They are in first place in the Central Division? Great stuff. One can only hope that this young Twins baseball team can hang on. If the Twins can keep up the solid play and general enthusiasm and excitement in their dugout, they should be able to scrape together a pretty nice season.

I’m not saying they’ll win 95 games, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Twins end up with a strong 2nd or 3rd place in the division. I don’t think they’ll be in the cellar at the end of the season.

Carlos Gomez getting hit in the head

I cringed when it happened, when Gomez got nailed by the throw to second by Ivan Rodriguez during May 2nd’s game. Sounds like he’s used to getting hit in the head.

“I got hit in the head five times in my career, so it’s no big deal,” Gomez said. “I’ll see how I feel tomorrow. I did hit my head, so it’s hard to tell if we play tomorrow or not.”

He was playing again already today.

I suppose this is an appropriate way to celebrate the launch of GTA IV. I’m surprised this didn’t make more of a stir in the “anti-violent video game” sectors of the politics and mainstream media.

This guy feels the city needs to be prepared. For space aliens. The story doesn’t get horribly specific, but I assume this is mostly a “what would we do if they showed up?” type of commission.

A Denver man who wants the city to be prepared for space aliens is proposing a commission to deal with the matter.

Read the rest here.

In case you haven’t heard, GTA IV has just been released. This is a monumental release.

Sneaky Release?

If you have not been paying attention, the release of GTA IV might just have snuck up on you. And clubbed you in the back of the head just before hijacking your car.

I am not referring to most gaming-informed people out there. I am referring mostly to the general public. There was very little fanfare about GTA IV in the mainstream leading up to the release. I saw the first ad for GTA IV on tv that I had ever seen just last night.

A Perfect Game

At least according to IGN. It’s a perfect game, that’s why it great. GTA IV will be one of the legendary games of this generation of video game consoles.

Cripes.

It must be a good game.

Maybe I should have reserved a copy at a local game store.

If it’s scarce, it’ll cost $100 on Ebay.

I should maybe buy it and play it, it looks fun.

IGN, I guess, rarely gives perfect 10 ratings. This must be a pretty good game. At least, GTA IV must be great enough to generate the most excitement of any recent game for the people over at IGN.

Even after all this, I really am not that surprised at the fact that IGN just gave GTA IV a perfect ten rating. I don’t expect any less from Rockstar.

Oh well.

The “Positives”

Watching the after-game shows, it was apparent that all Twins broadcast crew had become bitten by the nasty little critter referred to as the ‘optimism’ bug. Everybody had commentary about the optimistic angles of the Minnesota Twins loss tonight.

Granted, they did score 5 runs tonight. That alone is pretty cool. Some nights, going into a game, it’s pretty much a toss up as to whether the Twins will actually score more than a couple (and I mean only a couple) or less runs.

Morneau

Grand slam for Morneau. Can’t complain. Great stuff.

Liriano

Regarding yesterday’s game, Liriano. I still think that Liriano will come around eventually and be a pretty good, if not great, pitcher. I mean, the guy just had major surgery. This isn’t exactly Joe Mays coming back from surgery. This is Liriano.

I found this to be an interesting recap of the return of Liriano:

Francisco Liriano became the first Twins starter since Brad Radke on May 20, 2002, to fail to survive the first inning, and the Twins lost their second straight game. Liriano, 0-3 with an 11.32 ERA since returning from Tommy John surgery, allowed six runs in two-thirds of an inning against the Athletics.

Gotta win

The Twins need a nice little winning streak of about 4 games.