The Weekly Minnesota Sports Survey

Positive Numbers: Gopher softball (Last Week: 0).  After Mercy-Ruling Northwestern Sunday, 8-0 in five innings, they rose in the national pools to #5.  That is the highest rank the University of Minnesota softball program has ever reached.  And they have responded with four more victories compared to no losses.  The club won in so many different ways.  They Mercy-Ruled fellow Big Ten schools Wisconsin (the first game of a road doubleheader sweep) and Iowa at the minimum of five innings, blanked the Hawkeyes 5-0 in the Friday night game, and finally broke through with six runs in the 12th inning of what was a scoreless game.  I said last week that the season isn't that daunting, but that new all-time-highest ranking still fucking impressive, so they can get Positive Numbers from me.

This screening week will begin to wrap up the last eight games of the home portion of the Gophers' sched for the year.  After playing Iowa today (Sunday) at Cowles Stadium, they host a doubleheader vs. North Dakota St. Wednesday, then begin a three-game series against Purdue.

#-1: Gopher baseball (Last Week: -1).  Normally when the best team of the week is pushed up past -1 to 0 or even Positives, the rest of the survey moves up with them.  I couldn't do that in this case because, frankly, they don't deserve it.  The Gophs lost a series for the first time all calendar year by getting blanked Sunday afternoon to Indiana, 4-0.  A 5-2 victory over South Dakota St. at Siebert was followed by a 5-3 loss at home to Nebraska Sunday Friday before the results were literally reversed Saturday against those same Blackshirts.  A choppy 2-2 week -- the first choppy week in U. baseball's year -- means that I can't, in good conscience, give these guys #0.  They were projected to be in the NCAA Tournament as of Wednesday, but a .500 week could change all that.  Maybe they can change their fortunes back to the positive; this week they host the rubber match of the series vs. Nebraska, take a quick trip to DeKalb, Ill., to play Northern Illinois, then go back to Siebert for the first three of five games against Illinois.

#-2: Twins (Last Week: -2).  After a promising start, the Twinks have in the past two weeks been what everybody in Baseball Nation thought they were.  Friday's 6-3 doubling up of the Detroit Tigers (whose starting Pitching, of all people, was Justin Verlander, whom the Twins chased in the sixth) was the only thing preventing this organization from suffering the indignity of a winless week.  (The 5-4 loss to Detroit yesterday/Sunday aftrernoon came at around the same time the Mild were lazing it across the river -- man, Friday was such a shit day for Twin Cities sports.)  Anyway, the midweek sweep by Cleveland (at home, by the way) shows just how far the Twins have in order to be a contender.  And, for the record, the Twinks have slipped below .500 with a record of 8-9.

Before the season began, there were some rumblings about a move made by Twins Chief Baseball Officer Derek Falvey (who came over from, you guessed it, Cleveland).  Byung Ho Park was optioned to AAA Rochester.  In his place, Falvey decided to give Park's spot to a Pitcher, bringing the big league roster to 13 Pitchers, 12 batters/fielders.  Most teams usually don't do that.  The speculation centered on whether Falvey did it because he thought he had superior pitching or had far inferior pitching.

Well, with Adalberto Mejia stinking it up in yesterday's (Saturday's) 5-4 loss and getting rightly demoted, it appears as though keeping more Pitchers than batsmen is over.  With the arms being relative good (and miles better than they were in 2016), a hitter will come up and take Mejia's place.  Maybe it'll be Park himself?

After playing this (Sunday) afternoon's rubber match against Detroit, they will hit the road for an extended period of time.  They have three at The Bastard Washington Senators (v.2.0) starting on Monday, then spend the weekend in Kansas City.

#-Infinity: Wild (Last Week: -4).  Oh, fuck you, Mild.

I have no idea what to say.  Game 5, at home, the day after Prince died (although who cares, really, because even though I have found out [later than most] that he was a sports fan, we have no idea if he was a hockey fan) -- this was the one where that fucking team was supposed to tear through the St. Louis Blues like, 5-0, and where very early on in the game Head Coach (and cuckolded former Wild Head Coach) Mike Yeo would sit down Goalie Jake Allen and basically retreat and hunker down for Game 6 Monday at the Loo.  That was the blueprint.  Instead, the Blues were able to outlast the fucking Wild yesterday (Saturday) afternoon, 4-3 in Overtime, to humiliate the squad in five games.

The Minnesota Wild was once on pace to have the best record in the Western Conference and the second-best record in the National Hockey League.  The team set a franchise record for wins and points.  They set a franchise record by winning a dozen games in a row.  (Do you remember that clash New Year's Eve when the host Wild lost to Columbus?  The Blue Jackets snapped the Mild's winning streak while extending theirs to 15 games.  They lost in the first round to Pittsburgh, by the by.)  But after a late-season swoon, they were ushered out, quickly but quietly, but a traditionally underperforming franchise whose Head Coach, praised during the series for implementing a stifling defense even though that same D did dick for the Mild, must be masturbating in his bed for exacting revenge on the players who quit on him.

Oh, Mild, Mild.  I don't care about the "we ran into a hot Goalie" excuse.  And yes, the Chicago Blackhawks are also out of the playoffs by Nashville, and they were embarrassed much more so than the Wild -- Chicago was swept, and they didn't even score a goal in their two games at United Center.  Along with Montreal, Minnesota is another team who had the home-ice advantage and are already eliminated.  But saying that this is hockey and upsets happen all the time (and they do -- Chicago and Montreal won their divisions, so half of the division champions went one-and-done) is a CYA excuse for the fact that this team has yet again underachieved.

These quick exits are getting to be tiresome, and worrisome.  This is fucking Groundhog Day all over again, where the team goes through lulls in offense and get knocked out early in the Stanley Cup playoffs.  The team and its cuckolded fans are giving their excuses -- Devan Dubnyk just wore down (he was pushing Carey Price as The Beast Goaltender In The NHL until he swooned just like the rest of the squad), we just needed to finish, Ryan Suter is wearing down, Eric Staal got hurt, Jason Pominville disappeared and, yes, "We ran into a hot Goalie."  Unac-fucking-ceptable.  These guys have underwhelmed so consistently that I have come to the conclusion that this organization, as it is currently constituted, simply cannot win a Cup.

So blow it up.  Fuck it.  Fuck it all.  Trade all the veterans.  Trade away a few of your prospects, too.  A controlled brush fire that will level the entire franchise till all that's left are snot-nosed rookies from college and Canadian juniors.  Reach down deep into AAA Iowa, because General Manager Chuck Fletcher (or his replacement -- I'm coming to the conclusion that the GM needs to change, too) needs to remove the poison of underachievement that is plaguing this team now.  I don't know how you do that without sucking for a few years and picking up that transcendent player (a Sidney Crosby, an Auston Matthews) you can build a team around.  But Fletch's current state of trying to let loose role players while keeping the core intact and their best young'uns in their organization simply isn't working.  It's time for drastic change, because this bullshit may be the turning point in fan relations ... as it should be.