Notes, quotes and comment

I skipped the Twins Caravan visit to Mankato Tuesday evening. Usually I have an excuse -- I work most evenings -- but this year I was off, and I still didn't go. I've seen enough of them to last a good long while.

So I missed Terry Ryan, who came down here to talk about the need for immediate improvement. I'm sure he didn't notice my absence.

The Free Press skipped the caravan visit entirely -- Tuesday is a heavy high school sports night -- but Rhett Bollinger of MLB.com was there and filed this report.

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And often is heard a discouraging word department: Johan Santana has been ruled out of the winter league playoffs with "discomfort" in the front of his left shoulder. It gets increasingly difficult to imagine him ever returning to a major league mound.

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Here's something to make me suspect that MLB is serious about cutting the time of games; They intend to enforce the time gap between innings, which typically last longer than the rules allow.

This will disrupt TV producers more than the players. Which is fine by me. Baseball's attitude on TV should be: You're broadcasting the game, not controlling it. (Another one I'd like to see: If TV wants to show some between-innings thing, such as singing "God Bless America," fine -- but they don't get extra time to air their ads too.)

So pitchers have to be done with warm ups 30 seconds prior to the inning starts? What do we do for those last 30 seconds?
— David Price (@DAVIDprice14) January 21, 2015

Don't take Price's complaint seriously, He is one of the slowest working pitchers in baseball. What's he going to do with those final 30 seconds? The same thing he does before every pitch. Nothing.

The Twins Caravan comes to town

Ron Gardenhire and Brian Dozier sign autographs
Monday evening at the Kato Ballroom. (Photo by John Cross)

Despite the cold snap, winter's time IS passing. One of the signs is that the Twins Caravan has begun -- two weeks of team representatives wandering Minnesota and neighboring states drumming up interest in the summer game (and exposing young players, many of them from milder climes, to the frozen North). This activity is capped off by Twins Fest, and then comes the migration to Fort Myers and spring training, now officially less than a month away.

Day One of the Caravan ended in Mankato. As usual, I was trapped in the office and couldn't go; Jim Rueda, the Free Press sports editor, handled the coverage.

The Caravan is rooted, of course, in promoting ticket sales and interest in the team. I would think that's a bit tougher this winter than it has been in a while. After almost a decade as the top team in the AL Central, the Twins have lost 195 games the past two seasons, and expecting a rapid turnaround seems unrealistic.

So the organization is trying to peddle hope while avoiding promises it can't keep.

Twins Caravan connections

The 2011 Twins Caravan made its annual Mankato stop last night. One of my co-workers made a sarcastic comment on the drawing power of the contingent -- Tony Oliva, Glen Perkins, Trevor Plouffe and Ben Revere -- that I thought underestimated Tony-O's appeal.

But then, I'm a boomer, and my colleague is a few years younger. Oliva's last at-bat came the year I graduated high school, by which time he was a shell of what he had been; there's a couple generations of Twins fans with hazy memories, at best, of him as a player.

Glen Perkins makes
friends and fans at the Kato.

Certainly Minnesota youngsters swinging wiffle ball bats in their backyards on summer days aren't pretending they're Tony Oliva. Nor are they pretending -- yet -- to be Ben Revere.

The current players at the Kato Ballroom stop are all first-round draft picks. All had some time in the majors last season. None of them is certain to be on the Opening Day roster, and only Perkins figures to be a realistic candidate (barring injuries) this spring.

There's generally a "name" involved in each leg. Sometimes, as with Oliva or Jack Morris, it's a blast from the past; sometimes it's a current player -- Joe Mauer did a one-day, three-stop leg earlier in the week; Danny Valencia's got two shifts scheduled this winter; Denard Span, Matt Capps, Ron Gardenhire all either have or are scheduled to go out. But a lot of the load, yes, is carried by the prospects, the young, the unestablished.

And there are positives in that. The hundreds of Twins fans who saw Revere on Thursday are more likely now to feel a connection to him when he secures a roster spot. For his part, Revere, who grew up in Kentucky, has now seen a bit more of Minnesota. (And probably more snow than he's seen before too.)