There is some argument in the comments section about whether my Twinkie Town post making fun of Tsuyoshi Nishioka is funny or mean-spirited.

To be clear, it is definitely mean-spirited. Nishioka was awful in 2011 in the major leagues, and he’s been just as bad in the minor leagues for the Twins. He is one of the worst players in Twins history, and – given his $9 million contract – may well be the worst Twins free-agent signing of all time. I fail to see a reason that being mean to Nishioka is a bad thing.

This is a bit out of date now, but last week, the White Sox traded for Francisco Liriano and immediately said publicly that they thought they could “fix” him. At Twinkie Town, we said: well, good luck with that.

In the event, we know what happened: Liriano put together a typical Liriano start, pitching six innings and striking out eight but also walking four and throwing way, way too many pitches to get through six innings. He’s the same. He’ll always be the same, no matter how much “fixing” he gets.

Dare I say, this week’s RandBall column actually approaches optimism. It’s my way: rampant unfounded optimism followed by cavernously deep depression. As always, this appeared first at the aforementioned RandBall, your home for Olympic canoeing.

The Twins are mediocre, and despite Zygi Wilf making confident predictions to the contrary, it seems quite possible that the Vikings are headed the same way. If you can wait until the later fall, though, I’m beginning to think that the 2012-13 winter season is shaping up very nicely for Minnesota sports fans.

Let’s consider: the Wild made perhaps the biggest free-agent splash in Minnesota sports history, laying out $196 million to grab Zach Parise and Ryan Suter for the next 14 years. After a sterling first two months, the Wild crashed and burned last year, but it’s hard not to think that the Parise and Suter additions turn the team into a playoff team. Moreover, you start looking at line charts, you start looking at a few young guys who can contribute, and it’s pretty easy to talk yourself into the Wild potentially competing for a top-4 playoff spot.

At the same time, the Timberwolves are making a slightly smaller but no less meaningful free-agent effort in Minneapolis. They’ve dumped a bunch of dead weight and added two former All-Stars in Brandon Roy and Andrei Kirilenko. Ricky Rubio’s recovery from a knee injury is reportedly ahead of schedule. Kevin Love is playing with his fellow superstars in London. Again, it’s looking like the Wolves are a playoff team and potentially even a good playoff team.

At the college level, meanwhile, both Gopher hoops and Gopher hockey have large portions of their squads returning. The basketball team gets Trevor Mbawke back, and adds him to the team that nearly won the NIT. The hockey team returns 15 of the 18 guys that played more than 25 games on a team that went to the Frozen Four. Trips to their respective NCAA tournaments would seem to be on the cards for both sports. There might be other places in America for which a playoff trip would be nothing to celebrate, but considering that only Gopher hockey among the area’s seven major sports made the post-season last year (discounting, of course, the NIT’s second-tier tournament), four winter playoff spots would have to be considered pretty good.

Sure, there’s still plenty that could go wrong. The two basketball teams have five balky knees between them (Rubio, Mbakwe, Mo Walker, and both of Roy’s). The Wild looked like they were more than two players short for much of last year. Gopher puck loses Kent Patterson, who played more than 99% of the minutes in goal for the team last year.

All of this said, though, it’s just nice to have hope. Even in August, for sports that don’t start for months and months yet.

On with the links:

*For the graphically inclined, the Olympics seem to be breeding some fun charts. The Economist published this one, and also linked to a bunch of other Olympics graphics from other publications here.

*Humorist Dave Barry is still in London, and still writing. The best of this week: his tips for visiting London during the Olympics (and afterward).

*Will Leitch at Sports on Earth makes the point that, even though NBC is being pilloried daily on Twitter, they’re rightfully ignoring the blowback, because in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t really matter.

*Former NFLer and sometime Deadspin writer Nate Jackson was once on an elite swimming team, and he’s here to explain how much it sucks to all of us who don’t understand American competitive swimming.

*And finally (and non-Olympically): Even nature knows that this is a Vikings town.

Felt like I had to write about the Olympics, because it was either that or the Twins and the less said about the Twins the better right now. As always, these Olympic links were posted first at RandBall, your home for the night shift.

It’s Olympics time again, and let me remind you of perhaps the most important fact you’ll need to know about this year’s Games: London is six hours ahead of Minnesota time, so you’ll need to be setting that alarm pretty early in the morning to catch events live. You will be catching these events live, of course, won’t you? As a longtime fan of world sports, I know just what you’re going through right now; how many times have I risen at 6:00am to catch the noon Saturday English soccer match, or stayed up until 2 am to catch the first two hours of a cricket match being played in Sri Lanka? And surely you’ll be doing the same, because…

…Well, of course you won’t, unless you happen to be a die-hard fan of one of the Olympic sports. Will Leitch makes precisely this point in his post on the nascent Sports On Earth website: “I think that’s how hardcore sports fans see the Olympics. They’re sports for people who are only kinda into sports.” NBC and its “family of networks” will be showing some kind of Olympic activity virtually twenty-four hours a day over the next few weeks, but the semi-surprising thing is that for the most part these wall-to-wall events will have about the same importance to most sports fans as the Greater Hartford Open/Travelers Championship does to golf viewers. It’s something to have on in the background, and is potentially even exciting, but ultimately is inconsequential.

There are exceptions, of course. Gymnastics is about to get its quadrennial turn on center stage (along with the legions of men saying, “You know, my wife’s not a sports fan, but I changed the channel briefly during gymnastics last night and she tried to bludgeon me to death with an end table.”) If the USA proves less than dominant on the basketball court, it’ll be major news here in America. Usain Bolt will draw a crowd, as always, and the duel between American swimmers Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte is shaping up to be exciting. Beyond those things, though, we’re waiting for NBC to tell us a few exceptional stories, in prime time, on tape delay.

Every so often, a story falls into our laps, like cow wrestler Rulon Gardner re-enacting Rocky IV, or the unbridled emotion of a grieving Matthias Steiner lifting more weight than he’d ever tried before, that escapes the low hum of twenty-four-hours-a-day Olympics coverage. But what’s surprising about the Olympics is how low-stakes it is for most traditional sports fans. We would never dream of tape-delaying something so important as a regular-season Vikings game, but the Olympics – eh, let’s wait to see what NBC puts on the prime time show.

On with the links:

*I mentioned Matthias Steiner already, but you should also read Spencer Hall’s guide to Olympic weightlifting, which stars Steiner.

*In local news – which for most of you is probably much more important than anything happening in London over the next two weeks – Christian Peterson at the VikesCentric blog looks at ten players that will make or break the Vikings. (Here’s part one; here’s part two.) It’s probably bad news for the Vikes that there are nine players that are MORE concerning than Christian Ponder.

*In travel news, Arsenal midfielder Alex Song looks like he really enjoys flying on planes. Also: Kevin Love won the ongoing USA Basketball competition to take pictures of slumbering teammates with this photo, which also conclusively proves that not one person in the world can possibly look cool sleeping on a plane.

And finally: Just go ahead and quit watching SportsCenter before your brain leaks out of your ears.

When scientists at CERN in Geneva announced that they’d found statistically-significant proof of the Higgs boson, the subatomic particle that serves as the final piece of the Standard Model in physics, I’ll bet you thought that I couldn’t use that as the basis of a post about the Twins. Well, you were wrong.

If you’ve still got time, there’s also my Twins-White Sox series preview, notable for a bad joke about junior high dances, and for a shot at Nick Blackburn.

*The one thing about being a fan of sports across the pond is that Saturday morning is often chock-full o’-fun. Right now the hotly anticipated England-South Africa cricket series is on my computer monitor, with the British Open on the TV. If I understood cycling, I could flip over to the Tour de France. It’s all happening, and it’s not even 10 a.m. Anyway, these links appeared first at RandBall, your home for potential franchise cornerstones. *

I suppose I should be getting excited; the Summer Olympics start this week, and I’m a sucker for international competition of all kinds. Frankly, though, the event list for the Summer version of the Games could do with a bit of pruning; there are 26 sports – 39 if you count separate disciplines, like volleyball and beach volleyball, as separate sports – and some of them just don’t belong.

For example, soccer at the Olympics makes no sense. Soccer has an every-four-years competition of its own in the World Cup, a championship that’s more important than Olympic gold, and on the men’s side, countries send glorified under-23 teams. If the Olympics aren’t the pinnacle of competition in the sport, then why put that event in the Olympics at all? The same goes for tennis, which already has four championships every year, and road cycling, which has the Tour de France. And then there’s boxing, a sport that does not have a pinnacle, but if there is one, then the Olympics ain’t it.

The Summer version of the Olympics is also stuffed full of sports which have, shall we say, limited following. Fencing. Shooting. Canoeing. Archery. Of all people, I shouldn’t belittle niche sports since I love so many of them and can therefore understand their pull, but: Synchronized swimming. Rhythmic gymnastics, to say nothing of trampoline gymnastics. I’m not sure why these particular activities deserve to be in the Olympic canon.

It could be worse, I guess: baseball and softball were dropped from the schedule this year, and other possibilities like golf, cricket, and rugby sevens that already have championships in place didn’t make the cut. But I think the last two sports that were up for possible inclusion this year highlight the point I’m trying to make. Judo is an Olympic sport and has been every year since 1972, but karate didn’t amass enough votes this time around; similarly, squash stays out but tennis stays in. And if that makes sense to you, congratulations: you’re well on your way to a seat on the IOC.

On with the links:

*I’ve really enjoyed Grantland’s series on the history and future of US Soccer. This week’s installment looks at MLS’s Homegrown Player program, but be sure to check out the links at the top of the post for parts 1-3 of this four-part (so far) series.

*The Classical looks at team handball, a sport that America is terrible at, despite having all of the talent in place in the form of basketball players. I find this interesting because the same arguments have been used time and again for cricket (with baseball) and rugby (with football), two other sports that America has the talent to be world-class at, and yet is not.

*Didn’t like the American Olympic uniforms? Well, at least they’re not as bad as Spain’s.

*Caltech may have the worst teams of any athletic department in America, but they appear to have the most honest compliance department.

*And finally: because summertime is football season in Canada, here’s a 129-yard return of a missed field goal for a touchdown.

I like the idea that the Twins can improve in the second half. Even more, I like the idea that they can do silly things, like riding scooters on the field or playing while wearing disguises. I like flaky behavior. I can’t stress this enough.

Anyway, at Twinkie Town I came up with some goals for the remainder of the year for the Twins.

Rand, kind of on the spur of the moment, finished a triathlon this morning. This included a 440-yard swim, which is about 400 yards beyond which I would have any kind of confidence in not drowning. Hats off to you, RandBall. And as always, RandBall is where this first appeared.

A thought experiment: Let’s say that Zach Parise and Ryan Suter had kept everything else about their contract saga the same – the days of drama, the surreptitious text messages to each other, the collusion in becoming a package deal, and the eventual identical enormous contracts. But instead of signing in Minnesota, a place with a hockey tradition and where both had family ties, they’d signed for the Florida Panthers, and said at the press conference that their deciding factors were beaches, no income taxes, and an awesome nightlife.

I think people would have rooted for them to fail in Florida. Not just people from Minnesota or Nashville or New Jersey, but hockey fans from a lot of places; I think they would have been deemed to have the Wrong Reasons for signing, and would have been mocked for Not Getting It. But moving home to play, as they did – or if one had recruited the other to Nashville or New Jersey to build a team there – seems to make sense to most people.

To extend this experiment, imagine if LeBron had recruited Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh to play in Cleveland. Obviously he would have been one of the great heroes in Ohio history, but the furore over everything else – the stupid Decision hourlong special, the introductory celebrations, and so on – would have been muffled. In fact, I think I might have actually rooted for the Big Three, if only it was located in Cleveland and not in Miami.

People seemed to have a lot of reasons to hate the Heat, but I think LeBron’s rejection of his Ohio home might have been central to all of those reasons. For those of us who weren’t Cavaliers fans, we could put ourselves in those shoes, and we were outraged all the same. There are many differences between Parise/Suter and LeBron, but I think the most important one is that Parise and Suter had good, solid, parochial/hometown reasons for coming to Minnesota. That’s something fans can understand, because that’s how we feel, too.

On with the links:

*Will Leitch’s interview with Spike Lee is not, strictly speaking, about sports. But it’s in many ways impossible to talk to Lee without talking about the Knicks, and Brooklyn and therefore now about the Nets, and so the whole thing is still kind of fascinating from a sporting perspective.

*Bryan Reynolds at Hockey Wilderness examines Craig Leipold, to find out if the Wild owner is a hypocrite, a master of the “dark arts,” or just a businessman.

*We’re just a few months away from the first Formula One Grand Prix race in America since 2007, and the second since the infamous 2005 race in Indianapolis. The Economist takes a look at the history of F1 racing in America.

*Also, you may have heard that Manchester United is planning to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange. The Economist looks at this plan, and tells us why ManU needs to go to the markets to try to raise some dough.

*And finally: I can’t pass up a chance to link to the great Steve Rushin writing about his dad, who is a Twins fan just like you and me, and who likes Ben Revere because he “plays hard and always has a smile on his face.” It’s enough to make you feel good about the Twins, no matter how many leads they blow or games they lose.

It’s a sad day:Darko Milicic has been waived by the Timberwolves, thus ending the Minnesota time of one of the strangest players the Wolves have ever had.

I marked the occasion by writing what will likely be the final installment in the no-longer-continuing I, Darko series: I, Darko, Have Been Amnestied. I like to think all of the classic I, Darko tendencies are on display: a love for sandwiches, a confusing hatred of Swedes, a fear of Montenegrin cannibals, and so on.

I’ve been wanting for awhile to write about the possibility that the Twins are cursed, so I actually did some work on this post. I talked to former Twins music director Kevin Dutcher, who was extremely gracious, and I emailed back and forth with a helpful urban forestry major at the ‘U’ namedJeff Carroll. I also got some help from the Twins and from the DNR in tracking down the location of the center field pine trees.

The result, then, is 2,500 words about the Twins potentially being cursed. It’s perfect All-Star Break reading, I like to think.