*Managed to keep this week’s links to American sports, for once, this despite spending Saturday watching rugby and cricket. You’re proud, I know. As always, this post appeared first at RandBall, your home for the retirement of the greats. *

When the media begins to bother players who have reported to spring training, the vast majority of the players declare some variation of the following statements:

1. I’ve never felt better.
2. I’ve changed my diet / workout routine / offseason routine / trainer / agent / et al, and it’s really made a difference.
3. I’m not worried about (insert injury that affected player last year.)

This is why it was so disconcerting to hear Justin Morneau be realistic about the possibility that his recurring concussion symptoms could end his career. Major league baseball players are not fatalistic. They do not admit reality; like a tightrope walker refusing to look down, they do not admit the possibility of failure. They just can’t, especially in a sport with such a well-developed minor-league system. Morneau knows that there are a dozen or more first basemen in the Twins’ system, all waiting for the guy at the top to quit so they can move up a notch. And so, usually, players don’t say things like this; by nature, it’s not in their makeup.

It’s hard to see our favorite athletes struggle with this sort of thing. It’s unlike them. We depend on them to be different from us, to be calm when we would panic and to succeed when we would fail. They are our representatives on the field, our proxies, and they are supposed to be able to do what we cannot. I don’t want to admit – don’t want Morneau to admit – that he might be too human and fragile to overcome a solid kick to the head, because that says too much about me and my belief in my favorite athletes than I’m comfortable with.

That, I guess, and that I just want to see him hit some dingers again. On with the links:

*We begin this week at Twinkie Town, as Jesse Lund interviews assistant GM Rob Antony on a wide range of topics. It’s a long interview, but well worth your reading time.

*The Economist explains why Jeremy Lin is actually kind of a problem for the Chinese government. Key quote: “Mr Lin is, put plainly, precisely everything that China’s state sport system cannot possibly produce.”

*Speaking of Lin, If you missed Sebastian Pruiti’s breakdown of the strategies NBA teams have used to guard Lin, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

*Spencer Hall writes about his roots as a NASCAR fan, as part of the celebration of the week leading up to the Daytona 500.

*The goofs at Down Goes Brown have put together their own team-by-team guide for this week’s NHL Trade Deadline.

*And finally: the search is over, everyone. We’ve found the worst sports fan, and possibly the worst person, in America.

It’s NBA All-Star weekend in Orlando, but most of the Timberwolves get a long break rather than a trip to the Sunshine State. With that in mind, I took some guesses at what the rest of the team was doing.

The post is over at Canis Hoopus.

I spent much of the offseason writing fanciful tales of what the Twins were doing over the winter. Now that spring training has started, however, there’s actual news out there. So for my first post of the spring, I decided to really change it up and write a fanciful, but news-based, Twins-related tale!

You’re right. That’s not a lot different.

Here’s the post for this week, looking at the news that the front office, and not Ron Gardenhire or head trainer Rick McWane, will be doing injury updates this year.

Late Sunday, Twinkie Town editor-in-chief Jesse Lund put up this year’s edition of his yearly interview with Twins assistant GM Rob Antony, always one of the site’s best reads every year; I wonder if Antony could have guessed that he’d soon be a minor character in a broad satire on the same site.

I don’t have much to say in the way of preface this week, except to say this: honestly, thank goodness for the Timberwolves. Would have been a long winter otherwise. As always, these links appeared first at RandBall, your home for strange dirt bike pictures.

I’m afraid for the Wild. I’m afraid because I was at Tuesday night’s game against Anaheim, and I got the strong sense that not one person in the building wanted to be there. The crowd was barely awake. The teams both appeared to have other things on their mind; you could almost imagine them asking each other for mortgage advice during stoppages in play. The Wild held an early 1-0 lead until the third period, then gave up two goals and lost. I’d describe more of the game for you, but the whole thing was so boring as to be almost self-erasing; at the final horn, there were groups of fans sitting and chatting at the various arena eateries, apparently having long given up on the game and gone in search of something entertaining to do.

I’m afraid for the Wild because I’ve experienced this sort of thing before. This is what Timberwolves games were like for an awfully long time, and it’s only now – eight seasons, four coaches, one GM change, and scores of players later – that the team’s fun to watch again. The similarities are evident; both teams fired a longtime coach. Both teams lost the player that was really the only star the franchise had ever had. And the Wild are currently going through a stage that the Timberwolves went through a few years ago – the stage where the team tries bringing in veterans and castoffs, in the hopes of accidentally hitting upon a combination of bad players that might magically transmogrify themselves into a winning team.

The secret, of course, isn’t better chemistry or veteran leadership or anything of that ilk; the secret is better players. The Timberwolves finally have a couple in Kevin Love and Ricky Rubio (and, dare we hope, in Nikola Pekovic). The Wild are going to have to find a few players like that through the draft. Their best hope is that Mikael Granlund, still playing in Europe, can be their Love, and that somehow they can be bad enough to pick up a Rubio equivalent along the way.

The scary part is that, maybe especially for a franchise that’s drafted as poorly as the Wild, high draft picks bring no guarantees. The Penguins picked first or second in the draft four years in a row before they finally rebounded to become a good team. On the flip side, Edmonton has picked first two years in a row, and in the top ten four times in five years – and the Oilers are the second-worst team in the NHL.

On with the links:

*Rob Neyer at SB Nation, and Brandon Warne at FanGraphs (the genesis of Neyer’s article), both think that Scott Baker is vastly underrated. You remember Scott Baker, don’t you? No? Pitches for the Twins? Starting rotation? Quiet?

*Spencer Hall compares the current Alabama football dynasty to another seemingly-unstoppable juggernaut – the mid-1990s Nebraska Cornhuskers. Thanks to various factors, Nebraska eventually fell apart – and Hall has a pretty good idea of the type of team that might be the one to knock Alabama off the mountaintop.

*The Economist studies Quebec’s push for a new set of Nordiques , especially the underlying factors that have changed to make Quebec again a possible destination for the NHL.

*The Classical looks at the current state of Ultimate Frisbee, which has become a competitive intercollegiate sport in addition to the reason half-drunk freshmen run you over when you’re trying to study on the campus quad.

*And finally: this is what ESPN has become. Oh ESPN, I remember you when you were cool, and now, look at yourself. First you got in bed with that Skip Bayless, and now this.

People seem to like my latest post at Twinkie Town, which discusses some of the good things about baseball in a few stream-of-consciousness mini-essays.

I can only say that I’m getting good at shameless pandering. This can also be summed up in the following rule: when at a loss of what to write about, write about baseball and dads. I’m sure glad spring training’s about to start, though – I’ve missed baseball.

*I had to absolutely sweat blood to write this week’s opening essay. Even now I’m not sure I got it right. If you think it’s terrible, or if you think I’m an idiot, please keep it to yourself; I don’t know if I’ve ever had such difficulties producing a coherent 500 words. As always, this post appeared first at RandBall, your home for weekend sports columns that nobody reads. *

Cast your mind back to last summer, and the Women’s soccer World Cup. You might remember the USA-Japan final, because you probably watched it; at the time it was the most-Tweeted event in the history of Twitter, eclipsing even the royal wedding and the death of Osama bin Laden. And if you watched the game, you might remember USA forward Alex Morgan, who scored the first goal of the game, a tremendous goal that any striker would be proud of.

You also might remember Morgan for being wildly popular during the tournament for her attractiveness. Seemingly hours after the USA’s heartbreaking loss to Japan, Morgan was making red-carpet appearances back in the States. And she was in the news again on Friday, as she was interviewed and pictured by SI.com because she’s in the upcoming Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.

This bothers me. Not because I have any interest in telling Alex Morgan what she should and should not do; if she wants to be photographed in nothing but bodypaint for SI, that’s her business. And not because I’m holding myself out as the last bastion of enlightenment, a seawall holding back the crass sexualized tide of popular culture. But at some level, it seems like the popular reaction to women’s sports is more about the attractiveness of the participants and less about the attractiveness of their play.

You could cogently argue both sides of the debate about celebrating female athletes for their looks, and I don’t wish to re-fight that battle. And female athletes certainly don’t have to make a choice; they can be both athletically talented and good-looking at the same time. But I do know that reducing Alex Morgan – fourteen goals for the national team, and the potential to star for another decade for the USA – to a cheesecake magazine spread feels wrong somehow. I’d like for our athletes to be more admired for what they do on the field than what they look like in a state of undress.

On with the links:

*Could football’s concussion problem really kill the game in America? Economists Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier think so – and they have a fascinating look at how it might happen.

*Remember when Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski was going to coach the L.A. Lakers, and then changed his mind, purportedly because of an email from a student? That student, Andrew Humphries, takes a look back at the hoopla – and explains why the experience, in part, pushed him away from Blue Devil hoops.

*Will Leitch has an unpopular opinion: Gus Johnson has become a terrible college hoops broadcaster. As much as I’ve written about how great Johnson is, I can’t really disagree here.

*Zambia is in the finals of the African continental soccer championship, which has occasioned much passing around of Leigh Montville’s Sports Illustrated story about the 1993 plane crash that claimed the lives of the entire Zambian national team.

*And finally: Shawn Fury, of the TVFury blog, thinks that in order to save the Super Bowl halftime show, it’s time to send in the ROTC.

That’ll do it for me. Enjoy your Saturday, especially tonight’s battle between the Timberwolves and NBA sensation Jeremy Lin’s New York Knicks, which is on (checks schedule)… Well, I guess this one isn’t on television. Take that, fans who wanted to watch the most interesting Wolves game of the near future!

This week at Twinkie Town, it was once again time to write goofy fictionalized scenes from the Minnesota Twins offseason.

In this edition, the team tries to confuse Tsuyoshi Nishioka, and Matt Capps is re-imagined as an accident-prone good-ol-boy who loves disgusting food. (Yeah, I don’t get it either.)

This week’s weekend links include a really superb picture of an owl, which I encourage you to view over at RandBall, your home for talking about anything but the Super Bowl, and where I’m just proud for working in another mention of Don Cherry’s Piano Desk.

I turned on the radio yesterday on the way to work, to KFAN, and the guys on their morning show were talking about Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski’s ankle. I have heard enough about Rob Gronkowski’s ankle for the rest of my life, so I attempted to get away from the conversation by switching over to MPR News, and dadgummit if they weren’t ALSO talking about Rob Gronkowski’s ankle. On public radio! It is inescapable. It is everywhere. I spent all day in fear that my phone would ring and the conversation would be about ankles of any kind.

The strange thing is, Super Bowl coverage has always been like this; there have been jokes about three-day pregame shows for literally my entire life. But football, the NFL in particular, has become so insanely popular, and sports media so insanely available, that it’s starting to feel like there’s just now one year-round NFL pregame show going on. I’ll bet the biggest story in the post Super Bowl glow isn’t about spring training, or the NBA or NHL; I bet it’s about Peyton Manning and where he might end up. Football in America has become like hockey in Canada, and I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not. I just know that I’m ready for something else. (Also, I hope Terry Bradshaw doesn’t turn into Don Cherry.)

On with the links:

It’s Super Bowl weekend, so we need to start with a football link. Here goes: Every once in awhile you’ll hear a story about how a significant number of Americans cannot tell you how many moons Earth has, or cannot name the president or correctly state how many limbs they are in possession of. And you will think to yourself, “Gosh, just who are these Americans?”At that moment, remember that more than 11 million people watched the Pro Bowl, surely the worst football game played above Pop Warner level this year, and realize just how many of these people are out there.

*Twins links of the week: John Bonnes has some answers about the Twins’ confusing $15 million drop in payroll, just two years into the team’s tenancy in the stadium that was supposed to ensure the Twins could compete financially with the rest of the league. Second, Parker Hageman examines the hitch in Danny Valencia’s swing, and wonders if its elimination might lead to a return to 2010 form for the third baseman.

*David Roth at The Classical looks at Bill Raftery, the best of all the color guys in college hoops.

*Also at The Classical, Jay Sacher – not a hockey fan – heads over to check out his town’s AHL team, and discovers (and illustrates) a different sporting experience that he’s used to.

And finally: The last time I played Wiffle ball, the challenge involved swinging a bat that weights about four grams. Apparently these days in big-time Wiffle ball, the real difficulty is coming up with the most annoyingly, tauntingly boisterous celebration you can manage.

That’s enough for this week. I’ve always said that the Super Bowl is the secular Christmas, so get out there and enjoy it. Eat four pounds of cheese. Let’s keep America great. (Oh, and according to ESPN, every one of us has to drink twelve beers, too, so get ready for tomorrow.)

In the latest installment of my multi-part look into the fictional life of Timberwolves center Darko Milicic, Darko explains why he does not trust banks, and lists off a few other untrustworthy things.

It’s here: I, Darko, Do Not Trust Your Banks

*For more I, Darko, click here.
*

This week’s Twinkie Town post is again a news update. Again it’s written quite cynically. I must just be lashing out at the lack of baseball. Jokes are made about Joe Mauer and Denard Span whistling past the graveyard, about Ben Revere’s noodle arm, about Trevor Plouffe’s terrible defense and Carl Pavano’s resulting murderous visage, Tom Kelly’s mumbling, the long-ago attempt to change David Ortiz that eventually soured Big Papi on the Twins organization and drove him into the grateful arms of the Red Sox, and the performances by Francisco Liriano in winter ball.

While I’m at it, last week’s update was much the same. It even included some of the same jokes, many of them about Liriano.

It’s like three weeks until spring training starts. Thank goodness.