This week at Twinkie Town, it’s time for a supremely odd off-season quiz.

This sort of thing happens when I write when I’m half-asleep.

NOTE: As always, this appeared first at RandBall, your home for free beer.

The NHL took out full-page ads in 40 newspapers on Friday, including this newspaper, apologizing for the lockout. This is the latest in a series of gestures that are designed to portray the league and its teams as contrite for causing pro hockey to stay away until mid-January. Unfortunately, not one of these gestures strikes me as heartfelt, genuine, or even accurate; I feel like my intelligence is being insulted. I almost wish the NHL would have printed the truth instead, which would have gone something like this:

Dear fans: We’re not sorry.

Oh, we’ll make any gesture that our PR gurus say we need to make, so we’ll paint slogans on the ice and take out full-page newspaper ads, but in truth we’re not one bit sorry for this lockout. We got pretty much everything we wanted – more money for us, less money for the players, and all we had to give up was 14 home dates to do it. Heck, that doesn’t even matter in like ten of our markets, since nobody goes to those games anyway. (And we didn’t even fix that with half-decent revenue sharing. Jeremy Jacobs and Craig Leipold are going to have themselves carried around the arena in Phoenix in solid gold sedan chairs, just to rub it in.) How is that not a good deal for us?

And let’s be honest, most of you didn’t notice anyway. We’re irrelevant nationally in America, anyway, so we’re safe there. And as for fans, they filled an arena in St. Paul on Wednesday just to watch an intrasquad scrimmage, the same day the team set a franchise record for tickets and merchandise purchased; it’s safe to say that the fans hardly cared, either. We win.

Ultimately, players get less and owners get more, and fans, we’ll happily let you purchase our wildly expensive tickets and fill our arenas again. We’re caring like that. We’ll even pretend to be contrite. But sorry? Really, truly sorry? Don’t make us laugh.

*On with the links:

*There aren’t many good ways to objectively measure the defense of the catcher in baseball, though the Twins – who just agreed to a $700,000 contract with Drew Butera, one of the worst hitters in baseball history – must have some good ones. Parker Hageman at Twins Daily does a study of one thing we can measure – the amount of time it takes Butera, Joe Mauer, and Ryan Doumit to get the ball to second base on a steal attempt.

*I’m pretty sure that the people who invented the Internet did so just for things like this: Baseball Prospectus breaks down the baseball clips in a scene from the TV show ‘Elementary’, in complete detail, and for good measure interviews the show’s producer to ask about the footage selected.

*To kick off the NHL season, Sean McIndoe looks at ten players to watch this year in the NHL. And if that wasn’t enough, he also teams up with Bloge Salming to give us one of the greatest movie trailer parodies you’re ever likely to see (assuming, like me, you enjoy jokes about Roberto Luongo.

*The Economist talks to the commissioner of Major League Gaming. Key takeaway: there is a professional video game league called Major League Gaming.

*And finally: if you liked Tebowing, you’re going to love Te’oing.

This week, the 53rd edition of the Twins Winter Caravan begins – a community outreach thing that I rather like. Players, coaches, and administrators visit the far-flung reaches of Minnesota, Iowa, and South and North Dakota, giving the whole geographic area of Twins fandom a chance to talk some baseball in January. It’s a great tradition and I like it.

I like it so much so, in fact, that the latest edition of Scenes From An Offseason takes place entirely in the vehicles that are going out for the Winter Caravan.

NOTE: As always, this appeared first at RandBall, your home for sweaters.

The NHL lockout is over, and I would like to tell you that you have a easy way to punish the owners, players, or both – to show your disapproval of a months-long process that accomplished, ultimately, very little. Unfortunately, that’s not true. You could stay away, I suppose; you could stop going to games, and buying merchandise, and watching games on TV, but if you are a hockey fan then you and I both know that you’re not going to do any of that. You’ve been checking line charts all week. You’ve been trying to figure out a way to not hate Zach Parise for going to North Dakota. In short, you are going to cave.

I know this because I know that if you’re an NHL hockey fan, you must be a die-hard NHL hockey fan, because there are no casual NHL fans left. Labor strife, nonexistent television contracts, and the overarching control of the sports world by the hockey atheists at ESPN have combined to make the NHL no better than a niche sport in vast swaths of America – the NASCAR of the north, if you will. Even in Minnesota, the country’s most hockey-mad state, it’s no better than fourth place.

The great thing, though, is that you, my dear hockey fan, couldn’t care any less. All the games are televised and St. Paul is still a fun place to be on game night and that’s really all you care about – not TV ratings or why Steven Stamkos isn’t more famous or whether the news or the sports page leads with last night’s Wild game. I can call hockey all the names I want and it won’t hurt me or any other die-hard hockey fan. We’re just glad the circus is back in town.

So welcome back, NHL. We yelled and screamed at you for being idiots all fall, and while your surpassing stupidity hasn’t changed, our love for the game hasn’t changed either. It’s good to see you again. Now let’s drop the puck and forget this whole thing ever happened.

*On with the links:

*Down Goes Brown has a list of surprises in the new NHL CBA. And, in one of the year’s most amazing posts (in a I-can’t-believe-they-went-to-the-trouble kind of way), DGB and Bloge Salming also detail the negotiations that ended the lockout in a parody of Eminem’s “Guilty Conscience.”

*Will Leitch has some news for you about the NBC Sports Network – it’s surprisingly good, especially when it is as little like ESPN as possible.

*Here’s the whole seedy story of Curt Schilling and the state government conspired to waste a whole lot of Rhode Island taxpayer money.

*And finally: I think I’ve figured out why nothing ever seems to go right for Gopher football. Clearly, the jerks on the other side of the ND border have stolen all the good karma.

The North American Soccer League released the first details of the league’s 2013 season on Thursday, announcing a schedule of twelve games per team for the Spring half of the championship, set to take place between the beginning of April and July 4. The winner of this phase plays the winner of the fall half of the schedule (which will ostensibly run from August through mid-November) for the NASL championship. Seven teams will play in the spring, with the expansion New York Cosmos participating in the fall along with league member Puerto Rico, which has chosen to skip the spring season to reorganize for the fall.

(Confusing? Sure. But the league’s so hell-bent on promoting the return of the Cosmos that a two-half schedule wasn’t a problem for them. On Twitter, some wags suggested that the two halves of the year would be called “Preseason” and “Cosmos.”)

Closer to home, the Stars will play five of their six spring home games in the Metrodome, with just the July 4 date being played at their traditional home at the National Sports Center. Minnesota opens the year April 6 at home against San Antonio, the team they knocked out of the playoffs last fall thanks, in part, to a headbutt from Scorpions striker Pablo Campos.

The Stars played last year’s season opener at the Metrodome as well, drawing 0-0 with Carolina.

Minnesota will also get an Independence Day home game, their lone outdoor home game of the spring season, against Atlanta.

Spring training seems so close that we can almost reach out and touch it. Monday at Twinkie Town, I enumerated just how close it was – with a few helpful dates thrown in, like, “day on which Ron Gardenhire starts drinking openly during press conferences.”

NOTE: As always, this appeared first at RandBall.

Last Sunday’s Vikings-Packers classic has occasioned a number of comparisons to the Twins’ win over Detroit in 2009’s Game 163 – two division rivals battling on the last day of the regular season, with our local heroes in a win-or-go-home situation. When it was over, with the Purple victorious, euphoria seemed to be the emotion that carried the day. Drew Magary wrote that he cried after the win. Local curmudgeon Patrick Reusse tweeted that it was one of the top five games in Dome history, and even started engaging in mathematical hyperbole to taunt Packer fans. Closer to home, RandBall wrote that the game was “exhilarating” and called it one of his favorite five games ever.

Despite this, you can hardly find a Vikings fan who really believes the team will win tonight. The Packers are eight-point favorites, and though it’s an increasingly lost season, the smart money’s on Green Bay. And for all the comparisons to Game 163, Twins fans felt the same way, post-game; the win only gave the local nine a playoff series against New York, where the Yankees summarily (and expectedly) dispatched them in three games. I desperately wanted the Vikings to win Sunday, but – just like Game 163 – when it was over, all I felt was a sense of relief, not euphoria or exhilaration. They didn’t miss the playoffs. Whew.

It wasn’t until hours later, when I began reading the reactions of others, that I realized that most other Vikings fans were treating the game as one of the great Vikes games ever. And even now, a week later, I still feel a little cheated. Nobody told me that euphoria was a legitimate reaction, and so I missed out on last week’s mass delirium – a shame, because sports-related mass delirium is one of my favorite feelings. So I have a request for the Vikings: please win again this week. This time, I promise, I won’t be looking ahead to next week.

*On with the links:

*Commenter Stu, who is the best, wrote “An Oral History of Nick Punto Sliding Headfirst Into First Base” for Twinkie Town, and it is excellent.

*Meanwhile, at Twins Daily, Parker Hageman interviewed Twins Director of Baseball Research Jack Goin, to get an idea of what the team is doing with advanced baseball metrics.

*Steve McPherson at A Wolf Among Wolves explains the Wolves’ improbable win over Denver, sight unseen, with a discussion of the observer effect and quantum mechanics.

*From Sports Media Watch, here’s a list of the fifty highest-rated sporting events last year – 49 of which were NFL games or Olympics telecasts. Perhaps more interesting is the chart of the highest-rated event in each sport, which puts the highest-rated NHL telecast behind events in golf, men’s and women’s tennis, horse racing, and – shockingly – IndyCar. In fact, the highest-rated NHL game (Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Finals) finished barely ahead of the top-rated telecasts in MMA, second-string NASCAR racing, college women’s basketball, and women’s national team soccer. But no, guys, great time for a lockout. I’m sure all the fans will come roaring back.

*And finally: we may not have pro hockey this year, but we’ll always have Down Goes Brown.

2013 is at hand, and with that in mind – and with a Monday column to write and no good ideas – I made some Twins-related New Year’s resolutions for 2013.

I can’t quite explain this, but it’s become a tradition for me to write a Christmas-week Twins column in the style of Larry King’s old USA Today columns. Mostly, it’s just a cheap and easy structure for dumb jokes, which somehow works, at holiday time.

Here’s this year’s edition, as “Larry” struggles to understand geography or find appropriate cat wear.

*NOTE: As always, this also appears at RandBall, your home for the merriest of Christmases. *

Merry Christmas to all! When you think about it, Christmas is probably the closest thing we have to a universal day off; few people work the day, with the exception of essential services, some gas stations, and (at least in the movies) Chinese restaurants. It’s the one day of the year that virtually everyone expects to have a chance to spend with their families. Even Scrooge gave Bob Crachit the day off on Christmas Day.

The one exception to this rule seems to be sports, where the NBA has no compunction about ruining Christmases far and wide. The league has a quintupleheader scheduled for Tuesday; you’ll be able to watch basketball from 11am to midnight, should you so desire. It’s one thing for the home teams, who theoretically will get a chance to have Christmas morning and/or Christmas dinner fit around their schedules, but those five games have five road teams, all of whom are away from their families this holiday. The Celtics, Knicks, Rockets, Thunder, and Nuggets – sorry, guys. You’re spending your Christmas on a plane and in a hotel room.

Speaking of the players is to say nothing, too, of to the thousands of other people who’ll miss Christmas thanks to these games. Stadium staff, team personnel, TV crews, team beat writers – all of these folks have to give up their Christmases as well, thanks to the league’s desire for holiday hoops. Spare a thought as well for a few college football teams – the Gophers among them – that have Christmas Day scheduling issues. For example, the Gophers don’t play until Friday, but they’ll leave for the game on Wednesday – meaning that, for players that came to the U from further afield than the Upper Midwest, they might not have the chance to spend the day with family on Christmas.

The jokes all say that most people can’t wait to escape their families on Christmas, but the truth is that most of us relish the chance to get together and celebrate. This year, though, I’ll be thinking about all of those people who give up that chance as a blessing to the rest of us – not just nurses and doctors and firefighters, but Kevin Durant and James Harden, and all of the ESPN announcers, and the Staples Center staffers, and all of the football players across the country who’ll eat Christmas dinner in a team lounge. Merry Christmas, everyone. Thanks for giving up your day to make it better for the rest of us.

On with the links:

*I want to print out this Steve Rushin column about hockey, and hand-deliver a copy to every owner, possibly by stapling it to his forehead. If somebody wanted to dump a hundred thousand copies on the houses of Jeremy Jacobs and Craig Leipold, I’ll start buying printer ink. Dear NHL: You’re not alienating casual fans now; none of them now exist. You’re alienating your actual fans, and we’re a disappearing breed. You’re on your way to second place in CANADA, for cripes’ sake, and if you lose Canada you might as well fold up shop.

*This three-part interview at The Classical with the guys behind Fire Joe Morgan was absolutely delightful. Here’s Part 1, here’s part two, and here’s part three.

*Brian Phillips of Grantland heads to the rodeo finals in Las Vegas, and the whole thing becomes a wonderful mishmash of one part stranger-in-a-strange-land diary, one part Vegas travel journalism, and one part elegiac rumination on his lost Oklahoma childhood. It’s tremendous.

*And finally: not only am I now convinced that squash should be an Olympic sport, I’m also convinced that it is the greatest sport ever invented.