Last year, we all got a lot of good laughs out of Carl Pavano’s mustache. Local genius Stu came up with a wonderful personification of the mustache, a character naturally called “Pavstache,” who likes two-day-old coffee, unfiltered cigarettes, explosions, and waitresses from chain breakfast places.

Well, Carl has shaved the ‘stache, and he’s not sure if he’s going to bring it back. Naturally, then, I wrote something for Twinkie Town in which the Pavstache tries to pass the torch to a new Twins hairstyle personification – in this case, the semi-spiky hairdo Joe Mauer sported at TwinsFest (that looked, at least to me, like it belonged in the mid-to-late 1990s.)

If none of this makes sense to you, that’s because you’re normal.

This week’s Twinkie Town inanity comes (mostly) in picture form, as I’ve selected a few images to illustrate Ron Gardenhire’s progression through the five stages of grief, now that Nick Punto is gone.

I’m really enjoying this off-season. It’s given me a great excuse to make a lot of silly jokes.

It’s Saturday, it’s below zero outside again, so what better time for some weekend links – about baseball, about ESPN and soccer (sort of), and about college hockey.

And just so you know, it could have been worse: I had a mini-nightmare last night about the fortunes of the USA national cricket team. Seriously. (Now there’s a cry for help, if I’ve ever heard one.)

It’s like this.

Today’s Twinkie Town goofiness focuses on the fact that we’re less than a month from pitchers and catchers reporting for spring training – and therefore, it’s time for the players to start packing up for their Fort Myers sojourn. I’m imagining what a few players might be bringing with.

The cricket world moves on, as always. The cricket coverage that I consume has a decided England slant to it, and so from my perspective, in the months preceding the Ashes series, there was simply nothing else being talked about anywhere in cricket. And then England went Down Under and cleaned up comprehensively, and after expressing admiration and no little shock, the topics have moved on. The Cricket World Cup is coming up next month. The Ashes triumph has been, if not exactly forgotten, then pushed to the back burner.

As for me, I’m still new to all this, and so what follows is a few random thoughts, which I’ll give the illusion of coherence by organizing them in a bulleted list.

• This series has confirmed something I already knew: no sport is inherently exciting, but when there’s something on the line, any sport can be thrilling. The last time I watched a Test cricket match, England were in Bangladesh, cleaning up against the home side. The series didn’t matter to anyone – not least the Bangladesh fans, who didn’t bother to show up to watch the matches – and I ended up pronouncing Test cricket on TV as suitable entertainment for convalescents and others who cannot handle even the least bit of excitement. The Ashes, though – despite everything, they truly are exciting, and every wicket is a mini-skirmish as part of a five-day battle that makes up the framework of a hundred-year war (to stretch a military metaphor to its absolute breaking point.) I’m reminded of the central thing I’ve learned about sports, in all of my time watching them: they matter only because we pretend they matter, but when we pretend they matter they are absolutely fascinating. Even when they take five days to play and stretch on into the middle of the night.
• You probably don’t have to read very closely to note that I was pulling for England in this series. I don’t have a good explanation for this, my embarrassing and confusing Anglophilia aside, except that the Australian team seemed like playground bullies to me, and England seemed like the underdog, and who can resist rooting for the underdog? At any rate, it’s not easy for an American-born person with no restricting ancestry to pick out a team for which to cheer. There’s no home team for an American, not in Test cricket, and I’m not Indian or Pakistani or South African on my mother’s side or anything like that, and so I suppose the choices are open. The West Indies are our closest geographic team, and New Zealand has just signed a deal to help develop American cricket, so I guess those are possibilities. Perhaps I’ll have to root for three different teams, at least until the USA starts playing Test cricket.
• If nothing else, this series has introduced me to the comedy stylings of England bowler Graeme Swann, who did a video diary for the official England cricket website. Swann would appear to be a world-class goof – his main contribution to this victory, other than his top-notch spin bowling, has been to introduce “The Sprinkler” as the official dance of English cricket. I look forward to Swann’s future career, which I can only assume will include talk shows and comedy DVDs, or at least a long and fruitful stint as the star of silly web videos.
• There were a lot of great moments in the series, but I think my favorite is still the beginning of the second test in Adelaide, when Australia chose to bat and then lost two wickets without scoring a run. Aussie captain Ricky Ponting was out against the first ball he faced; the highlight is here, and ultimately, it was a sign of what was to come in the series, and for me it was the top moment.

I’ll end this with the joke that I used when the series itself ended, almost two weeks ago: Well, that’s that then. Now you don’t have to hear from me about cricket ever ag- hey, look! it’s the first test of the New Zealand-Pakistan series! Awesome!

It’s another exceptionally bright and unexceptionally freezing January Saturday – so this week’s weekend links have a lot of baseball talk, to put us in a springtime frame of mind.

Pitchers and catchers report one month from tomorrow. Be strong, everyone.

Today’s Twinkie Town column references Victory Sports, so it’s only a good seven years out of date. It also has a Sidney Ponson joke, as well as a Matt LeCroy joke, so you know it’s good.

The title: Original Twins TV Shows We Missed. It’s silly.

The first Weekend Links column of 2011 (that wasn’t a 2010 recap) is up at RandBall. It’s quite a lot of talk about the Twins, plus some making fun of Gary Bettman, which we all like.

Fifth Test: England won by an innings and 83 runs (Australia 280 & 281, England 644). England win the series 3-1.

The big prize was decided in Melbourne, when England guaranteed themselves at least a series draw and thus retained the Ashes. Even so, a series victory down under – and by such a ridiculous margin – may have felt almost as good for the English.

Somehow, the storyline of this game followed almost exactly England’s wins in Adelaide and Melbourne. The Melbourne Test had Australia collapsing to 98 in their first innings, the Adelaide Test had England’s incredible 620 declaration, but the Sydney version had pretty much the same story of dominance. Australia’s top order couldn’t get going on Day 1, their bottom order managed to fight back to get to 280, and then England batted for days and days. Alastair Cook, Ian Bell, and Matt Prior all scored over 100 runs for England in their innings, with captain Andrew Strauss tossing in a quick-fire 60 at the beginning to set the visitors on their way. In contrast, Australia’s best score in either innings was Steve Smith‘s pointless 54 in the second, made after all hope had gone for the Aussies.

Over the same period of this match, India – the top-ranked team in the world – were over in South Africa, the second-ranked team in the world. The two teams, tied 1-1 in their three-Test series, were busy fighting to a draw in the final match, a game that came pretty close to defining what I (in my limited experience) think of as a normal Test. India led by two runs, 364-362, after both teams had batted once. South Africa spent the fourth day building up a lead of 339, then turned around and tried to bowl India out on the fifth day. India, uninterested in going for the victory (which would mean a very high possibility of a loss), instead chose to grit out the entire day, scoring just 166 but losing only three of the ten wickets South Africa would have needed for the victory.

That, in my mind, is how Test cricket is supposed to go. You play five days, you score almost two hundred more runs than the other team, and it ends up tied because somehow a five-day match, encompassing 30 hours of cricket, still isn’t enough time to decide anything.

All of which makes England’s dominance that much more amazing. Going into the series, England was ranked third in the world, Australia fourth, with very little separating the two. The Aussies, though they’d been having problems of all sorts, had just only narrowly lost to India in India. And England hadn’t been successful on a tour Down Under since 1986-87.

And now: three innings victories for the English. Australia scored 481 in their first innings of the series, then never got above 309 in any of their subsequent nine. Meanwhile, England scored more than 500 runs in an innings four times, including two scores over 600. The Sydney Test was just an exclamation point on what was a surprising show of England dominance.

That’s that, then. England win 3-1. The two teams will play some one-day matches – two 20-over affairs and seven one-dayers, I think – but I’m not sure I particularly care. I suppose it’s just an exercise to get both teams warmed up for the Cricket World Cup, which is contested via one-day matches, and begins at the end of February.

Either way, the big part of this series is over. I’ll probably wrap the whole thing up with one long post later, but for now: England win. It wasn’t close.