He’s not a machine! He’s a man!

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Joe Mauer is the greatest catcher and baseball player ever to grace a baseball diamond. Joe Mauer’s seeing-eye singles make men cheer, women faint and children weep. He sees through walls. He can jump 10 feet in the air, flat footed. He runs the 40-yard dash in two seconds flat. He’s from St. Paul, too.

Joe Mauer’s arm fires baseballs fast enough that the heat expended melts the Minnesota winter snow. He teleports instead of driving - he’s also concerned about the environment. And he can kill a bull only by smirking, although he never would. He goes back in time – why else do think he has the sideburns – so he can teach Elvis guitar and slaughter the dinosaurs. He’s a hometown boy to boot.

Joe Mauer started playing in high school as a toddler and only struck out once. The pitcher’s head exploded immediately thereafter. When Bill Brasky gets drunk and tells crazy stories, he recalls the time he watched Joe Mauer fight Paul Bunyan ─ Mauer tossed the lumberjack across the country into the Grand Canyon. When someone posted the story on Wikipedia last June, Mauer demolished Paul Bunyon Land in Brainerd by hitting .452 over the next 30 days. If you jar his urine, it sells for five grand on eBay. He walks across the Mississippi River from St. Paul before every Twins game.

Joe Mauer can impregnate women just by bunting in a clutch situation when he’s hitting third. His listed height is 6’5”, but he’s closer to 7’2”. Jesus rested on the seventh day – Mauer rests every fifth day because he accomplishes the same things in a shorter amount of time. He’s smarter than you. He’s faster than you. He’s has more claim to St. Paul than you. He has an 18-inch penis.

Joe Mauer was born in St. Paul and he is THE HIT MACHINE (according to this laughingly bad article from the PiPress).

Tired, yet? I know I am. Let’s be honest with ourselves: Joe Mauer is overrated.

The hero worship with Joe Mauer needs to stop. Or at least curtail a bit – we’re reaching Oprah levels here. (If a “Joe Mauer Book Club” is formed, watch out.) Yes, Joe Mauer is a good baseball player. He has a terrific eye at the plate and hits (singles) to all fields. He’s an intelligent base runner who moves well for a catcher and has a rocket arm. But he’s not messiah and he’s not the Baseball Jesus. In fact, he’s the third best player on his team at best (Santana, Morneau).

Last spring, Morneau drove me nuts by swinging and everything thrown 10 feet near him without as much as sniffing the baseball. ( Mentioned here.) He turned it around and became the American League MVP.

Listen, I don’t hate Joe Mauer. I predicted he would hit a batting title at the start of last year. (I didn’t think it would be last year, but I still thought it would happen.) He’s a great player who you won’t see in the crime blotter. He handles pitchers very effectively and plays defense at the backstop as good as anyone. He strikes out rarely. But if he’s going to hit third for a division winning baseball team, he has to drive the ball more. Period.

I love small-ball, when teams are strong defensively, move the runners around from station to station offensively and rely on tough pitching and speed. And Mauer does a lot of things that are GREAT for small ball. But not in the third spot. He draws a lot of walks, but this team doesn’t need him to set the table, they need him to clear the bases.

A true small-ball team should have speed at the top and bottom of the order, centered around one or two mashers in the middle that can either put the ball either in the seats or into the gaps. Mauer, at this point, isn’t doing that. I believe that as he grows he will drop a few average points (an slightly overrated statistic) while increasing his power numbers. But until that point, Twins manager Ron Gardenhire needs to put Mauer in the No. 2 hole. But Joey hits into too many double plays (24 last year, almost double his 13 home runs).

(*Average is overrated to a point and this is why. A person can often collect meaningless hits when there are already two outs and no one on base. A.J. Pierzynski was the king of the two-out, none on double. Those hits usually turn into “LOB” at the end of the inning. Batters should hit anywhere from .270 to .330. Now if someone is hitting .240, they need to bring up their average in order to become a viable hitting option. But would you really notice the two singles per month more of a .360 hitter than you would of a .330 hitter? No. But you will always notice someone who has 90 RBI compared to 120 RBI.)

Until Mauer starts to drive the ball, stop the ridiculousness. This isn’t hate filled. This isn’t blasphemy. This is reality - Joe Mauer as of right now is a great two hitter.

And Jesus hit clean up.

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Elliot writes professionally for a newspaper and spends some of his free time blogging about sports and music at www.elliotmann.org. He loves watching the Twins but is tired of watching people fawn over seeing-eye singles and often checks Mauer’s career stats here.

*Ed. note: I had this mind for several days and time didn’t allow it to come together until now. I don’t mean to kick Mauer when he’s down. We here at Elliot’s blog hope for a speedy recovery for Joey Mauha. Also, special thanks to Apollo Creed’s trainer who became Rocky’s trainer in IV for the title.

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