*Looking back, I feel like I can almost pick out the posts that are written on vacation, as was this one. They’re a little more head-in-the-clouds, somehow. As always, this post appeared first at RandBall, your home for tagging along to hockey coverage. *

This week, Joe Mauer was named to the All-Star team for the fifth time. Theoretically, this should have been an opportunity for celebration, for Twins fans – a confirmation that our favorite son is back among the game’s elite, something that is borne out by the objective numbers. Yet within hours, team president Dave St. Peter was on Twitter, defending Mauer to the catcher’s critics. It’s the latest development in the confusing Minnesotan attitude towards Mauer, perhaps the most One Of Us athlete ever.

Mauer is fascinating, and yet almost everyone views him as normal and level-headed. He’s boring, but despite this – maybe because of this – he’s interesting. He’s simultaneously the best-loved and most-hated athlete in town, yet he can’t be described as polarizing on any level; everyone has a Mauer opinion, and yet off the field he’s entirely un-newsworthy. He seems open and friendly while being inscrutable and private; he’s a marketer’s dream because he has no baggage, yet the only way he can be used to sell a product is by poking fun at that lack of baggage, unless the product in question is something wholesome, like milk.

He doesn’t get angry on the field, and if he feels frustration, he doesn’t show it. He celebrates, but not exuberantly; he smiles, but doesn’t laugh. His swing is smooth, not powerful; he’s clearly working hard, but doesn’t ever appear to be straining every sinew. He is not emotional. Our only hint of feeling comes when he is running back to the dugout, head down, a slight trudge in his step – the gait of a man buffeted by a stiff breeze that only he can feel.

In some ways, he can be interpreted in any way the analyst chooses. I might say he’s a good hitter and he finds a way to stay on the field and he seems like he’s really nice – and his contract is entirely appropriate. You might say he’s a good hitter but not good enough, doesn’t catch often enough, and is too nice – and gets paid too much money. Neither of us has any extra information, and Mauer provides nothing else. Who he is, is entirely in the eye of the beholder. What a fascinating, boring, riveting, yawn-worthy presence.

On with the links:

*Canis Hoopus goes inside the numbers on potential future Timberwolf Nic Batum – and discovers he’s a lot like Jared Dudley or Mike Dunleavy. Maybe it’s a good thing that the Blazers want to match Minnesota’s contract offer.

*Steve Adams at Twinkie Town reviews the Twins’ international signings, including 16-year-old Dominican shortstop Amaurys Miner.

*Anytime Chris at the Western College Hockey writes something that refers to a CHL practice as “one of the biggest scams in sports,” you know it’s worth a read.

*It’s the week of the Fourth of July, so let’s watch Spencer Hall participate in that most American of traditions: the hot-dog eating contest.

*And finally: the Cetics really have selected the classiest guy in the draft this year.

Today, Star Tribune reporters Michael Russo and Michael Rand caught Zach Parise at the airport on his way home to Orono. Rand shot a less-than-one-minute video, which ends somewhat abruptly. Here now, the epilogue to this video, the one that didn’t make it on screen:

RAND: Thanks, Zach. We appreciate it. Oh, and can I give you some advice?

PARISE: What’s that?

RAND: (in a low voice) Run. Run now.

PARISE: What?

RAND: (urgently) You heard me. Run. Get out now. Turn around and go upstairs and buy yourself a plane ticket to anywhere but here.

PARISE: Dude, I live here. I’m going to go home and think this through.

RAND: No, no, you’re not listening. You need to get out of this state, and you need to get out right now, before it takes its last best chance to swallow you whole.

PARISE: Why? What are you talking about?

RAND: Can’t you see what’s happening here? You’ve been back five seconds and you’ve already got the media hounding you. Imagine what will happen if the Wild lose. Imagine what will happen if you don’t score goals, if you get hurt, if you aren’t perfect in every respect. I’m speaking for the media here. Look what we’re doing to Joe Mauer. We will eat you alive. We will publish your salary numbers at every opportunity. Three guys in town are already writing their “Zach Parise is killing the Wild” columns, they all have radio shows, and they will absolutely savage you. No, I’m serious. Run. Get out now. This is your last chance.

PARISE: I…. (he flees the airport)

RAND: Poor guy.

RUSSO (who has been on the phone the entire time, talking to 96 different league insiders and somehow digging up fourteen different pieces of otherwise-unreported news, all of which have been confirmed by ten other people) What did you say?

RAND: Nothing. (he exhales heavily) Nothing important.

*Editor’s note: This began life as a RandBall comment, but the formatting there is terrible, so I posted it first at Hockey Wilderness. *

For those looking to plan out their summers, I came up with a short quiz that will help you determine if you need to schedule in times to watch the Twins.

(This is actually a week old, but I like to think it’s timeless.)

I miss Lew Ford quite badly. He was an average outfielder, but he was an above-average personality, and a truly exceptional joke subject. I wish more Twins were like him, and that’s the subject of my latest Twinkie Town piece.

If you’ve still got a few minutes left today, check out my Twins-Tigers series notes, and impress your friends with up-to-the-minute Tigers injury news.

This week’s post is dedicated to my college roommate Jordan, who is an enormous Italy fan and who sent me about fifteen emails during their semifinal match against Germany. The part about diving is pretty much lifted directly from my conversation with him, with the addition of a few vocabulary words. And as always, this post appeared first at RandBall, your home for everybody but @JohnSharkman, who is Canadian now.

It would be a stretch to say that everyone is watching Euro 2012, but a heck of a lot of people sure are; two and a half million Americans watched each of the semifinals in midweek on either ESPN or ESPN Deportes, impressive numbers given that the matches took place in the middle of a workday. That’s a 50% increase from Euro 2008. Even Clarence Swamptown has at least considered watching a game, which is an infinity percent increase from Euro 2008.

Sunday’s final – at 1:45pm, perfect afternoon viewing for those of you who can’t stand watching Bruce Chen and his marshmallow fastball shut the Twins out again – matches Italy and Spain. I’d like to give you a glowing preview, extolling Spain’s passing and Italy’s newfound attacking style, but I really can’t, because soccer finals are almost universally awful. The teams, afraid of being torn asunder by a counter-attack, generally are content to defend strongly and launch only occasional speculative forays into enemy territory. As a consequence, most finals are low-scoring or one-sided. The last major final, Netherlands vs. Spain at the 2010 World Cup, had two teams known for attacking, fun-to-watch offenses. That match degenerated into people kicking each other in the middle of the pitch; without looking it up, my memory says that there were 85 yellow cards awarded, and at one point two Dutch players had machetes on the field.

So for the Clarence Swamptowns of the world, who aren’t soccer fans but maybe heard something about Spain’s exceptional offensive style, or about the nutcase-genius hybrid that is Italy strike Mario Balotelli – judge not based on tomorrow’s match. It will likely feature very few goals. Because teams from Southern Europe are involved, it will involve players throwing themselves to the ground in a hysterical manner, like terrible actors trying to fake a mortal wound in a high school production of Romeo and Juliet. (There won’t be more diving than a normal match; it’ll just be accomplished with more histrionics than usual.) It’ll finish 1-1, or maybe 0-0, and go to penalties, and afterwards everyone will try to pretend it was a classic and not a thinly disguised shin-kicking competition.

And now that I’ve written this, I suppose it’ll end 4-3 with two goals in second-half stoppage time. On with the links:

*Parker Hageman wonders if Nick Blackburn can be fixed. (Gut feeling: no. But at least now you can see charts that explain why Blackburn is so awful.)

*You may have been excited about the Chase Budinger trade, but poster Madison Dan at Canis Hoopus really has the only legitimate reaction.

*The Vikes Geek is still not too happy about the Vikings stadium deal. This time, he’s pointing out who stands to benefit from a deal that does not have a land-purchase agreement tied into it.

*And finally: in America, millionaire businessmen sit in the suites. Millionaire England fans at Euro 2012, well – they’ve got an entirely different approach.

I wonder if any other league provokes as much vitriol as the NBA. Non-baseball fans say MLB is boring, non-hockey fans ignore the NHL, and there are no non-football fans… but I talk to people all the time that hate the NBA with an out-loud passion. I’ve never been able to figure out why this is, but to those people: tough darts. This week’s post is about the NBA. As always, it appeared first at RandBall, your home for having just one quirk.

“In 1979, Michigan State beat Indiana State for the NCAA Championship, a game now remembered as Round One of the Magic vs. Bird battle. The two would battle for the NBA Championship for the entire next decade, before Michael Jordan dominated the 1990s. Other stars – such as Isiah Thomas and Hakeem Olajuwon – also won titles in that span. And now, LeBron James has finally won his first title, finally supplanting Kobe Bryant and Tim Duncan atop the NBA!”

This is how the NBA’s marketing machine would like to render the last three decades. For years, the league has been careful to market itself around superstars, rather than teams, the theory being that teams are interesting only to locals, but individual players can be interesting on a national level. And so we remember the 80’s for Magic vs. Bird, the 90’s for Jordan, and so on. The players themselves have bought into the hype; look at the quotes following LeBron’s infamous Decision. “I’d rather play against Earvin Johnson than play with him,” said Bird. “From college, I was trying to figure out how to beat Larry Bird,” said Magic. “In all honesty, I was trying to beat those guys [Magic and Bird],” said Jordan.

It’s so easy to buy into the cult of personality, especially when you’re at the center. The ridiculous thing, of course, is that these guys portraying themselves as lone wolves, locked in hand-to-hand individual death matches, were surrounded by some of the greatest players in league history. Kevin McHale, Robert Parish, Scottie Pippen, James Worthy, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar – there’s five guys who were voted as part of the 50 Greatest Players in NBA History. Bird was greater than McHale and Parish, sure, and Magic was the key to those Lakers teams instead of Kareem and Worthy, but so what? We should remember the Lakers and Celtics, the Bulls and the Pistons, the Spurs and the later Lakers, rather than remembering individual superstars. I mention this because there are certainly many reasons to hate LeBron James – for his betrayal of Cleveland, for what’s perceived as his arrogant attitude, for being young and absurdly talented atop the world.

But I find it ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous, to hate him for teaming up with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh – or at least, hating LeBron and not hating Larry Bird and Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan for the same reason. All of them got the chance to play with other great players and took it, and the agency – whether that team was created by the player, or by some general manager or draft luck or otherwise – shouldn’t matter. This year’s NBA Finals was fascinating – for LeBron’s dominance and for Kevin Durant’s play, yes, but for Russell Westbrook’s recklesness and Mario Chalmers’s shooting and James Harden’s disappearance, too. In the future – maybe even now – we’ll remember it as LeBron vs. Durant, or maybe Round One of the LeBron vs. Durant battle. But we shouldn’t.

On with the links:

*Hey, you, guy who just caught a home run ball at Target Field! What are you going to do next? Commenter Stu has a helpful guide for you over at Twinkie Town, one you should commit to memory should you ever find yourself in this scenario.

*Playoffs appear to be coming to college football, a process that has involved much fighting between the conferences about what that playoff might look like. The great Spencer Hall reviews each conference’s negotiation style, in one of the funnier charts I’ve ever seen. BONUS: Since much of the fighting has been between the SEC and Big Ten in this process, Hall attempts to bury the hatchet by confessing on behalf of the SEC. Spencer Hall is the best.

*Kyle Wagner, writing for Deadspin, reviews the current state of sports concussion research. The great hope right now is that we can discover chronic traumatic encephalopathy – the disease that has contributed to the deaths of so many former players – sometime before the person actually dies.

*At Baseball Prospectus, Professor Alan M. Nathan writes about the knuckleball – and how it’s less like a butterfly, and more like a bullet, than we have previously believed.

*And finally: it turns out there are 13 positions in basketball, not five. Who knew?

Over at Twinkie Town, I tried to explain Francisco Liriano by using similes.

In a literary snafu of the highest order, I originally called them “metaphors,” and I’m thinking I should probably just slink off the internet stage in shame forever. All I know is that Liriano is destined to cause someone a panic attack, probably himself.

I wrote a review of Steve Aschburner’s new book, “Harmon Killebrew: Ultimate Slugger.” You can read it at Twinkie Town.

You can tell these are late, because Wednesday is in no sense a weekend. As always, these links first appeared at RandBall, your home for life being a marathon, not a sprint.

Two weeks ago, Johan Santana threw a no-hitter. If you already knew this, you probably also know that it was the first no-hitter by a Mets pitcher in team history. And if you knew that, you probably also know that the third-base umpire blew a call in the sixth inning, calling foul a Carlos Beltran line drive that caught the chalk line and should have been called fair, thus ending the no-hit bid. It’s the latest in a long line of high-profile blown calls that stretches back to the beginning of baseball, because with any entirely human-run system, many, many mistakes will be made.

I’ve got the replay system that can fix this issue, and that will allow for any calls – not just fair or foul and trap plays, but everything, including balls and strikes – to be reviewed. Here’s the deal: pitches will be tracked with ball-tracking software, the same system that is used in tennis and is being tested for possible inclusion at soccer’s 2014 World Cup. Everything else will use the TV technology already in place. Replays involving the “TV umpire” will have to be clearly wrong to be overturned – all calls will otherwise stay with the umpires’ decision. As for balls and strikes, more than half the ball must be within the strike zone, or the call will not be overturned. Each team will be allowed to be wrong once without losing any challenges, but once they are wrong twice, they can no longer challenge calls. This removes the incentive to challenge borderline calls, as they’ll likely not be overturned, since borderline calls will usually end up staying with the umpire’s decision. Umpires will also have the ability to refer decisions to the “TV umpire,” thereby letting the guy with the eye in the sky make the correct call. The TV umpire also means that the umpires won’t have to run off the field to make the call – the guy in the booth will make it.

Of course, Bud Selig is on record as saying, “I’ve had very, very little pressure from people who want to do more,” which is likely code for “the owners don’t want it, nor does anyone want to pay for it.” Also, at some point someone is going to discover that I lifted pretty much this entire system directly from cricket, and probably call me names.

The system doesn’t work perfectly in cricket, and there is plenty of argument about whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing for the game. India, one of the pre-eminent teams in the world, simply refuses to use it. But as far as I can see, this system accomplishes its most important task – the awful umpiring decision, the how-could-he-miss-that, ump-are-you-blind, Don-Denkinger-reborn kind of call has been eliminated. And really, isn’t that the baseline for what we want a replay system to accomplish?

On with the links:

*Steve Adams at Twinkie Town has an interesting look at top Twins draft pick Byron Buxton, who may well be the organization’s new top prospect.

*Aaron Gleeman breaks down the surprising success of Twins lefty (and Guelph, Ontario’s own) Scott Diamond.

*Seattleites are not happy that the OKC Thunder are finding success in the South, but as Jeremy Repanich points out, without demonized owner Clay Bennett, GM Sam Presti – who built the Thunder – would never have been hired.

*Tim Marchman has heard much about this game called “hockey,” and so, he decided to head to his local bar and try out being a hockey fan. (Note: hockey-loving readers such as Rocket may not want to read this too closely as it may provoke volcanic hatred.)

*And finally: I need to warn you that the following link is, in terms of percentage of words that are swear words, the single most profane thing ever included in the weekend links. If you are offended in any way by profanity, do not click. However, if you can stomach the f-word used as every part of speech, then I can promise you that this is the best poem that will be written about the England soccer team at the European Championships.

Monday is usually the day on which my goofy Twins column of the week is posted, but Monday night happened to be the first round of the MLB Draft. Since the Twins are terrible, and had three picks in the first round and first supplemental round, fun was shunted aside in favor of one of the more exciting days the team is likely to have this year.

As for me, I previewed the draft, previewed the week ahead for the Twins, and compared Byron Buxton to B.J. Upton like three different times.