Links, Because I'm Lazy

The Twins played a late-nighter on the West Coast last night, and this is a really busy week for me so I just didn't have time to stay up and write a post about it. Instead, here are a few links to other quality Twins material around the interweb:

* On Saturday, SBG held his Second Annual SBG Convention at Minnehaha Falls in East Minneapolis. It was a beautiful day in the park, filled with great food and conversation, and attending provided me with the opportunity to match faces to some familiar online monikers (although I'd already met the majority of bloggers in attendance). Naturally, one of the biggest highlights of the day was meeting the imitable ubelmann face-to-face. He has become one of the most respected Twins bloggers out there since taking over the majority of Twins-writing duties over at SBG's place, and it was especially nice to rub shoulders with him for a bit, although his stay was all-too-brief.

You can click on the link above to see some pictures from the convention. I'm only in one of them, which may be a good thing depending on your point of view. I think the best reaction to the series of photos so far came from my friend Luiza, who said that viewing the pictures of us bloggers mulling around was "like a trainwreck I can't look away from" because we "all look so nerdy." That's what friends are for.

* I recently added a new link to the sidebar for Twins Fix, a new blog operated by Andrew Kneeland, who is a frequent commenter on this site. It's looking good so far, be sure to stop by and say hi.

* Twins Geek has been very thin on content this month, but he wrote up a post on Brian Buscher on Sunday night which is absolutely worth a read. Geek draws a potential parallel between the careers of Buscher and another late bloomer in Ron Coomer, which would hardly be a bad thing. As much playful flak as Coomer takes for being one of the worst All-Stars ever, he was a pretty productive player for the Twins for a number of years and I think we'd all be satisfied if Buscher followed a similar path.

* Steve Rudolph makes a series of interesting observations over at Bleacher Bums, one of which makes note of an interesting thought brought up recently by La Velle E. Neal III:

As you may have heard, Twins manager Ron Gardenhire was fined $1,500 for violating the league's pace-of-game (POG) requirements. The Strib's La Velle E. Neal raised an interesting question the other day that helped sooth my disappointment over the lack of minor league stats and the lame headline.

Neal wondered why MLB is singling out Ron Gardenhire when Twins games are among the fastest in baseball at an average time of 2:44? Yankees games average 3:03 and the Red Sox usually take 3:01 to play a game.

I'm all for a quick game, but fining the manager of a team that plays at the pace the league want while ignoring the true offenders is just another example of the inherent biases that exist in the game.