*NOTE: this also appears at RandBall, your home for the Bierman Building. *

Opening Day is Monday, and by Friday or so, the Twins should be more or less eliminated from playoff contention. It’s shaping up to be another tough year at Target Field, and it’s starting to feel like the late 1990s all over again, when the unattainable goal was not division titles but a .500 record.

I’d like to lift your spirits, depressed Twins fan, so here are seven reasons that the 2013 Twins are better to watch than any of the sadness factories that the franchise put on the field in the late 1990s.

1. Joe Mauer is better than Pat Meares and Ron Coomer put together.
2. Unlike Marty Cordova, not one player on the current roster has ever injured himself with a tanning bed.
3. You can sit outside at Target Field and drink a pretty good beer. At the Metrodome, you had to sit inside and the beer tasted like it was filtered through an old gym sock.
4. Even if the team has ten more losing seasons, the Pohlads won’t try to kill it off this time.
5. Otis Nixon is too old to play baseball. (He was last time the Twins signed him, too, but we’re pretty sure it’s not happening again.)
6. Compare and contrast: Aaron Hicks and Rich Becker. Aaron Hicks and Chad Allen.
7. No matter what, the Twins are still better than the Houston Astros.

*On with the links:

*Parker Hageman of Twins Daily gorged himself on Target Field’s newest food offerings, and wrote about it – partially to inform, partially to brag, partially just to make you hungry.

*Tiger Woods is back to #1 in the world. Will Leitch at Sports on Earth notes that we don’t seem to care if athletes are terrible people, as long as they win – and thinks that this is just fine.

*You put hockey in a non-traditional market, leave it there for 45 years, the team wins the Stanley Cup… and still, nobody watches the games.

*Despite starting at 10:30pm ET, the USA-Mexico soccer match on Tuesday still drew seven million viewers – more than a lot of other sports, as the article notes.

*And finally: the term “breaking his ankles” has become commonplace in basketball, referring to the act of faking out a defender so completely that he falls over. Until last week, though, I’d never seen it in hockey before.

NOTE: This appeared first at SoccerCentric.

Also: this week’s United notebook appeared first at SoccerCentric.

NOTE: This appeared first at SoccerCentric.

After a long, drawn-out MLS tryout, defender **Kyle Altman **is back in Minnesota – at least for half the season. The center back will play the first half for United, then head to medical school.

Altman admitted to having mixed emotions. “I’m disappointed it didn’t work out in Portland and DC,” he said. “But at the same time, I’m excited to be a part of what they’re building in Minnesota.”

Altman, 27, had his best season as a professional in 2012, making the NASL Best XI and captaining the Minnesota Stars to a repeat berth in the league championship series. He went on trial with DC United, then Portland in the offseason, and with the Timbers’ problems in defense, it looked like he’d catch on in the Pacific Northwest.

Early this week, though, Portland informed him that they weren’t going to make spot for him. Altman, who earned admission to medical school several years ago and had taken all the deferments they were willing to grant him, made the decision to play the NASL spring season, then begin his career as a doctor.

“I love playing soccer, and it’s going to be hard to give it up – but I’m going to have to give it up eventually, so it’s kind of delaying the inevitable,” he told me last fall. “Med school’s such a great opportunity, and I’ve put in a lot of work to get this far, and it’d be a shame to let that lay by the wayside.”

Said United head coach Manny Lagos, “He’s our captain, he’s a great leader, a great person. It’s just really exciting to have him back.”

Lagos said he’d kept in contact with Altman to let him know the door was always open for a return. “Kyle for me is a big piece of what this team has been the past couple of years, and I think it’s important that the fans know that he’s helping us in coming back to Minnesota, in terms of the players and people that we try to get on our roster and be successful.”

Said Altman, “Manny and I have a very good relationship, and we’ve talked very much this whole offseason. He helped me get into DC, and he helped me get into Portland, and he’s been a very big reason why I’ve had the opportunities I’ve had. So he was disappointed for me personally, because I think he wanted to see me succeed at that level. He gave me his full backing and confidence that I could, so I think he was a little disappointed that it didn’t work out on my behalf.”

“But I think we’re both pretty excited to see what this team can do next season.”

Altman returns to a team that, at least at the back, is effectively the same, something that he agrees makes things easier. “I think the first part of every year is based off of continuity and what you can bring back from the year previous,” he said. “We’re bringing in a solid back six or seven guys who were in the squad last year. It’s definitely a positive, and definitely a very good place to start building from.”

Altman, who has been training with Minnesota since Tuesday, also knows he needs to get in sync with a few new faces in the locker room – as well as some he knows up close. Asked about being on the same team as his past nemesis, striker Pablo Campos, he said, “It’s great. He’s a big target, he scores goals. And it’ll definitely be good playing with him on my team as opposed to playing against him.”

Campos was sent off in his last match in San Antonio for head-butting Altman, but when asked if Campos had head-butted him this week for old times’ sake, Altman just laughed. “We had a couple of laughs about it, so, I think we buried the hatchet and moved on,” he said.

Fellow defender Justin Davis is certainly happy to have Altman back – though he’s disappointed, too. “Oh, I love Kyle,” he enthused. “Kyle’s one of my favorite players to play with. He’s the one who got me up to Minnesota in the first place. He’s the leader of the team. We couldn’t be more thrilled to have him back.”

“It’s unfortunate that he’s here – we hoped things would work out for him in Portland – but we’ll take what we can get. You’re friends with him, so you want him to succeed – but you get a little selfish, and you want him on your team.”

Minnesota United plays the Chicago Fire this morning at 10am in Chicago. Altman is with the team, and will play. And at least one other thing isn’t changing. “I would be very surprised if somebody else captains the first half of the season,” said Lagos.

It’s one week until Opening Day, so let’s lay out the main storylines for the Twins in 2013.

This is mostly for the baseball fans who’ve been away watching hockey, and haven’t paid any attention to the offseason.

*NOTE: as always, this appeared at RandBall, your home for podcast visits. *

The boys hockey state tournament championship games both got around a 5.0 TV rating here in the all-important men 25-to-54 age bracket. To put that in perspective, that’s somewhere around four or five times the rating that your typical Wild or Wolves game draws.

This got me wondering, because so far high school sports in Minnesota have avoided any real sense of commodification. When you think about it, though – why not? High school sports aren’t all that different from college sports – they’re tied to educational institutions and communities, things that people have a natural affinity for. They’re played by younger athletes and the level of competition is a lot lower, but that hasn’t stopped the NCAA men’s basketball tournament from becoming the biggest thing going in American sports (non-football division).

I’m sure that principals and coaches and MSHSL administrators would resist this. But there’s nothing magical about the 25-game limit in boys hockey, that if exceeded, will turn all hockey players into dropouts and Communists, or whatever it is we’re worried about. And after all, high school hockey in Minnesota already has cutthroat tryouts, and players that move to other towns to play, and guys that leave for other teams or other leagues like the USHL, and leagues that exist outside the high school league, like the Fall Elite League. The state high school league would resist any change to make high school hockey more like junior hockey or more like college hockey, but near as I can tell, closing the front door just makes everyone go through the back door and get extra hockey in other ways.

If nothing else, it’s an interesting thing to think about. What would a big-time, commodified Minnesota prep hockey league really look like – and if you think about it, wouldn’t you absolutely watch that on TV?

*On with the links:

*I really enjoyed TVFury’s Q&A with Patrick Reusse, in which the Twin Cities’ best columnist tells his story.

*From Deadspin, the confessions of an NCAA basketball band member, in which “spirit squad” members are basically paid to go on vacation along with their teams. Key quote: “These trips are like living a dream. Every year I nearly fail a class while readjusting to the real world.”

*Joe Posnanski, now of NBC Sports, checks in with Cardinals manager Mike Matheny’s semi-unwitting attempt to reform youth baseball.

*And finally, three somewhat-out-of-place links: How scrums are ruining rugby union.. How spring training, for a few minutes, turned into youth-league baseball. And a long story, sort of involving Real Madrid, that is a fairly compelling rumination on relationships and mental illness.

Your friend and mine, Mike “RandBall” Rand, came to visit us on Episode 6 of the Sportive. (We needed him. Brandon, who is the only one with actual information, was out this week, on his way to Vegas. And so we had to replace him with somebody else with actual information.)

We talked Matt Cassel, Aaron Hicks, Jonas Brodin, and #GOHUSKIESWOOOOO. Please, head over and give it a listen.

NOTE: This notebook appeared at SoccerCentric.

*NOTE: This also appeared first at SoccerCentric. *

Wales 30, England 3. I’ve no doubt that there are Welsh people, child and adult alike, who will never forget that score.

England were the pre-tournament favorites, and had won their first four games, though in decreasingly convincing fashion. Wales, meanwhile, came into the tournament as defending champions, but had lost every single game they’d played since winning the 2012 trophy. They played a terrible first half of the first game tournament, which led to a loss against Ireland, but had come back and won their next three.

Wales needed to win by seven points to win the Six Nations. They weren’t favored to do so; England was, at the beginning of the game, a 1/4 favorite to take the trophy.

But the Wales defense, so good for all but that first half, stifled England. And Leigh Halfpenny, the player of the tournament for me, kicked four more penalties. And in the second half Wales went on the counter-attack twice and Alex Cuthbert crashed across the line twice and the Millenium Stadium crowd went berserk with joy. 30-3; a dominant performance, and the tournament trophy was no less than they deserved.

And I bet this kid was thrilled.

What’s next: Every four years, the nations of the British Isles – England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland – get together a best-of-the-best team and tour a Southern Hemisphere country. This year, the British and Irish Lions tour Australia, beginning in June. I am not an expert, but judging from reaction, this is just about the highest honor for a British player. (For some reason, the Lions usually get killed by the international teams they face on these tours. In 2009, for example, they lost two of three games against South Africa.) I’m intrigued.

My Twinkie Town piece this week is some percentage biting satire and some percentage goofy. I can’t decide what the percentages are, though. You’ll have to judge for yourself.

NOTE: As always, this appeared first at RandBall, your home for adding up the stats on the back of baseball cards.

Chip Scoggins wrote an NHL column in the paper this week, the upshot of which was, “Hey, the season is so short that the regular season actually matters this year, isn’t that great?” Left only partly mentioned, though, is that next year – assuming Gary Bettman and Jeremy Jacobs can control themselves – the regular season will go back to 82 dull, drab, ho-hum games.

This week, though, the NHL also approved a fairly dramatic realignment, one that puts Minnesota in a division with traditional rivals Chicago and St. Louis, geographic grudge match Winnipeg, and Norm-Green-sucks-Drew-Pearson-too Dallas. And best of all, the first two rounds of the playoffs will at long last again be a (mostly) intra-divisional affair.

This is wonderful because more than anything, the two things that create rivalries in sports are a) geographic proximity and b) playoff history. Part a is why college hockey is more exciting to watch than the NHL, a lot of the time; part b is why Todd Bertuzzi is, after all these years, still universally hated in Minnesota, and why the words “Dan Cloutier” still bring a smile to Minnesota hockey fans’ faces.

So yes, next year’s NHL regular season might be a little bit boring. And the next one after that could be, too. But I’m hoping that the Wild get a playoff series or two with the Jets during that time, or the Blackhawks, or the Avalanche, and pretty soon, more and more of those regular-season games will start to feel like Gopher-Badger showdowns or Gopher-North Dakota wars, and we’ll see columns in the paper about how the NHL, despite the 82-game schedule, still has pro sports’ best regular season. And hopefully, other sports will take a lesson from hockey, because I couldn’t be more excited about this setup.

*On with the links:

*Here’s a semi-heartbreaking story about former North Carolina coach Dean Smith, who has a disease that’s robbing him of the memories of everything he accomplished, and is making him unable to remember his old players – something that’s just as hard for the players themselves.

*Charlie Pierce writes about Providence College and the birth of the Big East, and the death of the Boston Phoenix, and really both of these articles are equally good and I can’t decide which one you should read first.

*And now, a reminder that umpire Angel Hernandez is just the worst.

*I’m not sure what my favorite part of this video of a double-fake shot in a squash tournament is: the shot itself, the British commentator failing to find the correct words to express enjoyment of the shot, or the fact that there is apparently a channel, somewhere in the world, called “Squash TV.”

*And finally: Watch a Greek player hit the post four times with a single attempt at goal.