The Birth of Ron Gardenhire

On Monday Ron Gardenhire woke up and said, “I am not anyone’s mother.” Monday didn’t hear Ron Gardenhire. Monday was tired of hiding. Monday said, “Someone once told me there was a place where it is always Monday.” Monday did not believe himself. He thought he was lying. His doubts manifested in the form of an egg. The egg clucked. It tried to say, “My name is Monday.” The egg had no mouth. Monday said, “Are you a chicken or an egg?”  Ron Gardenhire frowned.

Roads exist in this story. Eggs are the descendents of the existence of roads in this story. Many people are confused and still ask what came first.  Ron Gardenhire laughs, but isn't sure why.  A good number of students base their senior thesis on the idea of God being a chicken. Seminars discuss dichotomy in nature. Students screamed for duality. A few continue to cheer for the chicken.  Ron Gardenhire has a pennant that says 'Chicken'.  A professor stands up and walks to the blackboard. He picks up the chalk and writes, “The road or the egg.” He underlines ‘road’ twice. The egg clucks. Everyone laughs. When they stop laughing the egg is gone.  Ron Gardenhire is sitting in the corner naked.
The egg has gone to visit his brother. Ron Gardenhire and the egg's brother don't live in the desert anymore. Monday says, “There is a place where everyone is breakfast. Someone once ate me with pancakes in Derek, Kansas.”  Ron Gardenhire smiles when he hears the word 'Pancakes'.  The egg remembered reading of a place where 76 % of the population had the same name. Monday said, “There is a place where everyone has the same name.”

No one in Minnesota has the same name. No one in Minnesota is named ‘Ron Gardenhire’. Everyone is named ‘sand pit.’ Minnesota has three Ron Gardenhires. One is a vegetarian. There are roads in Minnesota. When I was young I tried to count all the roads in Minnesota. I sat in my closet and counted to zero then fell asleep or maybe I lost interest when my grandfather drove me to a sandpit, told me to get out, closed the passenger door, and said, “Grow up,” before driving off. Three sandpits in Minnesota are named ‘Ron Gardenhire.’ There are thousands of sand pits in Minnesota. None of them are vegetarian.

Monday said, “I would like to change my name.” Bald figurines thought this was a good idea, but they did not have eyebrows and forgot who was talking. They tried to touch their heads and ask the passing roads what happened to their hair. They had no hands. They had no mouths.

The egg tried to say, “I’ll be Monday and you can be egg,” but gave up and thought, “I am a bald figurine.”  Ron Gardenhire said, "I have hair."

I did not like to see the egg like this. I switched on the incubator. I forgot what an incubator was supposed to do. Regardless, the egg did not cooperate. It rotated its head completely around and surprised everyone by eating a road.  The road was both Ron Gardenhire and Monday. No scientific explanations were offered. Conspiracy theories found their way into the editorial pages of high school newspapers. Monday died as both a road and as a Ron Gardenhire. It was either his first death or the 10,000th time he died. Those are the only two options. Nine months later Monday returned to the world as an egg. The cycle of life was complete. There was no longer a dilemma of what came first. The first thing Monday did was change his name to Ron Gardenhire. The judged waved and said, “Goodbye Monday.”

The End

Oh yeah, Fuck you Aaron for trying to make this a serious blog.  The Twins probably won't do the right thing, live with it.

On a more serious note...

This is an important offseason for the Minnesota Twins (so important that I'm going to revive this blog with a post that is not a complete joke). The Twins have a lot of talented young players, and are a late-inning reliever and an everyday right-handed 3B with a good bat away from being one of the best teams in baseball. They also have an apparent log-jam of outfielders, one of whom they might be tempted to trade in order to acquire the pieces they need.

Last offseason, we learned that Bill Smith is not nearly as gun-shy as his predecessor when it comes to making big deals. That might be a good thing, and only time will tell whether those trades were good ones or not, but it would be a lie to say, at this point, that they have worked out in the Twins' favor. Will the GM be afraid to pull the trigger again? Will he be eager to unload some of the pieces of those trades that have looked particularly awful? We might know the answer to that question sooner than later, and this is why the current offseason is so important.

Ron Gardenhire has publicly stated that he wants an outfield of Cuddyer, Span and Gomez next year. Barring the possibility that he is purposefully making such statements in order to inflate Cuddyer's trade value or something equally sneaky, this means that he and Bill Smith are actually considering either using Young in a backup role or trading him. Both would be huge mistakes, given that the Twins are unlikely to receive good value for Young right now.

Delmon Young was one of the best hitters on the team last year, despite having a dissapointing season. Carlos Gomez was the worst. Both are extremely young, with huge upside. The most obvious, almost painfully obvious, choice is to let Carlos Gomez start the season in AAA. He will not be valuable to a major league club until he learns how to get on base at a rate that is close to average, not swing at every slider in the dirt, and successfully steal bases. Last year he showed, for an entire season, that he cannot do any of these things at the major league level. The Twins wasted an entire year of service time letting him "learn" last summer. Let's not make the same mistake again. At this rate Carlos Gomez will be arbitration-eligible before he is major league ready. That gives the Twins very little chance to get good production out of him while paying him much less than he is worth. Franchises like ours need to be smarter than this.

The next most obvious choice, if Gardy and Smith really can't stomach the idea of sending Gomez down, is to trade Michael Cuddyer. He is actually earning real money thanks to the contract he signed last offseason, and by earning I mean he was injured the whole summer and has had one good offensive season (2006) in his entire career. That injury, in fact, proves exactly why we need to start Carlos Gomez in the minors. Remember last year when we seemed to have the usual glut of weak-hitting middle infielders? Matt Tolbert was playing every day and we weren't even sure what the Twins would do when Everett came off the DL. Punto was still on the roster, of course, and Brendan Harris was having trouble turning the DP at 2B. And then there was Alexi Casilla hitting the cover off the ball in the minor leagues. Once you factor in Lamb in the majors and Buscher at AAA, we didn't have anywhere to put all these guys. And yet there were points in the season when it was difficult to put an infield together. Injuries happen every year. With probability 1.

Sometime before July Cuddyer, Kubel, Young, or Span will probably go on the DL for a little while. I'd much rather be bringing Gomez up to play everyday than fielding Span in left, Gomez in center and Pridie in right when Cuddyer gets hurt again. There is no log-jam in the outfield. There is just an obvious choice to be made. Here's hoping the front office makes it.

Gardy to Punto: You're already a great player to me

"A couple years ago, he wasn't starting, and he came along pretty good in this role," Gardenhire said. "Maybe this clears his mind a little bit, so he's not worried about going 0-for-3 every day, and he'll come back and be a great player. He already is to me because he's so valuable everywhere you play him."( from the strib)

Scene: Nick Punto and Ron Gardenhire share a candlelight dinner for two after the 2007 season.

Nick (forlorn): ...I just want to be a great player...

Ron (reassuring): You already are to me, Nick. You already are to me.

Their eyes locked, the two mens' faces inch towards each other as the lights fade to black.

Fin

Oh my darling hummingbird

La Velle E. Neal III gives us this gem of an article full of the cute quotable Gardenhire we all love. One can't help but beam with joy and feel warm all over after reading Gardenhire's nickname for rookie Matt Tolbert.
"Hummingbird"
Maybe even better is how Mr. Neal III just sticks the quote in the middle of the article. The previous quote from Tolbert's minor league manager, Riccardo Ingram, kind of explains the Gardenhire hummingbird quote.
"The Latin players call him 'Eléctrico,' " Ingram said.
Still, the fact that the next line only has Gardenhire saying "hummingbird" leaves his meaning a little ambiguous.
Of course, this post isn't meant to criticize Mr. Neal's journalistic talent. No, it's to display the pure giddiness and love Gardenhire seems to have for this young buck Tolbert. And that's exactly what we get at the end of article when Mr. Neal decided to copy down Gardenhire's excited mumbles about the rookie verbatim.
"I said, 'You're on deck. You're hitting right now,' and he was still looking for his equipment. That's not normal. So he's fun."

News flash monroe in the outfield

I love how everything Gardenhire says seems like it is a spur of the moment thought. For example, in this article talking about Crumple Magoo.
"Monroe's here to help us out, however we can use him -- and I'm going to use him. I'm going to play him in the outfield, too."
Thanks for the heads up. Wouldn't want you to surprise us with any of your managerial wisdoms like the old days when you'd bat Tyner at DH.
Of course, I'm probably not wrong, about every Gardenhire decision being spur of the moment.

More Managerial Wisdom

"Twins manager Ron Gardenhire said recently that he would not use a platoon for the club's designated hitter spot. Instead, he would rotate left-handed hitter Jason Kubel and right-handed hitter Craig Monroe based on matchups and other factors."

That quote is from Kelly Theiser ( you may remember her from such references to Johan Santana's phallus as "hardwood - or should I say, hard wood"). Now, I am no scientist, but I'm pretty sure that a platoon in baseball is generally a situation in which two hitters, one right-handed and the other left-handed, share starts depending on who is pitching. So his quote tells me one of two things. Either Kelly Theiser does not know what a platoon is, and she should lose her job as a baseball writer, or Ron Gardenhire does not know what a platoon is, and he should lose his job as Manager. I would be happy with either, or both.

Anyhow, untrue to his word, last night Ron Gardenhire started the elderly, bad at baseball, right-handed Craig Monroe against the right-handed pitcher. Gardenhire justified this decision in a couple of ways.

1) "It was a gut thing."

That's a quote from Gardy. This of course means that Craig Monroe went 0-3 with a strikeout, stranding 3 runners. To be fair, he did hit a ball well and Torii Hunter made a pretty nice catch. Gardenhire's gut might consider that to be a success.

2) "Another reason for the move was that Gardenhire likes the idea of having an extra left-handed bat with power on the bench in Kubel."

That's a quote from Kelly. I find this to be really amazing. Here is a short list of things that are better than having a left-handed bat with power on the bench: having a left-handed bat with power in the starting lineup against a right-handed starting pitcher.

Thankfully, the players and assistant coaches were able to talk Gardy out of going with his gut and starting Mike Redmond at catcher in order to have an extra left-handed bat on the bench in Joe Mauer.

Managing styles

Near the end of June 2007, the Boston Red Sox called up CF Jacoby Ellsbury from their AAA affiliate. He shuffled back and forth between AAA and MLB before making the playoff roster and eventually helping the team win a world series. In 127 regular season plate appearances, he hit .353/.394/.509. In the playoffs, he managed .360/.429/.520 in 28 plate appearances. He is young talented and full of potential, and has shown that he can deliver on the biggest stage, but has struggled a little in spring training and is still only 24 years old.

Here's Red Sox Manager Terry Francona on his decision to bat Jacoby Ellsbury low in the order:

"You put a young player a little bit at risk when you put him right at the top of the lineup early on," Boston manager Terry Francona said. "I know what he hit last year. It was impressive, but you're still trying to develop guys."

In the middle of May 2007, the New York Mets called up CF Carlos Gomez to the major league roster. He more or less stuck, but suffered a serious injury to his wrist in early July that kept him out of the majors for two months. He stuck despite hitting .232/.288/.304. He is young, talented and full of potential but has yet to perform on the biggest stage, and had his first and only season in the majors interrupted by an injury that has been known to decrease a player's ability to hit for power. Baseball Prospectus says that due to the Mets' carelessness in bringing him up too early and his injury, 2007 was a complete waste in terms of his development. This spring, his hitting coach expressed concern that he was swinging so hard that he could easily hurt his back (his manager encouraged him to swing harder). He started out abysmally this in spring training before getting hot late (though he still has a lower OBP than either of the guys he beat out for the starting job in CF). He is only 22 years old.

Here's Twins Manager Ron Gardenhire on his decision to bat Carlos Gomez leadoff:

"Gomez real good... (grunting)... me like Carlos Gomez... (beating chest)... he run hard like Nick Punto. Also play bad like Nick Punto. If him not hit leadoff, Nick Punto. What on base percentage?