Not with a bang but a whimper some dead guy said it Ron Gardenhire lives it, so ends a decade of Twins baseball under the gardentool a cold dirty pile of what might have been. I'm told he never got the chance to manage in 2011 given the laundry list of injuries which rendered us sapless and besides surely he's earned a free pass after 6 division titles in 10 years. Never got a chance? It's when misfortune strikes that one is forced to manage. Anyone could train a chimp to deliver the same lineup card to home plate every day in fact I think someone did it's that same crowd-pleasing chimp who jumps out of the dugout and hops up & down in front of the umpire from time to time. You know the one I'm talking about that stupid-looking primate way in the corner of the exhibit which appears to be in a coma most of the time but then suddenly goes apeshit-for-ejection much to the delight of the paying customers who reward the performance with applause bananas. As for the 6 in 10, sadistic horse trainers everywhere fantasize that just once in their lives they'll have an opportunity to whip some freakish 3 year old all the way into the field of the Kentucky Derby - that's their dream, once, just once to run for the roses. Ron Gardenhire got six shots and each time the horse pulled up progressively lame until what remained after ten years under Gardy resembles some crow-bit nag suffering from stage fright which aimlessly limps about the barn saddled with historic postseason failure vainly crying out for a new jockey......Sorry I momentarily forgot that no one has given a rat's ass about horse racing since the 1950's....How about 1 run games? Does a manager have a chance to make a difference there? This was the year of the one run game in Minnesota particularly early in the season, 50% of April and May games fit that description yet summer arrived with a chalk outline already around the Twins dead by June in a division where all you need is a pulse. Some of us helplessly wasted by the still fresh intoxication of Target Field foolishly refused to stop searching for that pulse an unfortunate delay giving rise to nothing but a bloated corpse, a corpse which sadly remains on display for public viewing until mercifully at long last it can be officially buried on September 28, 2011.