Twins Trivia 2013 predictions

crystal ballThe 2013 season is just around the corner so it is time to make my annual predictions on who will finish where and who the 2013 World Series champion will be.

AL East
 
Toronto Blue Jays
Tampa Bay Rays (wild card)
Baltimore Orioles
Boston Red Sox
New York Yankees
 
AL Central
 
Detroit Tigers
Kansas City Royals (wild card)
Cleveland Indians
Chicago White Sox
Minnesota Twins
 
AL West
 
Los Angeles Angels
Oakland A’s
Seattle Mariners
Texas Rangers
Houston Astros
 
NL East
 
Washington Nationals
Atlanta Braves (wild card)
Philadelphia Phillies
New York Mets
Miami Marlins
 
NL Central
 
Cincinnati Reds
Pittsburgh Pirates (wild card)
St. Louis Cardinals
Milwaukee Brewers
Chicago Cubs
 
NL West
 
Los Angeles Dodgers
San Francisco Giants
Arizona Diamondbacks
Colorado Rockies
San Diego Padres

 

The Detroit Tigers and the Washington Nationals play in the World Series with the Washington Nationals winning it all in 6 games.

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The Minnesota Twins 2013 season opener at Target Field against the Detroit Tigers is just over a week away so after watching and listening to Twins in spring training and consulting with some of the worlds foremost baseball experts, here is what I see happening in 2013.

Einstein 2013

 

  1. Josh Willingham will be traded and Oswaldo Arcia will be called up to take over a starting outfield position. Arcia will fill the role nicely.
  2. Trevor Plouffe will not be able to hang on to the starting job due to injuries and inconsistent hitting and fielding and third base will be a black hole all season with Jamey Carroll, Eduardo Escobar, and Mark Sobolewski all getting a shot to win the job and none of these guys turns out to be the answer. The Twins will make a deal to fill the 3B hole but it will just be a stop-gap as they wait for Miguel Sano to finally fill the hole late in 2014.
  3. Anthony Swarzak and Tyler Robertson will lose their bullpen jobs and will be replaced by PJ Walters and Ryan Pressly.
  4. Jeff Clement will win a roster spot and be the Twins third catcher leaving Drew Butera out in the cold but not for long because the Twins will do him right by trading him to a team that will give him the back-up catching job.
  5. Pedro Florimon and Brian Dozier give the Twins their first decent infield combo in some time playing well in the field and hitting better than expected.
  6. The Twins will open the season with a starting staff of Vance Worley, Mike Pelfrey, Kevin Correia, Cole De Vries, with Scott Diamond joining the staff in early April. Kyle Gibson will be called up by June 1 and will replace….. Mike Pelfrey in the rotation.
  7. Manager Ron Gardenhire not only makes it through the season but gets a new two-year deal.
  8. Justin Morneau will be resigned to a multi-year deal before the All-Star game and will continue to call Minnesota home.
  9. Tickets to watch the Twins will be easy to get as attendance at Target Field plummets by about 20% and the Twins will be lucky to hit 2.2 million in attendance with attendance dropping by over a half million.

This and That

As I sit here looking out the window over-looking the back yard I see nothing but white. We have received about 9″ of snow in the last day or so and it is still snowing. Hard to fathom that the Twins will be playing baseball at Target Field which is just about 10 miles away in less than a month.

Time go by so quickly, you don’t realize how quickly until you get up in age and look back on things. When you are young, a week can seem like an eternity, when you get longer in the tooth you understand how quickly time passes. It has already been six years since Kirby Puckett suffered that massive strike on March 5, 2006 and passed away a day later. Boy, it doesn’t seem like it can be seven years that Kirby has been gone.

The minor leaguers have reported and will soon start to play games in Ft. Myers so the Twins will be in position to start cutting players and sending them to the back fields at the Hammond complex. Disappointment? Yes, but most of these guys can continue to play and hone their skills for a shot at the big money in the big leagues. On the other hand it also presents opportunities for some up-and-comers to get the call to come over to the big league side and strut their stuff for a game or two here and there, a rare opportunity to show the Twins management that they belong with the big boys. On the down side there are some players in the minor league complex today that will be cut before camp ends and their baseball careers may be over, a lifetime of dreams will come to and end for some and the reality of getting a real job will be staring them in the face. But that is the reality of baseball and life. As sure as the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, these things take place year after year in spring training camps all over Florida and Arizona.

Jim Thome
Jim Thome

After two seasons they would like to forget, the Twins have lots to prove and many decisions to make. I think it is too early to waste a lot of time speculating on who is winning what position battles as yet but there are a number of good battles going on. What the player does on the field doesn’t even take into account how “service time” plays into things and how long the Twins have a player under their control. The Twins aren’t even a .500 team this year so do the Twins bring say an Aaron Hicks north in to start the season or do they wait for a month or two and control him a year longer? There are plusses and minuses on both sides but my opinion is that if the Twins are really serious about putting the best team on the field now and for the future they will not allow this to come in to play. If Hicks earns the job with his play and beats out everyone the Twins throw out there, give him the job. If you lose a year of control over Hicks so be it. You play the game of baseball to win, not to see how you can avoid arbitration and or free agency with your players. When the season ends the only valid measure of how any baseball team did is your wins and losses and if you won your final game. The bottom line is winning and you win with your best players. If you are more worried about the money then winning then you are in the wrong business. I am not advocating spending money foolishly, but how can you say that letting a young guy play if he earns it spending money foolishly. To me spending money foolishly is signing someone like Jim Thome to pinch hit for a team that will be lucky to win 75 games. If this is really what Gardy wants then I say fire Gardy because he is not thinking straight and I really like Grady as the Twins manager, but bringing Thome back would be the final straw. I know that Thome is a great guy, a future hall of famer and all that but it comes down to this, how many games will he add to the Twins win column? Everything has  an opportunity cost, I think Thome’s opportunity cost is too high. It is not about the money, it is about the player that deserves to be on the roster more than Thome does at this stage of his career.

Anthony Swarzak
Anthony Swarzak

A player that I think does not deserve a roster spot on the Twins 25 man roster is long man Anthony Swarzak. I know you need a long man but Swarzak has done a less than stellar job in that role. Let’s look at what Swarzak has done in his 3 years with the Twins. He record is 10-20 with 5.03 ERA  with a 1.44 WHIP. Opponents hit .287 off him (righties hit .302 and lefties hit .272) and he has a 1.96 ratio for SO/BB. I am not a huge fan of Cole DeVries as a starter but I would like to see him in the long man role for the Twins. In his one season in Minnesota, DeVries went 5-5 with a 4.11 ERA and a 1.21 WHIP. Opponents only hit him at a .252 clip and his SO/BB ratio was 3.22. If DeVries is not in the starting rotation, he deserves to be the long man more than Swarzak does.

Have you been watching the Twins attendance numbers at their spring training games? I have and if I were the Twins I would be very concerned. The Twins have played 6 exhibition games at Hammond Stadium and they are averaging 5,553 per game and their high is 6,591 with their seating capacity at about 8,000. In 2012 their average attendance in Ft. Myers was 7,344 so the drop from last year is about 24.39%. If you compare attendance drops in spring training games to regular season attendance drop in attendance in 2012 you could expect the Twins attendance to drop 25%-30% this season in Target Field meaning that the club will be lucky to have 2 million fans pass through the Target Field turnstiles. That is assuming the Twins don’t play worse than or better than is expected by the fan base. Hopefully the Twins can get off to a good start both on the field and with their attendance but with the number of home games the Twins have in April and the weather being what it is so far, there is reason for concern.

2010 Attendance

November 16, 2010 – Major League Baseball announced back in October that the 30 clubs drew 73,061,781 fans during the 2010 regular season, the sixth highest attendance total in history. Major League Baseball attendance for the regular season was off just four-tenths of one percent (.4%) from the 2009 total of 73,367,659.

The Minnesota Twins eclipsed three million fans for the second time in franchise history and set a new all-time franchise record with a 2010 home attendance of 3,223,640. The previous record of 3,030,672 was set in 1988, the year following the Twins first-ever World Series Championship. During the inaugural season at Target Field, the Twins sold out a franchise-record 79 games (including 78 consecutive). They also drew crowds of 40,000 or more in 22 consecutive games from July 3rd – August 31st, eclipsing the previous mark of seven consecutive games of 40,000 or more fans set from August 10-20, 1988.

The Twins finished with 3,223,640 fans going through the turnstile gates with the third highest attendance in the American League trailing only the New York Yankees with 3,765,807 and the Los Angeles Angels with 3,250,814. This places the Twins sixth overall all in the majors trailing the only Yankees, Phillies, Dodgers, Cardinals, and the Angels. On a percentage of capacity basis in the American League, only the Red Sox with 100.9% of capacity beat the Twins 100.7% of capacity.

On the road however; it was a different story as the Twins drew an average of 27,350 fans (62.6% of capacity) making the Twins the third worst draw in the American League just slightly ahead of the American League pennant winning Texas Rangers with 26,565 and the worst drawing team, the Chicago White Sox who only drew an average of 26,311 fans into opposing stadium seats. You have to wonder why two division winners like the Rangers and the Twins draw so poorly on the road.