A New Season is Born

Opening Day is finally here in Minnesota and a new baseball season has begun. Like a newborn child no one knows what lies ahead for it. At this point anything is possible. The Royals could win the World Series and the Yankees could loose 100 games. Ok, so that’s not likely to be happen but it could.

So what will the season hold for the Twins? The experts have done a 360 from last year when they predicted an appearance in the Fall Classic. Now most people are picking the team to finish only third in their division. The Twins have always done better as the underdog so this really doesn’t bother me. The Twins have possibly their best team in the last 5 years (in which they won the division three times). Of course the rest of the division has also improved as the reigning World Champion White Sox’s actually look to have improved their lineup and teams like Cleveland and Detroit have a lot of good young talent as well. Win or loose there should be a lot of good baseball to follow.

So why am I so optimistic? It’s mostly due to our pitching. Even with a horrible offense last year our pitching kept us competitive and the key people on the staff are all back and look ready to do just as well. Offensively the Twins can’t be any worse and on paper they even look better. A lot of things need to go right for them to win their division this year but I think that can be said about most teams. The teams that stay healthy, have young players step up, and get timely hits are usually the teams that stand above the rest in the end and right now the Twins are just as capable as the next team and with their pitching they probably even have a bit of an advantage.

Only time will tell what things will look like come October, but for now we all can at least hope. Hope that Morneau will have that 30 homer year. Hope that White and Castillo will make the hitters around them better. Hope that Batista can field adequately and that Stewart returns to his old self. The list could go on and on and undoubtedly things won’t turn out exactly as we would like them to. But then what fun would that be? Variables are what makes baseball (and life) interesting so let’s hope for the best and enjoy this new season of Twins’ baseball. 2006 may not fulfill all our hopes but who knows…the end result could be even better.