The Fergus Falls Daily Journal

Basketball and a power shortage

By Tom Grout

June 13, 2008

3 comments

-I guess I should have stayed up a little longer last night to watch the rest of the Laker-Celtic game. When I first turned it on the Lakers were leading by 24 and I watched for a little while and the Celtics were working hard to cut into that lead. With the Lakers being at home and me not being a great fan of pro basketball, I went to bed.

This morning I hear that the Celtics won the game so again I missed a great game and a little bit of history. I say that because I tend to go to bed early on a lot of great games.

The controversy with that former NBA official has piqued my interest a little. Many years ago I had a conversation with a guy who bet a lot on sports and he said a lot of games are fixed. Not necessarily the outcome of the game, meaning who wins or loses, but to make sure a point spread is made. He said it was very common in basketball and football where it is a little easier to fix a game. I’m not saying I believe him but with the allegations of this official and the fact that pro sports has a way of hiding things, like steroids, it will not surprise me if there isn’t some truth to it.

I can’t help but wonder if some games are fixed for various reasons. I remember watching a Timberwolves game when they were playing the Lakers. They were at the Target Center and at the time the Wolves were just a few seasons in existence and weren’t very good. On the night the Wolves were playing their stellar defense as only Bill Musselman’s teams could play, and were actually leading most of the game.

The Lakers were down by ten with about 3 minutes left when I saw Magic Johnson slowly bringing the ball up court. He looked up at the scoreboard to check the score and the time and then proceeded to completely take over the game. You could say it was “Magic” as he turned on the burners and the Lakers ended up winning by 10. At that moment I couldn’t help but wonder if the game was fixed that way. Let the home town fans think for most of the game that the Wolves could actually win then yank it away at the end. It may or may not have been that way but it did make me think a minute and go Hmmmmmmmmmmm.

_Wow, the Twins are not only getting beat they are getting hammered. First by the White Sox and now by the Indians. I guess if you are going to lose you may as well lose big.

This brings me back to an old topic here. The Twins lack of power. The Whites Sox killed the Twins with 2 and 3 run home runs and the Indians had a big 3 run home run last night. I know the Twins like to brag about their small ball way of doing things by stringing out a bunch of hits to score a run. That may work in the National League but it ain’t working in the American League.

I used to play on a pretty good soft ball team and we scored most of our runs with the small ball approach. We relied on base hit after base hit to score our runs. To score 5 runs it took about 12-15 hits to do it and when we were hot we could score a bunch of runs in an inning or game. The problem was when we played a team with power. It would take them a couple of hits to score 5 runs and it really was disheartening to watch it happen so fast.

The Twins are like that too, they have to string a number of hits to score yet the other team with one swing of the bat scores the same amount or more. The problem with stringing hits to score is that everything has to work right to do it. Everyone on the team has to be hot to make it happen and that isn’t an easy thing to accomplish.

Realistically the Twins have only one player right now who may accomplish the feet of hitting a big home run and that’s Justin Morneau. Other players may do it once in awhile but there really is no threat of anyone to do it other than him. Without that threat, scoring runs is not an easy task or something that can be done consistently unless you have a team full of .320 hitters which the Twins don’t.