One year ago today: 

Team    W   L   Pct   GB

Detroit  27  13 .675

W-Sox  26 14 .650  1

Cleve.   20 21  .488  7.5

Twins    17  24 .415 10.5

K-City   10  28 .263 16

In other words, if you think things couldn’t have gotten any worse, think back to a year ago.

That being said, the upcoming “rivalry weekend” looks to offer more of a chance to start getting their own house in order than the attack the current 7-game deficit in the division. Cleveland, Detroit and the White Sox are all playing teams that are below .500 in the weak NL Central. Cleveland is playing last-place Cincinnati, Detroit plays 16-22 St. Louis and the White Sox play the Cubs, who spent $300 million in the off season and wouldn’t be that much worse if they’d $299 million less and only brought in Sidney Ponson.

Meanwhile, the Twins will find out if Milwaukee is really good or mostly a product of playing most of its schedule against teams in its dreadful division. The Brewers just returned home after a 2-5 against the Mets and Phillies. Aside from six other games at the start of the season against the Dodgers and Marlins, and a three-game sweep of East-trailing Washington, the Brewers have run up their hot start against NL Central rivals.

By comparision, the Twins have been banging around against rivals in their “best division in baseball,” for the most part.

And now comes a chance for self-correction: After Milwaukee, they go to last-place Texas and then return home to play Toronto (surprisingly struggling at the moment) and the White Sox. At the moment, that offers more hope than, say, playing s’more against Cleveland, Detroit and Boston.

The Twins’ schedule over the next six weeks offers a different set of challenges than what they’ve faced so far. Except for the White Sox over Memorial Day weekend, there are no games against division rivals until the final days of June. That doesn’t mean a cupcake schedule by any means, but it simply doesn’t look to be as tough, nor with the edge of playing AL Central rivals.

So it’s time for better performance, better personnel and better results. Or else, by the end of next month, we’ll be talking more about preparing for 2008 than the rest of 2007 — which was pretty much what we were saying at this time last season.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2007 at 6:53 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.