Positive Numbers: Gopher softball (Last Week: Positive Numbers). This team is aided by the relative paucity of rivals because they play during from the mid-winter through early summer, when the crowd of teams playing locally thins out. Nevertheless, you cannot dismiss the holy roll these players are doing for the U. Yet another pair of mercy-rule games at Penn St., which lasted a combined 11 innings and a lopsided aggregate score of 25-2, means that the Gophers have won the Big Ten regular season for the first time since 1991. (Did the conference even have softball back then? Did the NCAA have softball back then?) They have won 50 games in a season for the first time in program history. They are the first club in top-flight college softball to win 50 games this season. And earlier in the week they rose to #4 in the polls, establishing a new all-time best rank.
With both the Lynx and the Gopher women's hockey teams both failing to repeat as champs and the Wild failing to meet expectations, it is very possible that the University of Minnesota softball team is the best team in the Twin Cities right now. And it might not be close. Add to it that the Golden Gophers might receive a national seed for the NCAA Tournament and will surely be in line to host not just a regional but (at least according to College Sports Madness, I think the only place that does bracketology in softball) also a super regional, and these ladies have a chance to not only be historically great, but to be good enough for even the casual fan to notice them. They deserve the publicity. Things are getting real exciting for this ballclub. Minnesota is now a bonafide title contender.
But first they have to finish off the Nittany Lions this afternoon. That's it for the regular season; later in the week is the B1G Tournament, being held at Michigan.
#0: Twins (Last Week: 0). This week I want to talk a little bit about the starting rotation for the Twins, who went a respectable 4-2 for the screening week. (For that reason I am closing the gap and putting these guys at #0 this week. That plus it's weird to go from Positive Numbers to -1 every week.) Michael Rand or Phil (Phil?) Chiu (Chiu?) of the Star Tribune noted the cleave between the top three and the bottom two Starting Pitchers so far this season. Ervin Santana, Phil Hughes and Hector Santiago have been good (Santana in particular being uncharacteristically spectacular). The back two, which was Kyle Gibson and Adalberto Mejia, sucked -- so much so that I think both of them are back in AAA Rochester. The organization is trying to spackle the ass end of those arms, but on Saturday, call-up Nick Tepesch got rocked in an 11-1 ass-kicking at home by the Boston Red Sox in front of a lot of Sawx fans coming into town (but school's still in session!). Doesn't matter anyway since this is still a rebuilding year, but it would be nice if there is at least one answer to what appears to be the three-armed monster that will take this team through at least the trade deadline. Could it be Jose Berrios, finally?
After wrapping up against Boston today, they hit the road for the week: Three vs. the White Sox, three against Cleveland.
#-1: Gopher baseball (Last Week: -3). Split a two-game set against Georgia St. at Siebert, then won a squeaker (6-5) and then a blowout (17-1) at Penn St. to commence this weekend. All well and good, but these are not good opponents, and losing to them would be damaging to the squad's tournament hopes. It's still not good; as of the middle of last week Baseball America didn't even consider the Goofs for the NCAAs.
So that's whey next weekend's series is so important for the team to have any chance of making it to the postseason. It's against Long Beach St., which as of right now, according to the same bracketology at Baseball America, has the U.'s future opponent hosting a regional to start the first weekend of the tourney. If Minnesota can clip a game, or two ... no, most likely they need all three games ... if the U. can sweep them, they're right back in consideration. (Of course, they need to also sweep the Nittany Lions with a win this [Sunday] afternoon.) Nothing else in the schedule can bolster the squad's CV. Next weekend basically is the season ... well, unless they can win the conference tournament and get the auto-bid. Yeah, there's that.
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