Four thoughts as we officially transition fully into football season in Minnesota, at least a month later than most of us expected:
Under new management
The Twins went into the final day of the 2015 regular season ranking eighth in the American League in runs scored and 10th in ERA. After losing 6-1 to Kansas City in Sunday's finale, they wound up on the wrong side of the runs ledger for the season: 696 scored and an even 700 allowed.
That they finished a couple of games over .500 could be attributed to fortune and a decent showing (21-20) in one-run games. Or one could say that manager Paul Molitor, in his first season with the team, squeezed some extra wins out of a team that finished 83-79, at least 13 games better than any of the previous four seasons.
It's a difficult thing to assign praise or blame, but most would agree with this: Molitor, at the very least, made some moves this season that it would have been difficult to imagine his predecessor, Ron Gardenhire, making.
Putting Trevor May in the bullpen to shore up that leaky unit … keeping a shaky Glen Perkins out of the closer role after he came back from injury … experimenting with lineup combinations based on matchups (even batting the pitcher eighth in National League) … those were new things.
Again, it's hard to say if he pushed the right buttons or had better buttons to push. The answer, I suspect, is a little bit of both.
QB conundrum
A day after the Gophers were shut out 27-0 at Northwestern, with freshman QB Demry Croft replacing ineffective Mitch Leidner, coach Jerry Kill naturally tried to downplay the shake-up. Kill was quoted as saying "it's not as big a deal as everybody will make out of it," adding that Croft played because "we've got to have a backup quarterback ready to play."
There's quite a bit of truth sprinkled in with that diplomacy, though there is also this: Any time you remove a starting QB and put in a backup, it's a big deal regardless of your stated intentions.
