Matters of high finance

Fred and Jeff Wilson's offer: Invest in our team and shut up.

It's been known for quite a while that the Wilpon family, the owners of the new York Mets had "invested" with Bernie Madoff, once a highly regarded figure on Wall Street and now an imprisoned con man. The Wilpons had withdrawn the money long ago.

Now they are about to be hit with a "clawback" suit from the special trustee, whose job it is to recover whatever funds can be salvaged from the mess and distribute it proportionally among Madoff's victims. How much money is involved is unclear, but it could be as much as $1 billion. It's substantial enough that the Wilpons are offering 25 percent of the team for sale.

Selling a minority interest is likely to prove difficult. There have been expressions of interest, but they pretty much all want control of the operation. Which figures; it's difficult to imagine that somebody with a spare $125 million or so to put into a baseball team would be inclined to let folks with the track record of the Wilpons bumble around with their capital.

Some of those expressing interest are known to have serious money. One, for example, is the founder of Vitaminwater, who sold that company to Coca-Cola for $4.1 billion. Others ... well, one group is headed by Martin Luther King III and includes Ed Kranepool, a Mets first baseman in the 1960s, and Donn Clendenon Jr., the son the the man who platooned with Kranepool on the 1969 Mets. I'm sure these guys have more cash than I do, but is being the son of a civil rights icon really so lucrative? I'll believe it when I see it.

So it's interesting times indeed; baseball is flush with cash, and it appears that two of its most high-profile franchises, the Mets and the Dodgers are approaching forced-sale status through the sloppiness of their ownerships.

Poll stuff

There were some glitches this past week with the Blogger polls. About half the votes from the three polls disappeared at one point; they apparently returned within a day on the Nick Punto question, but not to the two questions related to my Strat-O-Matic league.

So the results are even more meaningless than usual for a poll of limited, self-selecting respondents.

The Punto results, assuming that the final results shown accurately reflect the voting: Forty-nine people responded to the question, Are you happy or sad that Nick Punto is no longer a Twin? Eighteen (37 percent) said happy; 16 (32 percent) sad; 15 (30 percent) indifferent.

At the peak of the results, the Strat questions each had about a dozen responses with no clear consensus on the MVP or Best Pitcher. I don't regard the final numbers as worthy of recording.

New poll up.

They said, I say

Twins nuggets in the news and my reaction:

* Joe Nathan, preparing to test his reconstructed pitching elbow in spring training, invites manager Ron Gardenhire to step into the batter's box during a throwing session and says: "I wasn't afraid to come inside and brush him back a couple times."

Autograph time at Twins fest for Ron Gardenhire and
Joe Nathan, presumably after Nathan's throwing session.

I say: Pitchers coming back from ligament replacement surgery frequently find that command is an issue. This story implies that Nathan is comfortable enough with his command — the ability to locate the pitch where he wants it — to buzz his fastball off the plate inside on his manager. (It also implies that it matters to Nathan that he not hit his manager; I suspect there are pitchers who would privately love to bury a fastball in their boss' ribcage.)

* LaVelle Neal's blog has commentary on new lefty reliever Dusty Hughes from anonymous team officials:

... they really think Hughes can help. Hughes throws four pitchers — fastball, curve, slider and change — and they think he can be more than a specialty lefty.

``He's Craig Breslow, with crisper stuff,'' one said of Hughes.

I say: I'd be more impressed with this if the Twins had attached any real value to Breslow when they had him. Perhaps it was just Gardy who didn't think much of Breslow, but Breslow was seldom used in game situations and jettisoned rapidly when he hit a rough patch; since the Twins waived him, Breslow has pitched 130 innings with a 2.84 ERA and 115 strikeouts.

The four pitches thing is intriguing, though. It implies that Hughes has a starter's repertoire. That sounds better than it is for a reliever; a starter with four average major league pitches can work with that, but a reliever is better off with one or two quality offerings. Still, it worked for Matt Guerrier.

The trees behind the wall?
Going, gong ...

* The Twins will retire Bert Blyleven's Number 28 this summer, about a week before he is inducted into the Hall of Fame.

I say: No surprise there. I've figured for years that he needed to get into the Hall for his number to be retired. Unlike non-Cooperstown honorees Kent Hrbek and Tony Oliva, Blyleven spent a good portion of his career with other teams.

* The spruce trees behind Target Field's center field fence are to be removed because hitters found the movement of branches in the breeze and the shadows distracting.

I say: As a fan, I liked the trees, but if there were legitimate concerns about visibility, they had to go.

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.)

Another bullpen candidate added

Just when we figured the Twins had finished tinkering with their 40-man roster this winter ... they add Dusty Hughes, a LOOGY candidate with experience.

The initial reaction to the news is: If the Kansas City Royals waived him, what's the point in claiming him?

And that may be the final reaction as well. But it's not that difficult to see the appeal here. The Twins had three left-handed bullpen candidates on their 40-man roster -- Jose Mijares, who has repeatedly reported to camp out of shape; Glen Perkins, who does not have a track record of getting left-handers out; and Scott Diamond, a Rule 5 draftee.

The Twins waived Rob Delaney to make room on their 40 for Hughes, and it's a lot easier to imagine a scenario in which Hughes makes the 25-man roster than one in which Delaney makes it.

I don't know if Hughes has options left, and I certainly don't know why the Royals picked him to dump to open a roster spot for Jeff Francis. They would seem to have bigger bullpen problems than him. Which isn't to say he's a good pickup. His stats suggest his control isn't up to Twins standards, and he wasn't all that effective against left-handers last year (.261 batting average allowed).

He's left-handed and breathing. He adds to the Twins' options in their bullpen reconstruction project. If the Twins saw something there they can use more effectively than the Royals did, great; if he bombs, they invested little in acquiring him.

An unlikely Punto lament

Aaron Gleeman's take on the departure of Nick Punto surprised me today, because Gleeman has regularly criticized the organization for relying on Punto to fill infield gaps.

Nick Punto's 288 plate appearances last season were his
fewest since 2004.

In the past, Gleeman has described Punto's defense as overrated; today's post calls Punto a truly elite gloveman.

The difference, I think, is that this past season Punto really shined in the defensive metrics. I wrote about it in November, that Baseball Info Systems left him off their leaderboards because they simply didn't trust what the numbers were telling them about his defense.

Gleeman takes UZR -- Ultimate Zone Rating -- more seriously than I do. Because of that, he now takes Punto's defensive abilities more seriously than he used to.

Which, now that Punto is 33, is probably an error. My notion is that UZR and other metrics have underrated Punto, but the past is the past. Thirty-three-year-olds are not going to gain range in the middle infield. They are going to decline.

The Twins are right to move on from No. 8. Not only is he older, which implies an increasing proneness to injury and a decrease in ability, but the front office cannot rely on Ron Gardenhire to keep Punto in a reserve role.

The plan is to give the infield jobs to Tsuyoshi Nishioka, Alexi Casilla and Danny Valencia. I suspect that if Punto were around, Gardenhire would want to use him more than Casilla. That might be the right thing in the short run, but it's counterproductive in the long run.

Sure, the Twins probably could have signed Punto to a similar deal as St. Louis did. It's best that they didn't.

Who's the MVP? (A detour from real life)

About a year ago I began a solo Strat-O-Matic league with cards from their Hall of Fame and Negro League stars sets — 10 teams, 44 games each. I have now finished the regular season — still have the championship series to play, but the project is essentially complete.

On the basis that little is more boring than somebody else's fantasy league, I won't delve into the details. If you are really interested, I chronicled the ins and outs here.

What I'm after is opinion on the league MVPs — Most Valuable Player and Most Valuable Pitcher. (I won't call the latter Cy Young because Cy Young was in this league — and wasn't all that good.)

I offer three candidates for each, alphabetically, using only traditional stats because (a) most of these guys never heard of on-base percentage and (b) I kept the stats by hand and opted to avoid extra computation:

Players

Josh Gibson, c/1b: His team, Homestead, finished second in its division, two games out. Gibson was first in batting average (.423), second in home runs (18), second in runs scored (48), ninth in RBIs (38).

Babe Ruth, lf: His team, Franklins, lost a one-game playoff for its division. Ruth led the league in home runs (22), runs (52) and walks (45). He was fourth in RBIs (43).  His .347 batting average did not make the leader board.

Tris Speaker, cf: His team, Teddys, won that one-game playoff. Speaker was second in batting average (.420), RBIs (47) and hits (74). He led the league in doubles (17).

Pitchers

Three-Finger Brown: 8-2, 3.01 for the Teddys. His 89.6 innings were second most in the league. The wins tied for the league lead. The ERA was third best. Not on the leader board in strikeouts.


Carl Hubbell: 8-1, 3.47 for the Franklins. Led league in innings (93.3), tied for sixth in strikeouts (60), was fifth in ERA.

Slim Jones: 6-1, 2.48 for the X-Giants. Led league in ERA. Relatively light workload (72.6 innings), but was still fourth in strikeouts (62).