Every year, baseball’s movers and shakers gather somewhere in the South to… well, I don’t know what the stated purpose of the Winter Meetings is. I do know that every general manager, free agent, and player representative in baseball is there, right now, making deals. It’s the pinnacle of the Hot Stove League, and for four days in December the media covers baseball offseason news like it’s Super Bowl week.

At Twinkie Town, we figure that if everybody else is going to cover things wall-to-wall, we might as well, too. I spent Monday writing updates – one the night before, one in the morning before work, one at lunch, and one after racing home from work – about baseball rumors that may never, ever come to fruition. It’s an entertaining time, not least because it’s a departure from what I usually do when writing about the Twins, which is to lay around thinking up new jokes with one of the same eight premises I’ve been using for four years.

Below are links to the updates, though they’re a day out of date by now. By the time you read this, they will seem pointless. But I take some shots at the team’s absurd re-signing of Matt Capps, and that’s always fun.

Early Morning
Morning (Mark Buehrle rumors and others)
Afternoon (Josh Willingham rumors)
Evening (Capps signs)

I liked today’s opening paragraph when I wrote it. Today I realize that it had no evidence and means nothing. I wish I was better at stuff. Anyway, this post appeared first at RandBall, your home for going to Orlando for Thanksgiving and pretending it was a hardship:

In my experience, one does not have to look far to find an online opinion that NBA fans are a dying breed. ESPN’s Bill Simmons used to write quite regularly that he was “one of 18 NBA fans left,” for example, and with the NBA lockout apparently over I’ve seen a couple more columns lamenting that nobody cares about the NBA. The problem with this is that by most measures the NBA is comfortably the third most-popular sports league in America, enjoyed and watched by millions. I understand this “woe is us” impulse – I am, after all, a non-Canadian hockey fan, and sometimes it seems like “Why doesn’t everybody understand how great hockey is?” is the only thing any of us can talk about. But, at least where the NBA is concerned, this impulse confuses me. NBA fans, worry not: there are many more like you and they’re everywhere.

We didn’t do the links over Thanksgiving, because RandBall decided that he had to go to Orlando instead, so we’ve got a number of them from the past two weeks:

*The Sports Economist blog notes that at least one pro-stadium group here in Minnesota seems to think that if you oppose the Vikings stadium, you’re too poor to have your opinion count anyway.

*I was thrilled to find out that John “Twins Geek” Bonnes, like me, wasn’t too happy about the way that Joe Nathan departed.

*Patrick Donnelly at VikesCentric compares Les Frazier to Les Steckel, to try to answer whether the former will get fired.

*A Wolf Among Wolves thinks that Michael Beasley may be on his way to the margins of the Wolves’ lineup.

*Parker Hageman shows us proof that Brian Duensing belongs in the bullpen, not the rotation.

*I enjoyed Shawn Fury’s story of the life of a young sports journalist.

*And finally, for those of you interested in college athletics, this post from the Sports Economist about college athletics and university governance structures is the link of the week. It’s a way of looking at things that I hadn’t considered.

That’ll do it for me. If you’re looking for some anger to sustain you this weekend, remember: this man is well-paid for his opinions.

Eagle-eyed readers will note that my latest post at Canis Hoopus, 13 Little-Known Provisions In The New CBA, bears a striking similarity to something I wrote last Monday for Twinkie Town. I can only say that it was unfortunate that baseball and basketball both put together new collective bargaining agreements so close to one another, thereby throwing into sharp relief the fact that I have pretty much one joke in my entire repertoire.

At Twinkie Town this week, I did the usual Monday news reset, which I find I am enjoying because it gives me an excuse to be pessimistic. I can’t do analytical, but I can do curmudgeonly, and I’ve been doing so every Monday morning this week. Cathartic, you know?

Just to show I haven’t stopped being silly, though, I also made up 15 little-known things in the new baseball CBA. This led one commenter to call me a hero in German, and another to tell me I was stealing jokes from “I Love Lucy.” The Twinkie Town commenters are just the best.

Today’s Twinkie Town output covered two subjects: new Twins backup catcher Ryan Doumit, and other offseason news, also including Ryan Doumit. As you can tell, Doumit has been much on my mind lately, mostly because the more I think about it, the more I realize that the Twins have signed a backup catcher who can’t catch. This will lead to the team carrying three catchers, one of whom is Drew Butera, the worst hitter in the major leagues. Drew Butera will play. Drew Butera will bat. He will fail with the bat, and every time he does, I’ll be stuck wondering: Why did the Twins sign a backup catcher who can’t play backup catcher?

Also, it would seem that Joe Nathan has signed with the Texas Rangers. He got hurt and we had to watch Matt Capps and Jon Rauch fail all over the diamond because of that, and he got paid something like $24 million, and as thanks he goes and signs with another team. I shouldn’t be bitter because he was very good for the Twins for a long time and he doesn’t owe the Twins anything, least of all resigning with a team that’s probably not going to be very good next year. But still: I sort of am.

Thanks to an internet outage at the mansion, I haven’t had a chance to post this week’s Twinkie Town writing, which was a reasonably grumpy Monday news roundup. I’m not sure why I’m so completely pessimistic about the Twins. Maybe because they’re a 99-loss team that has holes in the lineup all over the diamond and still somehow has very little payroll flexibility.

*This week’s weekend links were, for some reason, almost impossible to write. What you see below is about my fifth attempt at an introduction. I can’t say it got that much better, but at least it took me a long time, right? At any rate, these appeared first at RandBall, your home for hockey coverage from now until the NBA lockout ends. *

I have just been made aware of the trailer for “Goon,” a movie starring Cottage Grove native Seann William Scott as a slow-witted bouncer who becomes a hockey goon. I am aware of two decent hockey movies ever – “Slap Shot” and the first “Mighty Ducks” movie. (I’m still peeved that the unspoken subtitle of “Miracle” was, “The story of how Herb Brooks and three guys from Boston won a gold medal, with the help of a bunch of Minnesotans who get two minutes of combined screen time.” Yes, I’m a bitter, parochial lunatic. Sue me.) And now I can’t decide if I hope this movie is the third decent one, or not.

Since I’m your typical paranoid hockey fan, I’m just as concerned about the wider public’s opinion of this movie as I am about my own opinion. I’m afraid that this movie will spend two days in theaters, sink like a rock, and be out on DVD three weeks later, thus proving that even a hockey movie with Stifler can’t succeed even on a limited scale, because nobody in the country cares about hockey. I’m also worried that it will be a success, even a small one, because any non-hockey fan that sees this movie will assume that hockey is UFC on ice – a little bit of exhibition skating in between bare-knuckle brawls.

This sort of seems crazy to me: I want you to like this sport, but not for the wrong reasons. But maybe this is a common thing; if you took a friend to see a band you loved, you wouldn’t want that friend to say, “I don’t know about the music, but I like that the singer’s wearing red shoes.” You would feel like your friend had entirely missed the point, and what’s more, you wouldn’t be able to argue with him without sounding like a crazy person.

I guess my point is this: instead of trailers, theaters should be required to show ten minutes of clips like this one.

Anyway, on with the links:

*The Division 3 football playoffs start today. The Minnesota representatives, St. Thomas and St. Scholastica, meet in the first round at 1:00 in St. Paul. It is supposed to snow. Somehow, this feels right. In celebration of this, here’s an long Shawn Fury interview with Pat Coleman of D3Sports.com. Coleman is the guy who manages to keep track of a division that has 25 conferences that get automatic playoff bids, plus a bunch that don’t – sort of like the BCS at 100 miles an hour and with no national TV contract.

*I know how we love invented stats on this blog. Chase Stuart at Smart Football has come up with rather a good new stat: rating run plays in the NFL based on a fairly logical definition of success or failure.

*The Sports Media Watch blog wonders: given that six companies control most of the TV in this country, and four of these have relationships with the NBA, how much unbiased NBA lockout coverage are we really going to get?

*And finally: I had no idea that the scheduling in men’s professional tennis was this goofy.

That’s enough for this week. As mentioned, we in the metro area are scheduled to get our first shot of snow this year. I’m looking forward to driving in it, and to my annual first attempted stop of winter, when I temporarily forget what I’m doing and slide gracefully into an intersection. It should be fun.

This week, the weekend links begin with some ranting about hockey refereeing, and ends with me hoping that the Dallas Stars’ rink burns to the ground. It must be hockey season. Throw in a link regarding the labor unrest in the Australian Football League, and I’d say this is another successful edition, which as always appeared first at RandBall.

Tuesday night in Calgary, Wild winger Nick Johnson got kicked out of a game for supposedly headbutting Jarome Iginla. In the real world, what happened is that Iginla started a dustup to try to get his team going, tore Johnson’s helmet off, punched him a few times, and then started whining to the refs that Johnson was headbutting him even though all Johnson was doing was trying to hold on. Wild beat writer Michael Russo, like anybody outside of the Calgary metro area, didn’t see why Johnson had been thrown out, other than because Iginla had yelled at the refs to call a headbutt. And so Russo tweeted this: “Maybe LaRue and Kowal should let Iginla officiate the 3rd period since they’re letting him call majors and game misconducts now.”

In theory, I should be old enough and calm enough to ignore bad calls by referees, to accept them along with the bad bounces and minor heartbreaks of sports. In reality, I was ready to drive to Calgary to attack some assistant referees. And my reactions are multiplied for WCHA referees, especially one in particular who shall remain nameless. I wish I could understand why referees can provoke me to such uncontrolled outbursts of rage. Perhaps they serve to highlight the inherent unfairness of life. Or maybe it’s because they can’t see an elbowing penalty that happens three feet in front of their face.

On with the links:

*You’ve probably read a lot about the Penn State scandal, but I invite you to read one more thing: Spencer Hall’s ruminations on the banality – and therefore the terror – of evil.

*Paul Flannery at The Classical (which is newish, and which I really think I’m going to like quite a lot) tracks down Spaceman Bill Lee, one of the great baseball characters ever.

*Staying at The Classical, Marine veteran Matt Ufford writes about war, in honor of Veteran’s Day. Key quote: “Not everyone comes back broken, but nobody comes back whole.”

*Want to know a big reason why the Twins are in such a mess? Jesse at Twinkie Town looks at the bareness of the Twins’ farm system over the past few years.

*And finally: the NBA isn’t the only league having a labor dispute at the moment. Consider the case of Australian Rules Football, where players get less than a quarter of team income, for a sport that appears to be basically bare-knuckle boxing interspersed with wind sprints. That 50-50 split’s not looking so bad now, eh, NBA folks?

That’ll do it for me. We close with this quote from Dallas Stars winger Loui Eriksson: “No one … there’s not many people there [at home games]… It’s also nice to go on the road too, playing in some big arenas with a lot of people.” On behalf of the people of Minnesota, who are still bitter: AH HA HA HA HA AH HA HA I HOPE YOUR TEAM FOLDS AND YOUR RINK BURNS TO THE GROUND.

I spent a lot of time on Sunday writing a post summing up the state of the Twins offseason for Monday morning at Twinkie Town. It touched on free agent news and arbitration news and a few stories about possible front-office moves that didn’t seem very important.

Monday afternoon, the Twins fired general manager Bill Smith, surprising everyone, not least me. I madly typed out a reaction in less than five minutes. It reads like an AP newswire article written by someone who’d had eighteen cups of coffee. I used the word “pilloried” and took a shot at Trevor Plouffe. We really need to write these things in advance, like obituaries, so that this sort of thing doesn’t happen. I’m going to get a start on this: “Monday, Tsuyoshi Nishioka was eaten by wolves in an unfortunate and unlikely accident in downtown St. Paul. Police suspect mafia involvement.”

I also wrote about the Twins and TV ratings for the World Series, this being the kind of thing you write about on a day that there couldn’t possibly be a lick of news.

If you happen to click the first week in this week’s links – the one in the first paragraph below – you’ll note that Rand noted that last weekend was so good, sports-wise, that even I had to be happy. I swear, I’m really not as much of a curmudgeon as everyone thinks. Anyway, as always this week’s links appeared first over at RandBall, your home for whatever the heck is going on here...

Last Monday, the Proprietor wrote about how good things were over the weekend, sports-wise. Since then, the Wild beat Detroit on the road in overtime and slaughtered Vancouver at home. Gopher hoops won (albeit in an exhibition, but that’s not always been a guaranteed win for Minnesota.) And Gopher hockey shut out North Dakota last night, 2-0. I don’t know what’s going on around here lately, but I think I like it. At the very least, let’s all enjoy it while it’s happening.

A few links for this fine Saturday:

*Local genius and RandBall contributor Stu has made his list of suggested home run calls for new Twins play-by-play guy Cory Provus. Children, and adults of a nervous disposition, may want a responsible person of stout heart with them while they read the list (it’s PG-13 for sure), but apart from that I demand that you all go there right now and laugh until tears come to your eyes.

*An interesting note from The Economist: the guys that run McLaren’s Formula One team are starting to develop F1 car-style sensors that can be used on athletes in other sports. This might help coaches in other sports help determine fatigue levels for players and therefore make better decisions of when to substitute. Also, it would be fun to put these on football players, and then watch a nose tackle’s constitution hit the red line when he tries to return a fumble fifty yards for a touchdown.

*A Wolf Among Wolves says that Anthony Randolph might be good, he might be terrible, but mostly he’s just part of a huge group of NBA players with too much talent and not enough something else. (I enjoy links like this because they help allow me to pretend that the NBA is just in an extended preseason, and is not going to waste an entire year for no good reason.)

*And finally: the average MLS game now has more spectators than the average NBA or NHL game. Go ahead and note that the stadiums are different sizes, and any other argument you care to muster; this is still more evidence that the “Will soccer ever catch on in America?” debate is not really a debate, not any more. Anybody who’s pretending that it’s still up for discussion has long since been left behind by what’s actually happening out there. You may go ahead and accuse me of being a “soccer kisser-upper,” because I do like soccer an awful lot, but I think it’s time we accept that soccer is the fifth major sport in our country.

That’ll do it for me. Let’s remember: Last year it snowed seven inches on November 13, and the snow didn’t leave for the rest of the winter. I don’t say this to depress you. I’m trying to tell you that – like this confusingly good run for our local sports teams – let’s try to enjoy the good weather while it lasts.