Game Two In Texas: That There's The Team I Imagined Back In April

Tonight’s game, along with last Friday’s win in Milwaukee (Bonser’s 11 strikeouts, Hunter’s grand slam), was a blueprint for the kind of team I thought the Twins were going to be coming into the season.

Sort of, anyway.

It still perplexes me that the guys in the middle of the order are being forced to pretty much score and drive in all the runs (Luis Castillo is batting .319 with a .368 OBP and he’s still a distant fourth on the club in runs scored –behind Morneau, Hunter, and Cuddyer). Considering how well those guys have done (and the absence of Mauer), it’s odd that the team has struggled as much as they have to score runs.

The reason for that, of course, is that nothing much has fired on all cylinders for the Twins all season. Going into tonight the team had lost four of Johan Santana’s last five starts.

They didn’t lose tonight, and the way Santana (and Neshek and Nathan out of the bullpen) pitched, the firepower of Morneau and Hunter was pure gravy, though certainly lots of fun to watch. Still, Morneau and Hunter drove in all seven of the Twins’ runs, and the 3-4-5 hitters (Cuddyer, Morneau, and Hunter) scored six of them. And those three pitchers combined for this extraordinary line: 18 strikeouts, five hits, and two walks.

Hunter’s season has been an astonishing thing to witness, and I’ve never placed much stock in that old monkey business about guys putting up huge numbers in the last years of their contracts; the game’s just too damn hard to play for even great players to just crank it up a notch at will when there are tens of millions of dollars on the line.

I’m still not sure what the hell Hunter’s doing differently this year, but he certainly looks like a guy who’s all of a sudden got things figured out. How often, though, does a guy make such great strides after he’s turned 30 (and Hunter will turn 32 in July)? Granted, it’s May, but the guy is on pace to post career bests in everything. He should easily have more doubles by the All Star break than he had in either of the last two seasons, and despite the fact that he’s slugged over .500 just once in the last six years, his slugging percentage currently sits at .616.

I can’t figure it out, especially since he’s been hitting without any real protection all season.

At any rate, that $12 million option the Twins picked up in the off-season –which I thought was a dicey move– is looking smarter all the time, even as Hunter is looking more and more like a guy who is pricing himself well out of Minnesota’s budget.

It will be a damn shame if Torii finally puts together a monster year and the Twins finish in the middle of the division.