The Evil Empire

Game 2 of the Twins-Yankees series was a tough one for me to swallow.  With the Twins up 3-1 in the bottom of the 9th, all they had to do was lean on one of the best closers of the decade to get three outs and then we come back to Minneapolis with the series tied 1-1.  Instead, Joe Nathan got behind in the count to A-Rod with a man on base, left a pitch hanging over the plate which was promptly escorted out of the zip code, and all of a sudden it’s a tie game.

Even more upsetting was Joe Mauer’s lead-off ground rule double in the top of the 11th inning which was incorrectly ruled a foul ball.  He would get on base with a single, but the two base hits behind him would have surely scored him had the right call been made originally.  Instead, he was stranded on base, and the Yankees would score the winning run in the bottom half of the inning.  The umps have officially apologized, but this just gives me yet another reason to hate the Yankees with everything inside of me.  They’re like the rich guy who wins the lottery with a ticket he finds on the street.  They don’t need the lucky/bullshit breaks like this to sway in their favor.  All close calls should be automatically defaulted to the Twins.

In case you actually needed them, here are three reasons why you should be rooting for the Twins and hoping the Yankees all catch herpes from each other and overdose on HGH right before their team plane crashes into Lake Michigan and they all die in a fiery pit of burning hell:

A) The Twins develop talent in their farm league, and actually bring those players up and keep them in their system. They actually win games with them.  The Yankees simply throw a shitload of money at whomever they feel like buying that particular day.  Granted, since Major League Baseball is run by idiots, this isn’t prohibited by any means, but it’s admirable that the Twins are doing it in a way that can be perceived as much more pure than the Yanks, and still making it to the playoffs fairly consistently.

2) The Yankees’ payroll is right around $208.1 million this season, the highest in baseball and a whopping $63 million more than the second highest.  Meanwhile, the Twins’ payroll is $67.6 million, the ninth least in the big leagues, and less than a third of what the Darth Vaders, er, I mean, Yankees are paying.  Just think, what if we could get rid of the Yankees and use that payroll money to have three more Twins teams?  What a world it would be. To put it into further perspective, at $33 million, Alex Rodriguez is making nearly half of the entire Twins roster this year, BY HIMSELF.

D) Jeter, Rodriguez, Damon, Swisher, Cabrera, Teixeira, Cano, Posada, and Matsui … Remind me, how the hell did the Yankees not win 130 games this year? That could be the lineup for a God damn All Star game.  Meanwhile, the Twins are in the playoffs, and got there without Justin Morneau, Joe Crede, Fransisco Liriano (mostly), and Kevin Slowey.  Instead they relied on guys named Blackburn, Tolbert, Span, and Kubel.  I’ll say this, and then I’ll let it rest: The Twins coaching staff could win 115 games every year with the amount of talent the Yankees have on their roster.

In other news, news that doesn’t make me want to fly to New York and kill 25 people,  the weather up here has officially cooled off.  Just over two weeks ago I was wearing shorts, and now the temperature is hanging around in the 30s and 40s everyday.  I’m not upset about it, because it’s an inevitability and there’s nothing I can do about it.  Rather, I’m disappointed that we kind of skipped a step.  We went straight from 80 degrees to 30 in the blink of an eye.  We never got to enjoy that “keep the windows open all day, enjoy the leaves changing colors, you can wear shorts during the day but need to put a sweatshirt on at night when it cools off” kind of phase.  I love that phase, it might be one of my favorites of the year.  Instead, I went from running the air conditioner all day to closing up all the windows and keeping a blanket nearby.  The leaves never changed colors, they all just died and fell off the trees.  We’re long past shorts weather and into full-blown jacket weather.  It has even managed to snow a few times over this weekend, even though it was just a few instances of light flakes and none of it accumulated.  Quite sad, really.

Since I am currently balls deep in the NFL and the President’s Cup, I’m gonna cut this one off here.  I have received a viewer’s choice request for a post that I’ll start working on either tomorrow or Tuesday (yes, I do take requests), so until then, enjoy whatever is left of your weekend.

One love,

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