Billboard spat isn't about aesthetics

The 2,800 square foot billboard is
intended to dominate the view down
the right field line from Target Field.

So ,,, the folks who run the Minnesota Twins are peeved with their counterparts a few hundred feet away, because the folks who run the Minnesota Timberwolves are erecting a giant billboard on Target Center overlooking the public space between the basketball arena and the baseball park.

Twins president Dave St. Peter calls it an "ambush" and implies that the sign will detract from the fan experience on the plaza.

What really irritates St. Peter (and, I assume, the Pohlad brothers by extension) is this: The Twins have built a sizable audience, both at the stadium and watching on television — an audience that dwarfs that of the Timberwolves. It is their belief, even if they refrain from saying so explicitly, that if anybody is going to profit from putting the name of a sponsor in front of that audience, it is them.

The Twins certainly do profit thusly. The Twins see no detraction from the fan experience from the giant beer company logo looming over the left field corner, or from the giant triangular billboard atop the seats in right-center, or the ads displayed on the scoreboard or on the outfield fences.

Is the Wolves' move classy? No. But the Twins are in no moral position to complain that the Target Center billboard will uglify the view from the stadium when they're doing the same thing. If the Twins ran a pristine, ad-free venue, I'd be more sympathetic to their complaint. That was never going to happen.

Meanwhile, I took a bit of amusement Friday evening watching the pains Fox Sports North took to avoid showing the view from the ballpark to the plaza lest they expose the still-under-construction sign to the audience.

The sudden rise of Jose Bautista

Jose Bautista had to spin out of
the way of a Jose Mijares pitch
in the ninth inning Thursday.
Bautista homered later in the at-bat.

Jose Bautista hit his 53rd and 54th home runs of the season Thursday night.

There is little in his history to foreshadow this. He will turn 30 in a couple of weeks, and entering the season had 59 career homers in 1,753 at-bats, or about one dinger every 30 times up. This season, it's almost one homer every 10 times up.

He was regarded in his minor league days as a decent power prospect, but nothing like this. In a weird 2004 season, he pinballed through baseball's dreg organizations — Pittsburgh to Baltimore to Tampa Bay to the Mets to Kansas City and back to Pittsburgh — in a complex series of transactions rooted in the Rule 5 draft. Everybody had a shot at him, and ultimately nobody thought he was worth the roster space.

When he finally stuck in the majors, it was as a multi-position quasi-platoon player.  He was considered too flawed (specifically being strike-out prone) to play every day.

Until now.

Bautista's explanation for his emergence: a technical change in his swing late last season, when he bopped 10 homers in September. Another factor may be that Toronto manager Cito Gaston stopped shuffling him in and out of the lineup and, to a lesser degree, from position to position.

Yet another factor: Improved plate discipline. Entering this season,  it took him more than nine plate appearances to draw a walk; this year, less than seven.

Yeah, I know. I haven't raised the steroid specter. I won't. Baseball history is filled with fluke seasons and sudden emergences; I need more reason to accuse somebody of unethical practice than a better-than-expected season.

I doubt Bautista's a good bet to replicate his magic 2010 season next year. But I tip my Twins cap to him for what he's accomplished. There has to be room in the game for the unexpected and the inexplicable.

And now, a bit of good news

About the only positive development for the Twins during the just-completed 1-5 road swing: Justin Morneau has had enough good days of late that he may take part in the full workout today.

Justin Morneau's 18 home runs still
rank fourth on the club.

Ron Gardenhire hastened to tamp down questions about whether the slugger might be on the roster for the first round of the playoffs. As I wrote here after the previous news on Morneau — in which Gardy implied that Morneau was out for the postseason — it's difficult to imagine the Twins stuffing him back into the lineup for the postseason after almost three months away from facing major league pitching.

This has been a long enough recovery period that the Twins (and Morneau) might be wisest to let him have the winter also. CC Sabathia was known to use Morneau for target practice in his Cleveland days; even if Morneau switches to the big helmet — and I rather hope he does — having a Sabathia heater skip off his noggin is never a good idea, and would figure to be particularly bad at this juncture.

So my take on this development: Good news for 2011; irrelevant for the 2010 postseason.

Keeping some perspective

The Twins haven't won since their Hangover Special — 0-5  on their current road trip. Five games of lousy  starting pitching, anemic offense and sloppy defense.

Nick Blackburn has allowed as many
hits this season as Cliff Lee —but in
about 50 fewer innings.

It's not good, and it's not that important.

History, even recent history, is replete with examples of teams staggering to the finish line of the regular season and still winning the World Series. The Twins in 1987 didn't win a regular season game after clinching the division title; they won the World Series. They finished the 1991 regular season by getting swept at home by playoff opponent Toronto; they turned around to beat the Blue Jays in the ALCS and went to take the Series.

More recently, St. Louis almost played its way out of the 2006 postseason with a dismal September — and wound up winning it all.

To the extent that the pitching has been poor because the rotation has been scrambled to get it into ideal alignment for October, that's something the Twins will live with. To the extent that the lineup is skipping beats because regulars and quasi-regulars such as Joe Mauer, Jim Thome, .J.J. Hardy, Orlando Hudson and  Denard Span are resting aching joints and muscles, that's acceptable also.

I am concerned about Nick Blackburn. He is the weakest link in the playoff rotation, he has a tendency to go from hot steak to cold streak, and he got hammered on Tuesday. That said, he still, on paper, is a better matchup to the Yankees for a start in New York than either Scott Baker or Kevin Slowey.

Good team, bad attendance

The Tampa Bay Rays are a good baseball team, perhaps the best team in all of the sport. They went to the World Series two years ago, so it's not a complete surprise that they're good this year.

Baltimore's Koji Uehara
pitched Monday before
a Tampa Bay audience
of empty seats.

So there they were Monday — narrowly ahead of the defending World Series champs for the divisional lead, one win away from clinching a playoff berth — and their announced attendance for a home game with Baltimore was a lowly 12,000 plus. There may not have been 10,000 paying customers in the joint.

They aren't the worst-drawing team in the league — there are five AL teams (Cleveland, Oakland, Kansas City, Toronto and Baltimore) doing worse at the gate. Still, for a quality team to draw as poorly as the Rays  is a problem.

Tropicana Field is not among the 19 stadiums in which I've seen a game. All I know of it is what I see on TV and what I read. There is a general consensus that, as a baseball venue, it's worse than the Metrodome; in my experience, that's pretty bad. An unappealing facility in an unappealing, not-easily accessed location is a handicap.

I spent a lot of money over the Metrodome years to watch the Twins play there, because I am a Twins fan and that's where they played. I wouldn't — and never did — write that anybody else had to make that same choice. It is no coincidence that the Twins attendance shot through the roof this year with Target Field. The Metrodome handicapped the team as a draw. But when the team was really good, the handicap was brushed aside. People packed the place.

That isn't the case in the Tampa-St. Petersburg area. Whether that's because there is no sense of fan connection to the relatively new Rays, because the economy is so sour there, because the facility really is that much worse than the Metrodome, because the franchise doesn't market the team as well — any or all of those things may be real factors.

It will be interesting to see how well, or poorly, the Rays draw during the playoffs.

Catching up on the past week

So many things I didn't get around to commenting on, for medical and other reasons:

The George Steinbrenner plaque
dwarfs all others in Yankee Stadium's
famed Monument Park.

* The bigger-than-life George Steinbrenner plaque unveiled last week at Yankee Stadium is a fitting memorial to him. How else to mark a life of mindless excess and ego? Let no one imagine that he had any sense of humility, or that anybody close to him has good judgment.

* Speaking of the Yankees: I was really hoping, as I watched the game Sunday night, that the Red Sox would win and raise at least the specter of a New York collapse. Alas, Mariano Rivera's blown save was matched by Jonathan Papelbon, and the Yankees clinched at least a tie for the wild card.

But the big takeaway from it for me: When Ryan Kalish and Bill Hall can each steal second and third off the Rivera-Posada battery, the rest of the playoff field should take notice. And duplicate. (Assuming that they can get anybody on base against Rivera.)

* Josh Hamilton didn't celebrate with his teammates when the Rangers clinched their division title. Good move, given his notorious problems with addiction.

* Of more recent vintage: Check out the size of the Rangers' new TV deal.

*Aroldis Chapman, the Cuban defector now pitching for the Reds, hit 105 mph on a stadium radar gun. Wow. We don't know what Bob Feller or Walter Johnson would have hit on a modern gun, but it's difficult to imagine throwing at greater velocity.

Unless you buy into the legend of Steve Dalkowski. Which I do.

Playing with match-ups

Francisco Liriano has allowed
0.3 home runs per nine innings

As I've alluded to a couple of times, I've been fighting a virus of late. The Monday print column — on how this year's projected Twins playoff rotation matches up better with the Yankees (and Rays) than previous versions — was cobbled together in pieces over a three-day span, Thursday-Saturday, as I had the energy to focus.

There's always a risk in that — the risk that events between the writing and the publication will make the writer appear at least a bit foolish.

So naturally, the Twins' big three of Francisco Liriano, Carl Pavano and Brian Duensing, pitching Friday-Sunday, combined for three poor statistical starts:

• Liriano allowed a home run and more fly balls than grounders; he got just nine outs.
• Pavano surrendered three longballs (and seven runs on 11 hits) in four innings.
• Duensing walked four men and allowed two homers, five runs.

Does this undermine my thesis? Not really.

• Liriano's outing I discount because of his illness. 
• Pavano's I discount because his start was pushed back eight days to set up the playoff rotation. 
• Duensing's line would look markedly better if Danny Valencia — who had an atrocious series defensively in Detroit — had made a clean play on a likely double-play grounder; he got an out, so there was no error, but the extra out set up the first, three-run, homer off Duensing.

All three figure to get another start in the regular season; this might be particularly important for getting Pavano back into his regular routine. Certainly all three need to pitch more effectively once the calendar page is turned.