Monday Morning Minnesota: End of an era

Hey, so the season is over and Joe Mauer, while still undecided, sure seems to be retiring. After yesterday’s amazing farewell, It still doesn’t feel real that the next Twins game I watch might not contain Joe. This is so sad, that even I am unable to really come up with any horrible goofy jokes and bad puns for this article.

And that’s saying something.

• Zack Pierce of the Athletic (Subscription required but now’s a good time to nab that free trial!) writes about how Joe basically lived every Minnesota kids dream. It is a pretty great reminder of how special, and rare, it is for something like this to happen the way it happened.

I know as a young girl I dreamed of playing for the Twins, but I also dreamed of ripping my brain out and shoving it in a spaceship so I could be a sassy on-board A.I of the first manned interstellar mission, so I don’t know how normal my dreams were.

• Who might we see at first base next year? Well according to minor league ball at some point it should be Brent Rooker.
• Willians Astudillo is the gift that keeps on giving, but he’s also an outlier among outliers and might just be the single strangest player I’ve seen. Imagine for a second that baseball players were all apples. Most would be red and sweet, some would be green and sour. Hell, a handful would even be yellow. Astudillo? He’d be a gourd.
• Zone Coverage’s Tom Schreier looks at a handful of players who should be part of the future going in to an off-season full of question marks.
• Jose Berrios wants to be the player the Twins build around. He might just have the best chance of becoming a genuine ace of any Twins pitcher post-Johan.

Today’s soundtrack is my mood.