Get off of Delmon Young

“If it’s Delmon Young you’re bitching about at this point in the season, you’re too baseball stupid to be taken seriously.”

- quote from Rubechat user ‘The DFC Work’ on August 19.

I think that is going to be my new phrase that I utter to the lot of moronic simpletons who always seem to emerge in late August when they realize that the regular season for football is still a month away and the Twins are in the division hunt.

You’re too baseball stupid to be taken seriously.

Go follow the Vikings. Go follow a god damn sport that only requires the attention span of one game once a week. Do that, have fun. Scream from your spleen and enjoy the type of game that requires three hours of simplistic understanding and can be emotionally gripped on a week-to-week basis. But, please, for the love of God, ignore the sport that has 162 games over the course of six months. Please, do me a favor.

And this goes for every person I know who rips into Delmon, and there are plenty of them.

There was the jackass at the Twins-Yankees series (the first series) who sat in the lower level next to the bullpen and just screamed, “You suck Delmon” whenever the crowd got quiet. He wore two earrings, had glasses on, called me a “fu– stick” and flicked me off when I yelled out, “Yeah Delmon, you pathetic 22-year-old Major League Baseball player, get a life!”

It goes for the copy editor I work with who bitched about Delmon’s error in Sunday’s 10-8 win, and his 0-4 performance in that game as well. Ignoring the fact that Young’s emergence has made him just as important as any hitter in this lineup over the last two months.

It goes for every idiot who’s head must ache from knee-jerk reactions to a 22-year-old right-fielder hitting .288 with 53 RBI and seven home runs.

In the past two months Young is hitting .306 with six home runs and 31 RBI. Justin Morneau, hitting in front of Delmon for most of those two months, has done what in that same stretch? .305, eight home runs, 43 RBI.

Does he swing at the first pitch too often, maybe. But, some hitters believe that the first pitch is often when the pitcher is trying to get a fastball over to get ahead in the count. Sometimes I wonder why Mauer always, always takes the first pitch, but hey, he’s a great hitter, so let him be. Right?

Of course, at 22, Mauer hit .294 with nine home runs and 55 RBI.

Wow those numbers look eerily similar to someone else that continues to draw the ire of every whitebred idiot in a baby blue Hrbek jersey at the Dome..

Oh and Morneau, when he was 22, spent 44 games with the Twins - his numbers? .226 avg., 4 HR, 16 RBI. Morneau didn’t have a full season until he was 24, and he hit .239 with 22 home runs and 79 RBI, he struck out 94 times to 44 walks.

But of course that is all happenstance, right? They were young, inexperienced players right? They made the defensive plays - they didn’t run like they have a turd in their pants? Is that it?

So Delmon makes some errors in left-field, a notoriously difficult position to play at the Metrodome. He doesn’t get to some balls and he has a lot of balls get past him, often leaving fans just shaking their heads - me included.

But I personally think that Delmon plays baseball hard and plays the game the right way. I think that his errors are mental but are not because of laziness, it’s just the breaks of a young man learning the game in his second season.

Could he be better? Sure, who couldn’t. But the fact that for some reason Delmon Young continues to get blamed for the problems of the Minnesota Twins offense or that people will continue to pinpoint his at-bats for reasons that the team lost, I just refuse to accept those notions.

He’s 22, there are ten players in all of baseball who are 22 or younger and have at least 100 at-bats this season. Young is leading all of them (including Evan Longoria, Billy Butler and Jay Bruce, and of course, Carlos Gomez) in batting average at .288. Only Gomez has more at-bats. His home run totals are off pace by a long shot but he is only behind Longoria (who has 60 fewer at-bats) in RBI’s.

He’s going to be a very, very good baseball player. There’s just no doubting that. He is in the kind of organization where players mature very effectively (see Morneau, Justin; Mauer, Joe; Kubel, Jason). He will learn and he will get better. But, to expect anything more at this point is just asinine.

Get some perspective, you idiots.