Rain Delay

It’s been a damn fine day here in the Twin Cities. Cold rain and temperatures forty degrees below normal. A perfect day for an indoor baseball game, in other words, or for hunkering down on the couch to watch the Twins playing somewhere better else.

No such luck, which means we have an extra twenty-four hours to gargle Mountain Dew and attempt to rinse the lousy taste of yesterday’s game out of our mouths before the Rangers come to town. There’s nothing worse than an ugly game against an ugly pitcher, and yesterday’s 7-4 loss to the Orioles and Sidney Ponson more than fit the bill on both counts. After already seeing Ponson, Bartolo Colon, and C.C. Sabathia, the Twins just need to face Randy Johnson and David Wells to complete their tour of the American League’s All-Ugly rotation.

The Baltimore series was disappointing on a lot of fronts. The pitching match-ups going in couldn’t have been more promising for the Twins, with Silva, Radke, and Santana all taking a turn. Those eye-popping control numbers for Minnesota’s staff are starting to catch up to them, though, with opposing teams taking a very aggressive approach in the early going. The Twins coaches have always preached the importance of strike one, and both Radke and Santana have long been in the habit of pounding fastballs in the strike zone in the early going, and early in the count, in an attempt at getting ahead in the count. The scouts have obviously noticed, and now it’s time for the Twins to make their own adjustments.

When an opposing team makes three errors at the major league level you really need to make them pay for those mistakes, but the Twins just haven’t been able to capitalize. The bottom of the order continues to be a train wreck. Yesterday the one through five hitters were a combined seven-for-eighteen; the other four guys (and pinch hitter Matthew LeCroy, batting in the eight spot) went 0-13.

The other thing I’ve noticed lately is that with Torii Hunter struggling teams can pitch very carefully to Justin Morneau, and he’s not going to see a lot of balls to drive until Hunter starts hitting consistently and taking a more patient approach at the plate.

I’ve also decided that J.C. Romero is virtually worthless unless he starts an inning with the bases empty. He’s got a bit of LaTroy Hawkins syndrome going on the last couple years. Consider that opposing hitters are batting .231 against Romero with the bases empty (over twenty-six at-bats), with a respectable .333 on base percentage. They’re actually hitting worse with runners in scoring position (.091, if you’d care to believe that), but thanks to Romero’s apparent case of the yips the opposing OBP in those same situations is .412. That’s almost hard to fathom, yet between the walks (five BB and one K w/runners in scoring position) and his penchant for uncorking wild pitches at the most inopportune times, Romero’s simply not a guy who can be trusted with inherited runners. So far this year he’s averaging 6.28 walks per nine innings, which is the worst ratio on the staff by a huge margin.