CHICAGO — Eight games is far too small a sample size to draw serious long-term conclusions, but sitting here on the Twins’ first off day of the season, here are the early concerns:

1. The Twins might have the weakest offense in the American League. Their 2.88 runs per game ranks second-to-last in the league, ahead of Detroit (2.50), and everyone expects the Tigers to start scoring eventually. Next highest on that list are New York (3.29) and Boston (also 3.29). Again, those teams are going to score more. But how much more can be expected of the Twins, who ranked 12th in the AL last year with 4.43 runs per game?

2. The Twins rank last in the AL with three home runs in eight games. Torii Hunter has four all by himself. And if you didn’t catch the highlights of what he did last night for the Angels, read all about it here.

3. It’s not like the Twins have faced world beaters to this point, either. The starting pitchers they’ve faced are Jered Weaver, Jon Garland, Joe Saunders, Ervin Santana, John Bale, Gil Meche, Brett Tomko and Javier Vazquez.

Compare that to what the White Sox have faced so far en route to their 5-2 start: C.C. Sabathia, Fausto Carmona, Jake Westbrook, Nate Robertson, Dontrelle Willis, Justin Verlander and Nick Blackburn.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 11:47 am and is filed under Twins thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.