The Weekly Minnesota Sports Survey

Positive Numbers: Twins (Last Week: -1).  God, I love this time of year, when all the fall and winter sports lie dormant and the only team I need to dote on are the Twinks (and pretty soon the Lynx, but still only means two entries, so that's very doable).

What also helps blog the survey: A winning team.  And that is what this club has been doing all month.  In fact, they are the winningest group for the month of May.  The week began with a 3-2 loss at the White Sox, but they have won five straight since, capped off with a three-game sweep of Boston at Target Field.  That has vaulted them into a tie for first place in the American League Central with defending league champion Kansas City and a tie for second-best record in the AL, behind only another organization that was shit not too long ago, Houston.

I've answered this before but I'll ask it again: How are they winning?  Aaron Gleeman, writing for MinnPost, is a sabermatrician and has (unlike me) actually drilled down into the numbers to come up with this excellent story.  The main similarity, and unfortunately its tenuous streak, is based mostly on luck.  The lineup is barely average in hitting, but managed to hit in bunches, thus racking up runs in big innings.  The bullpen, which I thought was comprehensively rounding into form, actually has been dead solid perfect in tight games.  And the rotation has gone from awful to merely mediocre, something I was able to put my finger on.

Gleeman and another man named John (?) Bonis host a weekly Sunday show called Gleeman and The Geek.  And one of them (I'm guessing it was Bonis/The Geek) said that the Twins playing well above expectations (which were that this team would hit 90 losses) once again doesn't mean there will be a nasty regression to the mean.  He says that the prediction that this is a 90+loss club will hold, just from here on out.  In other words, they won't have to give back the wins they have already won by playing well below expectation for the rest of the season, so they will finish with less than 90 losses.  I have to disagree.  I may not know numbers like Gleeman or The Geek, but if they predicted that the Twinks will lose 90 games, odds are that they are right on that macro prediction, therefore they will have to play worse than initially forecast so that by the end of the year they will be right where they thought they would be.  So yes, I am waiting for the other shoe to drop.  It may not happen; it's possible that the projections for everybody on the major league roster is wrong, plus the prospects for this squad will be higher if Byron Buxton and Miguel Sano get called up.  But yes, there will be a correction, and it'll be a bitch.

Till then let's take it one game at a time ... well, one screening week at a time.  On Friday they host Toronto for three games, then they travel to Boston for a four-game series starting on Monday.