It's May, though it sure didn't feel like it tonight at my daughters' all-school picnic, where parents retreated for warmth into the school's atrium and, in at least one case, considered how the fare from the "Minneapolis Public Schools food truck" would be assisted by a craft beer, or three Miller High Lifes.
I think May is my favorite month of the baseball season. When it starts, anything can still happen, but by the time it's over there's a pretty good chance that what you've seen is what you're going to get. Mainly it's just math: a third of a season, but not a sixth, will model the whole long summer. By the end of May every team will have played through favorable and unfavorable stretches of their schedule. In May the weather is better, there are fewer postponements and scheduled off days, and, no matter your payroll, your fourth and fifth best starting pitchers begin logging a lot of innings, which means too that your hitters have more at-bats against the other team's fourth or fifth best starting pitcher. Games in April are less representative, and anyway there aren't enough of them to be sure. A poor record in April can be attributed to a "bad start" and a good one to the gods preparing a lesson on hope being a bastard.
The Twins went 17-10 in April. Twenty-seven games is exactly a sixth of their 162-game regular season, so, multiplying both wins and losses by six, we arrive at the final record for which they are clearly headed: 102-60. Just more basic math. Plus, tonight, they won their first game played in May. I'm just saying!
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