Minnesota

As of this morning - the Minnesota Twins have the best record in the AL at 10-5. How is it possible that a club with a team ERA of 5.29 could have the best record in the league?

The answer is offense. The Twins lead the AL in runs scored with 98 (not including yesterday's games) with five players having better than 10.0 RC* (runs created). The next closest team in the AL only has three players with a RC of 10.0 or better.

The offense is coming from unexpected sources. Red Sox fan favorite Jose Offerman has a RC of 10.7 while slugging a healthy .565 (career slugging percentage of .374). Henry Blanco has a RC of 10.1 while filling in for injured rookie Joe Mauer. Blanco's offense is definitely a bonus for the Twins. Blanco has a career high of 7 HR and a career batting average of .221 but this year he is hitting .300 with 3 HR already. Lew Ford? Where the heck did Lew Ford come from? The kid is hitting .450 and leading the team with 15 RBI and 16 RC. You can't tell me that the Twins expected this sort of production from the 28-year old Ford.

Shannon Stewart and Jaque Jones are also off to very good starts (13.1 RC and 13.2 RC respectively) but the argument can be made that these levels of production were somewhat expected. Also off to a hot start is slick fielding first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz who just misses the 10.0 RC level (9.8) while hitting .351 (70 points over his career average).

The temptation is to say that these hitters will turn back into pumpkins and that the Twins will then crash back to reality but I'm wondering about this. Lew Ford has shown that he can hit at all levels. Maybe the time is just right and he will have a breakthrough year. Henry Blanco? Back to pumpkinville for him but I expect his high level of offensive output to be replaced easily by a healthy Joe Mauer. Sure Shannon S., Doug M., and Jaque J. will probably level off but their drop in production should be off-set by the pitching making adjustments to get the team ERA down into the 4.50 area.

The only guy I see turning completely into a pumpkin is Jose Offerman and that may just be talk born of spite (his last year in Boston he batted just .232).

* RC - runs created comes from a complicated formula but is a good gauge of offensive output (trust me). The actual formula used to arrive at RC is (H + BB + HBP - CS - GIDP) times (Total Bases + .26(TBB - IBB + HBP) + .52(SH + SF + SB)) divided by (AB + TBB + HBP + SH + SF).