He shouldn't have printed that

It's generally amusing, and seldom informative, to see what pearls of "wisdom" the metro papers' sports gossip columnists, Sid Hartman and Charley Walters, come up with to fill their allotted space.

Here's a Walters marvel I encountered Sunday (under the heading "Don't Print That") while reading the Pioneer Press during breakfast in a Wisconsin hotel:

Maybe the Twins could include shortstop J.J. Hardy in a deal for Kansas City Royals starter Zack Greinke.

Yeah, and maybe the Kansas City front office is brain dead.

As I noted here last week, if the Royals move Greinke, it  won't be for established major leaguers. Hardy might be eligible for free agency before Greinke is. 

If Walters (or his editors) had a sense of reality, they would have done with that sentence what the header advised.

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Poll stuff: We had 55 votes on the Twins double-play combo.

Thirty-four respondents (61 percent) think the Twins will have Hardy and Tsuyoshi Nishioka in their middle infield this coming season; 18 (32 percent) think it will be Alexi Casilla and Nishioka; one thinks it will be Hardy and Casilla; two think it will be an unnamed combo; and nobody was cynical enough to pick the "Punto will be involved" option.

New poll up.