All weekend baseball games during prime yard work season should be played at midday. I feel very strongly about this. What am I supposed to listen to while raking leaves that I planned to rake in November, a plan scuttled by seven inches of snow? While you ponder that, here’s the weekend links. As always, this was first published at RandBall, the very best sports blog in all of Minnesota.

Happy Saturday! The last time we met, two weeks ago, we had three inches of snow on the ground and I was writing about our January-esque weather. Today, I’m planning out a day full of yard work. This doesn’t make a lick of sense and we all should complain to someone, if possible.

After two weeks away, though, I’ve got a backlog of links to get through, so on we go:

*I liked this analysis from John Bonnes, detailing the delta stream of future probabilities resulting from a single Drew Butera at-bat late in a game in Toronto. And while we’re talking about Twins-related analysis, you can’t do better than Parker Hageman – who this week is studying the video and correlating a slight change in Denard Span’s pre-swing hand positioning with Span’s new troubles with hitting the fastball. Marvelous stuff.

*Kyle Nelson, writing for Inside Minnesota Soccer, has the strange-but-true story of how a bunch of second-division players almost ended up playing for the men’s national soccer team in an important World Cup qualifier. (Longtime US soccer viewers may now insert their own “anybody’s better than Jeff Agoos” jokes here.)

*In stadium news, the Vikes Geek doesn’t seem too happy with the Vikings. To put it mildly. Chalk at least one fan up in the “Let The Bums Leave Town” group.

*The baseball season’s already started, which makes this particular preseason prognostication a bit late, but I still encourage you to listen to Michael “Ken Tremendous” Schur and Joe Posnanski make their 2011 baseball picks. I’m not normally much of a podcast kind of guy, but this one’s worth it.

*And finally, if you’re not in the mood for serious discussion, Spencer Hall has some theories about what team luge might look like.

That’ll do it for me this week. I’ll leave you to admire the awesome new Star Tribune web design. (Except for the comments that don’t all fit on one page. Again. I thought we were past this! Everyone finds this incredibly annoying, right, or is it just me?)

One of my first columns for Twinkie Town, back in early 2007, was a slightly-tweaked ripoff of Dave Barry‘s annual Year In Review column – the tweak being that it was about the Twins, and written before the year even began.

It’s become an annual thing, and though many of the jokes are similar – all of the Livan Hernandez jokes have become Jose Mijares jokes, for example – it’s still fun. The 2011 version is up at Twinkie Town. As I wrote on Twitter – fifth time’s the charm!

Last Monday at Twinkie Town was the final Monday of spring training. Starting tomorrow, I have to come up with actual things to write about on Mondays. For now, though, I just made five top five lists – I lacked the creativity to come up with ten things for any of the lists – and called it good enough.

Theoretically, there was space for twenty-five jokes in this piece. I am happy with about four of them, maybe as many as five. I am batting .200 at best. I am the Drew Butera of comedy.

These links are actually from last Saturday, March 26. But Rand went on vacation last week – there must have been a national pug convention or something – and so there weren’t any links today, April 2. This has thus given me the opportunity to post the links this week and pretend that I did it on time. As always, these links first appeared at RandBall, your home for vacationing high school sportswriters on the internet.

Happy Saturday! So how are you enjoying January, the third time around this year? Mine even came complete with a little bit of midwinter sickness, which is always entertaining. I’ve spent the past three days exploring to see what kind of fun new interactions I might be able to find between various over-the-counter cold medications. So far I haven’t found much, but I’ll let you know if I come up with anything good.

*We start this week with – what else – obscure sports! Australian Rules Football started this week, to much acclaim from genius Spencer Hall, who calls it the greatest sport on the planet. I checked out some of a game on ESPN3.com, and I have to admit – the Aussies are serious about their violence. There’s a lot of shoving and punching outside the confines of the game. Everybody acts like this is normal. At one point, the cameras caught one player mule-kicking an opposing player in the crotch. Understandably angry, the kickee retaliated with a full-force kidney punch. This didn’t turn into a brawl and the announcers didn’t even mention it. Anyway, I can give Aussie Rules my niche sports endorsement, because it looks like a game you and your buddies would invent when you were ten years old and bored in the backyard.

*The guys behind the baseball webcomic “The Dugs” are giving it up, which is too bad because the site was genuinely funny. As proof: this. It’s philosophy and baseball wrapped into one!

*Parker Hageman has studied the video, and has figured out what might be going wrong with Kevin Slowey. Wednesday night when the Twins were on TV, I watched the game differently, thanks to Parker’s work. I can’t think of a much better compliment than that.

*When the Big Ten announced it was going to start a hockey conference, I immediately went to the Western College Hockey Blog to find out what to think. Key quote, regarding the conference tournament: “Apparently the feeling is that Michigan fans won’t travel to Minneapolis/St. Paul for a conference tournament, and Minnesota fans won’t travel to Detroit for a conference tournament, so the top idea as of now seems to be to hold the Big Ten conference tournament in Chicago, where fans of neither team will travel. That seems smart.”

*And finally, two things I always like: when Michael Russo goes off on someone (it’s Mikko Koivu this time), and when Steve Rushin reminds me of my childhood.

That’ll do it for me – and apparently, for RandBall, at least for a week. I’m not sure where we should take the discussion in the meantime. Maybe over to Paul Douglas’s blog. After this winter, that guy seems like he could use a little Stu and a little Clarence Swamptown.

I don’t often write about my writing process, because I assume it must be boring in the extreme. That said: over the weekend, I read that MLB.com was getting a new Twins beat writer, named Rhett Bollinger, who publicly admitted that he’d never been to Minnesota before.

I thought it’d be fun to write a “Welcome to Minnesota” post for Twinkie Town. I thought of one good joke (telling him to change his name to fit in better, and suggesting that Star Tribune beat writer Joe Christensen had done the same.) And then I padded the whole thing out with what I thought were gentle jokes about Minnesota, my home state.

I thought the post might draw a few smiles, maybe even a few knowing guffaws. But it would seem that the resulting post may be one of the two or three most popular things I’ve ever written.

I’m flattered by the reaction, but also a bit nervous. I thought this one was good but not great. Is it possible I just have no idea what’s funny?

It’s Saturday. This is the way that the public-address announcer always starts off his pre-halftime marching-band introduction at Gopher football games, and so every week when I sit down to write the weekend links, the invisible PA broadcaster in my mind booms, “IT’S SATURDAY,” and then shambles off into some speech about the music of Earth, Wind, and Fire. I have tried drowning this speech out with music but it’s yet to work. Anyway, as they always do, this column appeared on StarTribune.com’s RandBall blog, your source for breakfast place recommendations on the internet.

Happy NCAA Tournament Saturday to one and all! I have to say, when CBS and Turner Sports announced that they were teaming up to broadcast this year’s tournament, I didn’t quite realize that it meant that every single game would be on basic cable and in high definition. In past years, I’ve spent much of my tournament viewing time fooling about with laptops and looking up broadcast maps to see which game CBS would be showing in my area. This year, it’s been nothing but a chance to display my skills with the remote. I don’t think I’ve seen a commercial in two days. Truly, we live in the best of all possible times.

Perhaps you’re not watching the tournament, though. Or perhaps you’re mystified about why only two of eight games today start before 4:00. Either way, here’s a few links to get you through:

*We begin – where else? – with a New York Times profile of Gus Johnson, who’s one of the best reasons to watch the tournament. (For proof, Deadspin has some video.)

*I linked to parts one and two of this last week, but here’s part three of Tim Allen of Canis Hoopus at the MIT Sports Analytics Conference. Highlights of this installment include Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban making fun of Bill Simmons, and Golden State Warriors owner Joe Lacob making fun of Bill Simmons.

*Apparently Jose Mijares is developing a two-seam fastball to help him out against right-handed batters. Parker Hageman looks at a few other lefties who’ve attempted the same thing, and comes to the conclusion that this could be a helpful move. (Though he uses Jon Lester and David Price as comparables, which is a little bit like saying, “He should throw the high fastball more – it worked for Randy Johnson, and like Mijares, Johnson was left-handed.”)

*And finally: here’s some shots of people at shopping malls in 1990. If you were alive in 1990, you are in there somewhere, along with all of your family members. I don’t mean specifically you, but you are there. Trust me. It’ll all come flooding back. The jean jackets. The mullets. The Zubaz. Men wearing tank tops in public. It’s all there. I myself was one Hypercolor shirt from going into a full-blown flashback and trying to jam cassette tapes into my car stereo.

On that note: that’s enough for this Saturday. I’d say get outside and enjoy spring, but let’s be honest with ourselves. Just keep stretching that remote control finger, and feel free to ice it down (five minutes on, ten minutes off) if you experience any soreness.

Today’s the first televised Twins spring training game of the year, an event that I always get overly excited for and then get disappointed when the Double-A team is in the game by the fourth inning. Over at Twinkie Town, I’ve listed a few things to watch for on the broadcast – along with some associated point values. It’s a visual scavenger hunt!

This is the freshest version of the weekend links, baked to your specifications. They were first published at RandBall, your source for half-baked insults about the game of hockey for the better part of a decade.

It’s been a week for turnarounds on the local sports scene. The Wild, so recently looking like a solid playoff team, got waxed in the South two games in a row. The Timberwolves, so recently appearing to be a D-League team, won two games by more than 20 points. And the Gopher hockey team, on a mini-roll for three weeks, lost at home in the playoffs to Anchorage. It’s a confusing time. (If only the turnaround bug had infected the Gopher hoopsters.)

Let’s try to make sense of it all with the help of a few weekend links:

*Let’s start with the Wolves, since they’re the team going in the right direction this week. Canis Hoopus writer Tim Allen has been everywhere lately. First, he made a visit to Wolves practice as a fan, and then, he jetted cross-country to attend the MIT Sports Analytics conference (part one is here; part two is here.) For the opposite viewpoint – one that was published before the Wolves’ current two-game hot “streak” – we turn to NBA genius Steve Aschburner, and his short study of the dystopia the Wolves have built in Minneapolis.

*Moving on to the Twins, Parker Hageman thinks you should be keeping an eye on Kyle Gibson, who’ll begin the year as a Triple-A starter but could be close to ready for a big-league callup. Hageman’s also got an analysis of Gibson’s two-seam fastball and his changeup, complete with animated GIFs to stand in for video, that you won’t want to miss.

*I also enjoyed Patrick Reusse’s musings on the mysteries of hitting. It’s a nice look at what even the very top prospects have to go through to reach the big leagues – and how much of a gulf there is between hitting .300 in high school or college, and hitting .300 in the majors.

*And finally, I’ve got two links that fall into the “and finally” category this week: first, the story of a baseball coach from Chicago that ended up being a coach for the Australian national cricket team. And second, you might remember the Batting Stance Guy; well, now he’s imitating the baseball literati who appear on Ken Burns-style documentaries. It’s a must-click for anyone who’s ever lost the remote while the TV was stuck on an “ESPN SportsCentury” marathon.

That’s good enough for this week, I think. Enjoy your weekend – and let’s see where all of these teams are at in a week’s time.

I have just watched the Timberwolves beat the Pacers by 26 points. The Pacers may be battling for the last playoff spot in the east, but for tonight, they were easily the worst team in the history of the game of basketball.

Obviously that’s hyperbole, but ridiculous hyperbole is one of my strengths. When I got home, I found that Canis Hoopus needed a game wrap, so I wrote my own.

Back on ridiculous hyperbole for a minute: It’s easily the best game wrap in the history of the internet.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the news coming out of Twins spring training does tend to read similarly every day. Consequently, I think I can make up this week’s entire store of new stories, without the benefit of waiting until the week is over. My attempt at this is over at Twinkie Town. Join me as I play Carnac.