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

Hello once again, people of weekend RandBall. It's been quite a long time since we've spoken, hasn't it? Still doing well, I trust? Your mom and dad doing okay? Good. I'm glad to hear it. I hope you're well rested, because I've got about a month's worth of links to get through, and I might as well just dump them into a giant list. Here we go:

  • Let's lead with our strongest cards: a pair of goofy Twins posts from Stu. He's written an inside account of Kevin Slowey's return to the big club. He's also memorialized the inimitable Tom Kelly by compiling an exhaustive list of the sometime Twins color guy's baseball lingo.
  • I'm glad that the Vikes Geek read about the curious behavior of two Ramsey County Commissioners - and took it upon himself to call them out. No matter which side of the stadium debate you're on, you have to admit, the two commissioners must have raised a few eyebrows.
  • Via the Hardball Talk blog at NBC Sports, here's an article from NPR about subsidies for sports stadiums. Key quote, from someone who helped get the Rams a stadium in St. Louis: "The city was poorly represented - the city is always poorly represented.... We put in all of these ridiculous things, and the city didn't have the sense to say no to any of them."
  • I'm not sure I can completely explain this musing on the nature of fandom by the great soccer blog The Run of Play. It's an imaginary Socratic dialog between two 1980s Brazilian soccer players, one of whom was named Socrates - actually, forget it. Explaining it isn't going to help. It's a musing on the nature of fandom and I loved it and let's just leave it there.
  • John Bonnes covers a slight ray of hope for the Twins: they should have some money to spend this offseason.
  • That said, don't read Parker Hageman's analysis of JJ Hardy's resurgence unless you like kicking furniture.
  • Jesse at Twinkie Town analyzes prospect Kyle Gibson's arm injury. The Twins have sent him for rest. Given that this is a Twins arm injury, this could be code for "we've delayed his inevitable surgery by six months, for no good reason whatsoever."
  • And finally: this nine-minute film about an under-7 soccer team from outside Barcelona is, honestly, one of the best things I've ever seen. The team has never scored a goal, they get beat by dozens of goals every game... and yet players, coaches, and parents are all clearly having a wonderful time. You don't have to go far to find something about youth sports that makes you angry. This video, though - there's really no way to watch it without an enormous smile on your face.

That's enough for this month. I'll be back again next Saturday with a normal-sized post. Assuming Rand doesn't take another month off.