#-1: Gopher baseball (Last Week: -2). Finished the regular season going 2-1 at Penn State. Unfortunately for the Gophs, Ohio State swept bottom-feeder Iowa, giving them the regular season championship instead. That 10-8, twice-rain delayed game Sunday was the dealbreaker. Oh well, at least they hung onto the 2-seed and got the first day (Wednesday) off. On the bright side, the Gophers are ranked 20, 21 and 24 in three college baseball polls (though they are inexplicably left off of the poll conducted by USA Today). Congratulations to 2B Derek McCallum for being the first Gopher in six years to be named First-Team All-Big Ten. And Jeremy Mills of ESPN.com still projects the team in the tournament as a 2-seed. They draw Indiana Thursday. I've heard people say the Gophers are in regardless. I say, at least get to the championship game. If you're in a BCS conference which is really a mid-major when it comes to baseball, I don't know if you want to finish your conference tournament in third place.
#-2: Timberwolves (Re-Entry!). Get fucked in the ass again as they still have never leapt above their place by record in the lottery. Once again, in fact, they slide -- this year down a spot, to 6th. Oh, great. (This might be karma for being such a shitty team for so long.) Instead of getting lucky and getting to draft Blake Griffin or at least Ricky Rubio, they now have to choose between projects and enigmas like Hasheem Thabeet, Jordan Hill, and Demar DeRozan. Good news: The Woofie Dogs have three first-round picks this year. Bad news: Many people believe this is one of the weakest drafts in recent memory. McFail, why in the hell did you hoard draft picks in a year when all the newbies suck?
What may be more dispiriting is the protracted, agonizing search for a new General Manager, a search that may be just as long as the "race" for Minnesota Senator. (And man, what a clusterfuck that's become; we Minnesotans must look like a bunch of bumbling idiots now.) On Monday, Trail Blazers Assistant General Manager Tom Penn joins Spurs Assistant General Manager Dennis Lindsey and ex-Heat General Manager Randy Pfund in withdrawing themselves from consideration. Three candidates who explicitly said they don't want the job. Shit, man, they're not beating around the bush: Wolves GM is a sucky job to take. Looks like Owner Glen Taylor refused to give any of the prospects the control they wanted to run the team, including the final say in whether McFail stays as Coach (if he wants to) or who to draft (which they will pick some time next month, so there should be a tad more urgency into getting this job filled, but I could be wrong). This is getting embarrassing. After spending all this time supposedly vetting candidates thoroughly for this position, it's looking more and more like Taylor will let Jim Stack keep the job or have Fred Hoiberg take it. And that makes it much easier to let McFail decide on his own whether he wants to get up in the morning to go to the airport and make the 3-game, 8-day road trip out west once or twice a season. Pathetic.
#-3: Twins (Last Week: -1). The Twins and Timberwolves could've switched places, but I told myself Wednesday's game against the White Sox will be the deciding factor. And it looks like, once again, the starting pitching shit themselves. Francisco Liriano takes the 7-4 loss by giving up all the White Sox's runs in one inning (that happened to some other pitcher last week, if I recall -- strange) and blowing yet another lead. The losing streak is at 6. Ron Gardenhire responded to this funk by shitcanning tossing machine Craig Breslow today. (He was almost immediately picked up on waivers by Oakland. Does Mr. Moneyball think he sees something in Breslow, or are the Athletics just as hard-up for competent middle relief as we are?) They called up Pitcher Anthony Swarzak to start Saturday. Swarzak's been long-touted, but only by the local media. I did some recent scamming of baseball magazines and blogs and whatnot, and I came to a startling conclusion: The Twinkies, long hailed for "doing it the right way" and "making the most of their limited payroll" and "pouring all their energies into finding diamonds in the rough" and "promoting from within," don't have a nationally anticipated prospect in the short- or intermediate-term. The perception that the Twins always have a stacked minor league system is a complete lie if your best hope for pitching relief is Anthony Swarzak.
They try to avoid getting swept for the second series in a row in Comiskey this afternoon. Then it's back Dome for the start of interleague play against Milwaukee over Memorial Weekend for three (I'm thinking of checking them out for the first time all season Sunday because it's a night game) and Boston for four.
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