Yesterday, Baseball Prospectus came out with their latest Hit List, which comes out every week and supposedly ranks all 30 teams in order of their current talent/performance, rather than simply by record.

I say “supposedly,” because over the years I’ve been looking at this Hit List there has seemed to be an AL Central Penalty, and an even larger Minnesota Twins Penalty. They’ve apparently decided to pull out all the stops in their anti-Twins effort, as here are the Hit List rankings for the five AL Central teams:

#7: Tigers

8: Royals

13: White Sox

16: Indians

I’d quibble with putting the Tigers in the top 10 at all, and certainly not ahead of the Royals right now. But for a division that was expected by everyone to be “completely and utterly terrible” (despite the fact that based on actually winning games it’s been the 2nd or 3rd best division in baseball for years), these rankings are pretty good. Nobody will notice, of course.

Oh, you’re wondering why I only listed four teams? Because of this:

#29: Minnesota Twins

That’s right, they’ve got the Twins ranked at 29th best in the league, just ahead of the hapless Natinals. Now, I understand that they haven’t been playing well, and the top of the rotation is struggling, and the offense hasn’t clicked yet, and there’s no replacing Joe Mauer, and BP just saw them lose two games to The Only Baseball Team That Matters … but second-worst-in-the-league seems pretty unreasonable.

Oh, and it is amusing that “the top of their rotation is a mess but the back end isn’t” is used as a positive for Detroit and a negative for Minnesota.

I’d say that “winning games is the only way to change their minds,” but given their history it’s pretty clear that that won’t work. The only fix for this is to ignore it.

And I don’t think I can do that.

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