Fire Gardy

Everybody knows Mauer and Morneau are having great seasons, and I’m feeling pretty good about my Free Jason Kubel movement* from last year, and my criticism of the Cameron/Neyer Fuck Jason Kubel movement from the beginning of the season given that Kubel’s jumped up to just about as good as Mauer and Morneau — wait, just about as good? So the Twins have three of the top hitters in baseball this year?

* Although nobody else really followed the movement, and now the t-shirts make no sense, because why does he need to be freed now that he’s one of the best hitters in the league? I think it’s time for a new t-shirt.

According to Ken Funck at Baseball Prospectus, Mauer/Morneau/Kubel ranks 1-2-3 in the AL against RHP this year. That’s nice, but you have to face LHPs too if you’re going to be a star. So how do they fare? Once again, well: Mauer’s 1st, Morneau’s 2nd, and Kubel’s 4th (Youkilis sneaks up into third place, the asshole). He points out that such a feat is extremely rare: the last time one team had the top two players in OPS and another in the top 6 was the 1960 Yankees, with Mantle, Maris, and Skowron.

He relaxed the numbers a little bit, just looking for teams with three players in the top six, and found that it’s still rare but happens from time to time. It’s become increasingly rare — but has been the mark of extremely good teams. It’s happened three times since the start of divisional play, and all the other teams to do it went to the World Series (1995 Indians, 1990 A’s, 1971 Orioles). In fact … guess who was the last team to have three such great players and not go to the World Series.

…

If you guessed the 1964 Twins, with Allison, Killebrew and Oliva, you’d be right. Good company the Twins aren’t quite keeping, eh?

Funck has some amusing bits to say about the Twins:

The list is peppered with great players, great teams — and the 2009 Twins, who seem to be displaying an innate talent for doing less with more. The vast majority of teams with three players managing such gaudy production also paced their league in Team OPS+, and were thus able to bludgeon their opponents into submission; the Twins are currently fourth. Is there a reason? Well, the tenets of Minnesota Nice would require me to describe the bottom of the Twins batting order as “really trying very hard.”

Yes, great. So we’ve managed to put together step one of having a transcendently great team: a core of transcendently great players. Step two, of course, is filling out the roster with players who don’t fucking suck ass at baseball at a monumental level, and I’ll leave it to you to guess my thoughts on how we’ve done with step two.

Funck points out that merely upgrading a few of the spots in the lineup from “terrible” to “average” would go a long, long way to making this one of the (if not the) best offenses in the league — and it’s somewhat damning of the front office that they’ve done nothing to do this.

The point is, it would take very little to improve this lineup to leverage the rare and wonderful production currently provided by Mauer, Morneau, and Kubel, and the window to do so may soon close. The elephant in the corner of GM Bill Smith’s office is Mauer’s contract, set to expire at the end of 2010. Even if the Twins are able to re-sign the St. Paul native at a hometown discount, that contract, along with built-in raises for Morneau, Kubel, and Cuddyer (who has a team option), will mean even less financial flexibility starting in 2011. Minnesota’s home-grown hitters are in their prime, and it will be a shame if such a compelling concentration of hitting talent goes unrewarded.

Is anyone else feeling confident that Smith can make some sort of push (probably in the winter) to complement The Big Three J’s with actual major league talent? I can’t see any reason to be confident that this rare feat won’t go unrewarded.

But for this season, the Twins get to be both of the teams in the last 50 years to have three of the best hitters in the league and manage to do nothing with them.

So we’ve got that going for us, which is nice.