Jon Marthaler bakes up a delicious batch of links for you every weekend. Other times, you can find him here. Jon?

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Opening Day is Monday, and by Friday or so, the Twins should be more or less eliminated from playoff contention. It's shaping up to be another tough year at Target Field, and it's starting to feel like the late 1990s all over again, when the unattainable goal was not division titles but a .500 record.

I'd like to lift your spirits, depressed Twins fan, so here are seven reasons that the 2013 Twins are better to watch than any of the sadness factories that the franchise put on the field in the late 1990s.

  1. Joe Mauer is better than Pat Meares and Ron Coomer put together.
  2. Unlike Marty Cordova, not one player on the current roster has ever injured himself with a tanning bed.
  3. You can sit outside at Target Field and drink a pretty good beer. At the Metrodome, you had to sit inside and the beer tasted like it was filtered through an old gym sock.
  4. Even if the team has ten more losing seasons, the Pohlads won't try to kill it off this time.
  5. Otis Nixon is too old to play baseball. (He was last time the Twins signed him, too, but we're pretty sure it's not happening again.)
  6. Compare and contrast: Aaron Hicks and Rich Becker. Aaron Hicks and Chad Allen.
  7. No matter what, the Twins are still better than the Houston Astros.

*On with the links:

*Parker Hageman of Twins Daily gorged himself on Target Field's newest food offerings, and wrote about it - partially to inform, partially to brag, partially just to make you hungry.

*Tiger Woods is back to #1 in the world. Will Leitch at Sports on Earth notes that we don't seem to care if athletes are terrible people, as long as they win - and thinks that this is just fine.

*You put hockey in a non-traditional market, leave it there for 45 years, the team wins the Stanley Cup... and still, nobody watches the games.

*Despite starting at 10:30pm ET, the USA-Mexico soccer match on Tuesday still drew seven million viewers - more than a lot of other sports, as the article notes.

*And finally: the term "breaking his ankles" has become commonplace in basketball, referring to the act of faking out a defender so completely that he falls over. Until last week, though, I'd never seen it in hockey before.