Twins Tuesday

Having lived in Minnesota for the past ten years there are a few things that I have learned that Minnesotans have in common. We play duck, duck, gray duck. We drink pop. And we are in love with the Minnesota Twins. Anytime you meet someone for the first time the topic of conversation always seems to turn into the Minnesota Twins, and we love it.

This brings me to our new segment that we will have once a week called "Twins Tuesdays" with various posts regarding the Minnesota Twins. These posts could be anything from previewing an upcoming series for the Twins, or simply just worshipping the home town hero himself, Mr. Joe Mauer.

For the inaugural Twins Tuesday post I'm going to focus on a certain Twin that I have been extremely suprised and certainly delighted with thus far this year. This player being Delmon Young. After the Twins acquired Delmon in the offseason before the 2008 season everyone, including me, was excited. We were hoping for the same guy who won the 2007 AL Rookie of the Year Award the previous year after posting a .316 average and 93 RBI. This was a great acquisition because with the addition of Delmon Young, we could move Jason Kubel to designated hitter and stick Delmon in left field, and not have to put Jeff Cirillo as a DH anymore. From the looks of this trade it was nothing but positives for the Twins. We only had to give up Jason Bartlett who had a .265 average in '07 and Matt Garza who only had a 42% winning percentage in that same year.

Delmon's first season with the Twins wasn't as good as his rookie season but it was definitely an improvement over Jeff Cirillo. He posted a .290 average with 10 homers and 69 RBI. It was a bit of a disappointing season, but with Delmon Young the general concensus was that he's still young and that he has time to improve. 2009 was the season that people thought Delmon would come out and post the season that everybody was hoping for. That just did not happen. Delmon had his worst year of his career, he had an OBP of only .308 with 12 walks in 416 plate appearances. He only had 12 home runs, 60 RBI and was third on the team with 92 strikeouts.

This brings us to 2010. Coming into this season, people didn't really have very high expectations for Delmon. People lost hope in him, in a way, after a disappointing 2008 and 2009. People were more so anticipating big years from Jason Kubel and Michael Cuddyer. However, Delmon Young is quietly having a terrific season a quarter of the way through the season. D-Young thus far is hitting .285 and has already had more base on balls than all of last season. Delmon is tied for second on the team with 8 home runs and is only 3 RBI behind Justin Morneau with 40. Delmon has arguably been the best outfielder and arguably been the best hitter this year, throwing the M&M boys aside.