#-1: Gopher baseball (Last Week: -2). Both baseball squads won one more game this week than they lost, but I'll go with the college nine for two reasons. The one that bolsters the Gophs is that they had a better week by winning percentage (2-1, .666). Plus, that lone loss was a 2-1 Getaway Day squeaker against Michigan.
Check out the conference standings. Could this be true -- only two games separate every single team in the Big Ten? That means this weekend's three-game set with Penn St. is critical because Minnesota is one of four teams tied for first in the conference at 10-8, and the Nittany Lions are one of four teams tied for last in the conference at 8-10. This is the last home series for the Gophers, so they'll have to make them count.
By the way, congratulations to closer Scott Matyas for being named Big Ten Pitcher Of The Week.
#-2: Twins (Last Week: -1). The other reason I order them this way, the one that's related to the Twinkies, is that, for the first time all season, they have not won a series. In fact, they have split their last two -- horrors! OK, the Baltimore series was four games, so maybe the possibility of a split means this shouldn't count. (And in the interest of telling the whole truth, the first game of that series, a loss, happened before this week's WMNSS cutoff.) Plus, the series against the White Sox was a 1-1 split, so the only way the Twins could've won that series was to sweep, even though they could've won both if they were as hot as they were to begin the year. Whatever.
This is the first big week, the first great test to see how good they can truly be. They face teams from the forever-powerful A.L. East, all on the road, without a single off day. They begin with a weekend trio at the Yankees, the Twinks' bane o' their existence and the emblem of all that is bad and unholy with the business of baseball. Then they have a pair of weirdo two-fers, first at Toronto, then at Boston.
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