner, but the flags in left field were clearly blowing in and the flags in right hung limp. Certainly there were balls struck that I thought had a chance to go out that didn't.

Building a ball park

Twin Cities Business's story on the construction of Target Field details why it was "the most difficult urban ballpark site" in the long sports arena experience of the architecture firm.

A few nuggets:

• The park sits on 8.5 acres of land — but seen from overhead, it mushrooms to 10.5 acres, because it is literally suspended over railroad tracks and a freeway.
  
• The structure was built from the inside out, because the cranes couldn't go outside.
  
• Work had to be halted when Burlington Northern's freight trains went past — seven to 14 times a day.
  

It's a neat read.