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Chillinback wrote:

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can someone with an espn insider account copy and paste the mauer in pinstripes article by olney?
tia

Mauer staying power?

Joe Mauer could become a free agent after the 2010 season, and given that he's a catcher and he's one of the game's best pure hitters and he'll be 27 years old at the end of next season, there's going to be a lot written and said about whether he might be headed to the Red Sox or the Yankees or the Angels or Mets or some other big-market team for huge dollars. Johan Santana, after all, left the Twins under similar circumstances.

But the Mauer and Santana situations might be a lot of apples versus oranges. Mauer, of course, is from Minnesota, unlike Santana, and he is represented by Ron Shapiro, who as the agent for Cal Ripken and Kirby Puckett kept each of those stars with his original team.

Mauer will make $12.5 million next season and he will, of course, be in line for a huge raise; if he wanted to chase the biggest offer he could do that, and the Twins probably would be outbid. But the Twins will probably be aggressive in trying to keep him, by their standards, and in the end, it's possible that Mauer will decide -- as Ripken and Puckett did -- that he preferred to stay with the team that drafted and developed him.

Michael Cuddyer on Mauer's improvement as a hitter: "I think he's gotten better in that he knows what pitchers are trying to do to him. He's not afraid to let it go [with his swing] now, when the situation is in his favor." In other words, Mauer will attack pitches when he's ahead in the count and he's reasonably sure what the pitcher is going to throw next. Cuddyer mentioned that, in the past, pitchers would fall behind in the count against Mauer and feel comfortable pounding the strike zone with a fastball, believing that the worst thing that could happen is that Mauer would smack a single. But now Mauer is jumping those fastballs. Cuddyer has noticed recently that pitchers have become much more careful with how they pitch to Mauer in those situations, preferring to give him nothing to hit rather than firing a cookie fastball over the plate