Blogging Around

I read a lot of baseball blogs (I even read some non-baseball, non-sports blogs, quick shout out to The Art of Manliness), in the last days my RSS feeder tells me I’ve read more than 1,800 baseball, mostly Twins, related blogs.  Every once and a while I stumble upon some really interesting articles and I thought I’d take some time and share some of be more interesting things I’ve read in the past week.  

One of the things I’ve really enjoyed recently is participating in game chats over at Knuckleballsblog.  Knuckleballs will put up a new post about an hour before the first pitch of each Twins games and fans have a chance to sign into a simple chat window and talk with site authors KL, CapitalBabs, and Jim Crikket.  In addition to site authors there are several regulars popping up in the chat room making for a fun and friendly community.  It’s a nice change of pace for anyone who has been watching games and keeping close tabs on their own twitter feed as the Knuckleballs group tends to be more positive than a lot of the Twins fans on Twitter.

The other day in a game chat on Knuckleballs I was commenting on one of the features of Baseball Reference that shows a player’s nickname in parenthesis on their home page  (I found this out reviewing the page for The Little Professor).  The very next day Carson Cistulli at FanGraphs put up a post about the Secret Nicknames of Major Leaguers.  Check it out.  I especially love the nickname for Carlos Marmol.

Just this morning, Bill Petti of Beyond the Box Score, put up a neat graphic visualizing hitters in the AL Central.  It is easy to find Jason Kubel at the top, but among Minnesota Twins only one other player falls above the division average.

I wanted to point you towards David Schoenfield over at Sweet Spot Blog because after the Twins lost the other day in extra innings to the Red Sox I was able to find some levity in the intro to his article about the value of bullpens in a league where offense is coming back down to pre-steroid era levels.

“Twins manager Ron Gardenhire, apparently waiting to take the lead before using closerMatt Capps, and not wanting to use Joe Nathan on back-to-back days, was left with somebody named Jim Hoey on the mound.”

If you’re a sports fan and you are not reading Joe Posnanski over at SI.com then you are really missing out.  Posnanski is a master wordsmith and brings out the true emotion and passion of a wide range of sporting events.  His most recent article covers post no-hitter performances of pitchers going back 75 years.  Twins fans will remember that just last Week Francisco Liriano tossed his own no-hitter and followed that performance up with 3 innings of “flu-shortened” baseball giving up 4 runs to the Red Sox.

Finally, you should check out Stadium Journey as they just did a review of Pohlman Field in Beloit, Wisconsin, home of the Minnesota Twins’ Low-A affiliate, the Beloit Snappers.  As a Twins fans living in Wisconsin, and who has been to Pohlman Field, I think they’ve given a pretty accurate rating for the Snappers’ home.  They have also reviewed Target Field but it seems as if they rest of the Twins affiliates have not yet made the cut.

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