* The Twins signed former shortstop Jason Bartlett to a minor league contract and suggested he would have the opportunity to reclaim the shortstop position he vacated when traded after the 2007 season.
Really? Bartlett? Seriously? I don't buy it.
General manager Terry Ryan said Monday that incumbent shortstop Pedro Florimon is not a lock to keep the job. And he shouldn't be; Florimon fielded well, but he didn't hit. The Twins should be open to alternatives.
Bartlett isn't a realistic one. He's 34; he hasn't played since May of 2012, when the Padres cut him loose; his numbers were in decline before the knee injury he blames for his release; the Twins haven't even bothered to scout his workouts.
The Twins aren't risking anything on this minor league deal. I don't think there's any gain in it either.
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| The Atlanta Braves plan to desert Turner Field after just 20 years in the former Olympic Stadium. |
This is odd on a number of levels. Turner Field is just 17 years old, for one thing; for another, the Braves are bucking the overall movement of teams closer to the city center. A piece of civic infrastructure that cost hundreds of millions to construct is now to be discarded as if it were a fast-food outlet.
I've never been to Atlanta, so my knowledge of Turner Field (and its predecessor, the cookie-cutter Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium) is second hand. Turner, of course, was originally the Olympic Stadium for the 1996 games, designed to be retrofitted for baseball. I assume that it is miles ahead of the old concrete doughnut as a place to watch baseball but a step or two short of the likes of the baseball cathedrals in Pittsburgh, San Francisco and (yes) Minneapolis.
But this isn't about aesthetics. It's about a complex and unsavory melange of greed, demographics (racial and socioeconomic), dysfunctional urban planning, absentee ownership, corporate miscues and, worthy of additional emphasis, greed.
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