I kind of got lost in a digression about Dungeons and Dragons in Part I.  I admit, my Nerd Scale does go to 11.  But that was kind of  my point--here you have a game where a bunch of jocks hit a little ball with a stick chopped down from some tree by some other jock, and another jock tries to catch the ball with a chunk of cow flesh chopped off a dead cow carcass that had been raised by the ultimate jock, the American Cowboy.  And more often than not, the we the fans end up sounding like a bunch of nerds, bandying about statistics.  I mean, it's probably redundant, but you've all seen the Seinfeld episode, right?  Where George is unemployed, and he says, "I like baseball..." and Jerry says "they usually give those jobs to ex-baseball players."  But in TV land George gets the job anyway, and the Yankees lose because he makes them where cotton uniforms that have shrunk.  (One can only hope there is another George Costanza making his way up the Yankee chain of command.  It took them years to erase his mistakes.)  But by and large we're all Costanza's, and if we actually had to run a team like the Twins, we'd botch it up way worse than Smith and Gardenhire.

Seriously, the mathematical brainpower I've seen devoted to breaking down baseball statistics on Twins fansites alone could probably break the cold-fusion code, with plenty of room left over for some significant advances in time travel as well.  Which would be more productive than debating the relative merits of Brian Dinkelman vs. Steve Tolleson, because then the Twins could go back in time and really fleece the Mets.  Moreon RISK  below.

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I, shall we say, "enjoy" the stat side of baseball.  I liked math and science in school, but ultimately got a degree in English.  I realize stats are a very real part of the game, but for me there is poetry as well.  Attempting to reduce everything to some quantifiable stat kind of wears me out.

I suppose I just haven't looked hard enough, but since the end of Batgirl, Twins bloggers with a more artistic point of view seem to be few and far between, with, perhaps, the exception of Howard Sinker.  TwinkieTown does have some fantastic content though, and I truly enjoy visiting.  After the jump, I will attempt to show how baseball is like the game of RISK (although it seems some would prefer to compare it to Dungeons and Dragons; more on that later.)  If you have never played RISK, you probably don't need to bother reading on.

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