The Minnesota Twins will leave and I can see clearly enough a scenario in which I will become a blubbering and blubbery sidewalk problem for local authorities. I will be cited again and again for urinating in public. You will find me on lovely summer evenings bellowing in the sculpture garden and hurling insults at patrons scurrying for the sanctuary of the Guthrie Theater.

You’ll see me poking around in public trash receptacles with a whiffleball bat, scrounging for aluminum cans, my prized Tom Brunansky jersey now threadbare and horribly stained with grease and bile and mustard. You know me. My pants will be riding halfway down my ass. My nights will be nothing but a muddled succession of pre-dawn phone calls to talk radio programs, ranting about all manner of conspiracies. The obscene caricatures of Carl Pohlad and John Marty you will encounter on bathroom walls all over the Twin Cities will be from my hand. Pohlad flabby and naked except for a pair of drooping black socks, sprawled across a flophouse mattress, rheum puddling in the hideous folds beneath his eyes. Marty? He will be pictured as an appallingly gaunt and rouged little wooden head—for what does he resemble above all else but a terrifying ventriloquist’s dummy?-- perched obscenely on a lecherous giant’s lap, his hinged jaw falling open in delight.

It’s been a long, hard summer for a local baseball fan, and the winter whose campfires are even now visible in the distance promises to be a cruel one.

The saddest truth is that there are no good guys in this whole local stadium mess, and there has perhaps never been a time when the Twins have inspired so little optimism. The 1997 season was such a dreary, knee-walking spectacle that it is easy to lose sight of the small triumphs and compelling dramas that are a part of even the worst baseball seasons. If someone had told you going into April—with the additions of Terry Steinbach, Bob Tewksbury, Greg Swindell, and Greg Colbrunn—that Brad Radke would win 20 games, Chuck Knoblauch would steal 62 bases and score 117 runs, and Ron Coomer would emerge as a solid everyday third baseman and run producer, you would have expected, at worst, a .500 record.

Yet the Twins finished at 67-94, 12 games below last year, and managed once again to post a team Earned Run Average over five runs a game (second worst in the American League), and again failed to have a single player with either 20 home runs or 100 RBIs. They were the only team in the American League without at least two players with 20 or more home runs, and the only team without a single player with a slugging percentage of over .500. All of which, of course, makes the accomplishments of Radke and Knoblauch all the more extraordinary. (Two of the three 20-game winners in the AL, in fact—Radke and Clemens—played for lousy, last-place teams.)

There is plenty of blame to go around for the Twins’ miserable season, and for their discouraging showing five years running. General Manager Terry Ryan has a spotty track record at best—keep in mind that perhaps the most significant occurrence on his watch was the signing of Knoblauch, a deal that was actually brokered by Dark Star. There are also perhaps at this time some questions about the ability of the scouting and player development departments to find and nurture genuine major league talent. Having said that, however, it should be pointed out that virtually all of the players the Twins have taken in the first rounds of the draft have been consensus picks, and these are, in fact, the people who signed Knoblauch, Scott Erickson, Radke, and Marty Cordova, who it may be forgotten was the Rookie of the Year three seasons ago. And Ryan did go out and sign Steinbach, a move that was widely applauded on all sides, and the beleaguered GM can hardly be blamed for the fact that Steinbach responded with a decidedly sub-par season.

It has been amazing to watch the ways in which Tom Kelly has always managed to deflect blame for the poor performance of his ballclubs—offering up excuses ranging from insufficient talent to small market limitations—all the while managing to trade on his two World Championships, for which he has always assumed an inordinate amount of the credit. There is no denying that the game has changed dramatically since 1991, but the reality is that many of the so-called small market teams still continue to play competent and surprising baseball. Year in and year out a number of the big stories in baseball revolve around small market success stories. Witness this year the dramatic improvements and scrappy play of teams like the Pittsburgh Pirates, Houston Astros, Detroit Tigers, and Milwaukee Brewers.

The name of the game is still player development, and it is only through the development of homegrown prospects that the nucleus of good teams is built. Take a good look at the Yankees, the prototypical model of the ‘large market’ team: At least four of the key players on the Yankees—players instrumental in turning around the team’s long-floundering fortunes—are homegrown products (Andy Pettitte, Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, and Mariano Rivera). Granted, Steinbrenner’s money allows him to sandbag and surround those players with big-ticket additions, but without those products from the farm system the Yankees are still exhibit A in the argument that money can’t buy success in the Major Leagues. Ditto for teams such as the Atlanta Braves and the Seattle Mariners. Market limitations may limit you in keeping the good young players your system develops (See: Montreal Expos), but that doesn’t excuse the Twins’ failure to bring their prospects along and help their transition to big league players.

At this stage the evidence would seem to be irrefutable that Kelly and his moribund field staff have failed miserably in evaluating and developing the young players they’ve been given. In 1987 and 1991 it can convincingly be argued that Kelly won with squads whose nucleus by and large managed themselves. Players who have thrived under Kelly have almost always tended to fall into the category of self-starters, guys who come to the majors with a complete package of skills and the intensity and make-up to succeed.

It’s interesting that Kelly’s real success stories—aside from the journeymen relievers and utility players he is inarguably adept at handling—have been players whose success has been largely uncredited to Kelly or his staff, players who Kelly can send out there with confidence that they can do the job, coaching staff be damned. The real challenge for Kelly has come in dealing with young players unfamiliar with his passive-aggressive style and harsh demands and criticisms, players who may struggle and benefit from the confidence or patience of the coaching staff.

Yes, part of it is throwing the guys out there and letting them play, and there are certainly a number of young players to whom Kelly has given ample opportunities and who have been huge disappointments thus far (Rich Becker, Scott Stahoviak, Todd Walker, and Frank Rodriguez, to name just four of the current batch), but there is also the stuff that goes on outside the lines of the playing field, the preparation and coaching and development and nurturing that constitute a very large part of a major league manager or coaches job. Kelly and his staff cannot possibly be regarded as anything but failures in this regard. Inevitably when a player scuffles Kelly’s response had been to lose patience, and either to consign the player to the bench or bullpen, or to move them to another club (it’s a long list, but it arguably includes players from Gary Gaetti and Tom Brunansky to Scott Erickson and Kevin Tapani).

In 1996 Kelly routinely gave at bats and playing time to obviously marginal players at Ron Coomer’s expense, and even went so far as to belittle Coomer on his radio show and in print. It is certainly apparent now that the Twins could have profited with Coomer’s bat in the line-up. The same was true for much of the first few months of this season, when Kelly time and again trotted out to the mound a gallery of incompetents ranging from Scott Aldred to Rich Robertson to Kevin Jarvis. Meanwhile, as we learned in the last month of the season, potentially promising pitchers like Dan Serafini were languishing at Triple A, and Greg Swindell—by any measure a better alternative to any of the above named—was pitching out of the bullpen.

Kelly and his hopeless pitching coach, Dick Such, can hardly be blamed for the performance of the bums they trotted out to the mound, but they certainly should be held accountable for the performance and progress of the younger pitchers that come through their system. And they should certainly be held accountable for the fact that they sent those bums to the mound in the first place.

You honestly can’t name another professional sports coach or manager who has been allowed to endure five straight losing seasons without being asked to either step down or make some significant changes in his field staff. Kelly’s loyalty to his coaches is admirable on a very human level, but is inexcusable at the level of professional sports. It’s a scary situation when a manager of a team that has lost as consistently as Kelly now has, and whose teams have demonstrated an almost across-the-board falling off in performance, remains the most obviously powerful figure in the organization.

Now that he seems as resolute as ever in bringing back the coterie of dog track cronies that passes for his coaching staff, it’s time to acknowledge what has long been plenty obvious to those of us who have suffered through every one of the 810 games over the last five seasons: If people really want to point fingers for the huge current public indifference regarding the Twins, they might very well start by pointing a finger squarely at Tom Kelly.