Monday Morning Minnesota: conspiracies, Hughes and optimism

Good morning hombres and hombrettas. It is season opener! The best day of the year, assuming nothing good happens in your personal life you sad, sad people. Honestly, I love this day and do my best to let the pessimism melt away for at least one glorious day. I want to feed you that optimism too, but really not a whole lot of that going around today. So read these links instead, I’m sorry.

Today’s soundtrack is more Motion City Soundtrack, who I am pulling out of my pocket again both because they are my favorite band and because they have a song called “Major Leagues.” That’s a baseball reference, in case you didn’t get that.

• Judd Zulgad of 1500ESPN writes that the future is bright for the Twins, but a lot of people involved in the right-now Twins won’t be around to see that, including our best hitter and pitcher, and manager.
• Speaking of Paul Molitor, some at Twins Daily think the new brain-trust is setting him up to fail. Who doesn’t love a good conspiracy theory in the morning?
• You know that “best pitcher” I mentioned earlier? Well that wasn’t Phil Hughes. Yeah, not looking great for that guy, according to Derek Wetmore (also of 1500ESPN) and his declining fastball velocity is the primary reason for that.
• Remember when Joe Mauer was a fresh faced young lad? Well that was approximately 378 years ago, in fact this will be his 13th opening day start for the Twins, tying a little player named Harmon Killebrew for the Twins record. Mike Bernadino of the Pioneer Press has the write up.
• Over at Fangraphs, David Laurila’s weekly Sunday notes column (my favorite baseball writing to consume.) is chocked full of Twins tidbits, including a story about Kevin Slowey of all people.

That’s it. Have fun today and I will see you later for the gamethread you all better be in!