Tuesday Twins: Joe Mauer’s explosive opinion on batting cleanup

It’s a beautiful day! Here are the links:

• When asked what he thought about hitting cleanup in a major league game for the first time in over ten years, Joe Mauer said, “Not much. It was good; worked out pretty well.”
• Rapper girl Dessa was supposed to sing (rap?) the national anthem before yesterday’s season opener, but called in sick. Maybe if she did this before every game the Twins will go 162-0?
• Former Twins Randy Bush, Roy Smith, Tom Kelly, Kent Hrbek, Tim Laudner, and Terry Steinbach stuffed themselves in a clown car and drove to Chicago to surprise long-time Twins bullpen coach Rick Stelmaszek and convince him to throw out the first pitch at yesterday’s game. Stelmaszek is suffering from pancreatic cancer.
• This is an actual paragraph Tom Powers wrote and published in the Pioneer Press today:

This is the age of the Whiz Kids in front offices and the Twins now have their very own baseball programmers. The Twins and the Brainiac 500 are off to a rousing start.

• The CityPages went through and graded all of the Twins player’s batting music, and whoever did it seems to have pretty bad taste in music (though the highest grade given was correct).
• Did anyone else notice former Twin and large human Brian Buchanan is on the Royals coaching staff?
• Remember Matt Strahm, the Royals reliever who gave up all those runs yesterday? He’s actually from Fargo. A big group of his friends and family were at the game, even.
• Mike Berardino wrote a profile of new Minnesota “Whiz Kid” Derek Falvey. Did you know he got into baseball by writing and working on websites? Weird.