Cue The Meatloaf

“Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” would be an appropriate, if obnoxious, theme song for Ron Gardenhire’s Twins, for this or any season. The mantra in the Minnesota clubhouse during Gardenhire’s tenure has always been, “We’re just trying to win each series. The rest will take care of itself.”

That’s a decent, ambitious goal for a baseball team. A .660 winning percentage should be more than enough to easily win any division. The 2004 Cardinals played .648 ball and led the majors with 105 wins. The White Sox, of course, are playing at an unreal .707 clip so far this year, and no one really expects them to be able to keep that up. The Twins current .590 winning percentage is better than they finished last year, and would have been good enough to win three divisions in ’04; still, barring a complete Chicago collapse they’ll probably have to crank it up a notch, or at the very least keep rolling at their present pace to close ground on the Sox.

Thanks once again to the weird schedule, Minnesota and Chicago won’t meet again until August, and the two teams will play their remaining thirteen games against each other in the season’s final two months (including seven games in September).

The last couple games of the Toronto series were encouraging on all sorts of levels. The team bounced back from Johan Santana’s discouraging (and almost shocking) outing on Tuesday, and got a decent start from Kyle Lohse on Wednesday, and a spectacular start out of Joe Mays today. Juan Rincon and Joe Nathan appear to have suffered no lingering effects from their shaky outings in last Friday’s eleven-inning train wreck against Texas.

Michael Cuddyer continued his May resurrection, going four-for-seven with three RBIs in the last couple games (and raising his batting average to .274). Two of those RBIs came on his bases-loaded double off Gustavo Chacin in the sixth inning of today’s 4-0 victory in the series finale. The thirteen-pitch battle that resulted in that double was one of the great at-bats you’ll ever see (Cuddyer fouled off eight two-strike pitches, including one long, high blast that just hooked foul down the leftfield line), and was all the more significant given the Twins futility with the bases loaded so far this year.

“I saw all of his pitches in that at-bat,” Cuddyer said afterwards. “I saw some of them several times, in fact. I was just trying to stay back, get a good swing, and try to drive the ball. In an at-bat like that, after a while you stop trying to guess and just try to see each pitch. In the back of my mind, though, I knew he’d thrown me a change-up my previous time up, and I hadn’t seen it yet. It turned out that was the pitch I eventually hit, but by then, of course, I was no longer really looking for it.”

Finally, to return to Meatloaf for a moment, I’d like to give you a heads up that I’ve started to assemble my All-Time Fat Bastard team, and I welcome early suggestions for worthy candidates.