Given the choice between watching three hours of early Sunday coverage of the Masters or three hours of Twins baseball from the first week of the MLB season, I mostly chose the latter.
Call me a sucker for baseball, or maybe more so a local team, or probably even more so for the suddenly compelling Twins. I know there are 162 Twins games a year and only one final round of the Masters every year. A choice is a choice.
At the very least, those three hours allowed for the solidification of a few notions about these suddenly fundamentally sound, 5-1 Twins. Let's take a spin through five of them:
• Ervin Santana is not an ace, per se, but he inspires roughly the same feeling that Carl Pavano did when he was at his best for the Twins in 2010: that every time he pitches, the Twins have a reasonable expectation of winning.
If you were fooled by his 7-11 record in 2016 and didn't look more carefully at his 3.38 ERA and solid peripheral numbers, Santana's 2-0 start this year — with just four hits and one run allowed in 13 innings, to go with reasonable run support — might come as a surprise.
• Remember near the end of spring training when everyone was freaking out because ByungHo Park was sent to the minors after a hot spring in favor of keeping 13 pitchers? Feels like a distant memory thanks to two things: 1) Robbie Grossman has a .389 on-base percentage as the team's designated hitter and 2) all of those bullpen arms have come in handy.
In the only loss of the year, when starter Adalberto Mejia recorded just five outs Saturday, bullpen depth guys Justin Haley and Michael Tonkin chewed up innings to keep everyone else fresh. That set up Sunday's strategy of taking out Santana after six shutout innings, letting the bullpen do the rest.
• That said, the bullpen strategy almost backfired Sunday as a handful of relievers worked in and out of danger for three innings.
I like the idea of having confidence in the relievers, even if Santana was rolling. But I'm not sure the Twins have a bullpen good enough yet to make me think they're better off getting nine outs that way than asking for more from Santana.
• After everything we heard about Byron Buxton, Miguel Sano, Max Kepler, Eddie Rosario and Jose Berrios, what if the best of the young Twins players ends up being Jorge Polanco?
It's not as if Polanco is a no-name or unheralded, but others certainly have been touted more than him. All he's done so far this year is hit .389, including a home run Sunday. He looks like he's a threat to get a hit every time up.
• Then again, Sano has been everything the Twins could have hoped for in the first week of the season. Whatever happened during a disappointing 2016 — whether it was the right field experiment, the expectations after 2015 or just a natural sophomore slump — seems long forgotten.
