I still love baseball. I still make an attempt to at least keep tabs on every game, and religiously scroll through the boxscores every morning. I don’t know, quite honestly, why it’s been so hard to write about the Twins this year (and, truth be told, through the second half of last season).
Actually, I do know. I’m lazy and I’m busy, a brutal, impossible combination. Life keeps changing speeds on me. Baseball used to be the perfect antidote for almost any funk or malaise –if, in fact, funk and malaise are two different things. And baseball still is the perfect antidote. Donald Hall once wrote, “The diamonds and rituals of baseball create an elegant, trivial, enchanted grid on which our suffering, shapeless, sinful day leans for the momentary grace of order.” I love that quote, even if it’s exactly the sort of overwrought thing that highbrows have been writing about baseball forever.
It’s true, though. And I yearn for that “momentary grace of order,” and yearn even more for those increasingly rare shapeless days.
I’ve felt swamped all summer, and even though I haven’t found much time or energy at the end of the day to write about baseball, the game has continued to be a refuge. And, God knows, there’s been plenty to write about this year.
There are freak storms, freak accidents and freak injuries. This has been a freak season.
The Twins have been both confounding and astonishing, although astonishing has been winning out more often than not in the last several months. The season sure as hell hasn’t played out like anyone could have imagined back in April, and the team’s brutal start, coupled with the breakaway surge of the Tigers and White Sox, sapped a good deal of my early optimism.
That wretched start still pisses me off, but it’s amazing nonetheless to check out the standings every day and recognize how far the Twins have come. It seems truly impossible that they’re actually in the post-season hunt.
They’re a damn good team, though, and while hindsight is whatever it is, they had the makings –at least on paper– of the damn good team they’ve become way back in January. For a front office that’s displayed some awfully canny (and uncanny) instincts over the years, the Twins’ brain trust made some pretty poor choices over the winter.
The signings of Tony Batista and Rondell White were bad decisions, but the real blunders were the April choice of Juan Castro over Jason Bartlett and the early mishandling of Michael Cuddyer.
Cuddyer has been jerked around since his first call-up, moved from position to position, yanked in and out of the line-up, and shuttled back and forth between Triple A and the Majors. What he’s done since he’s been permanently installed as a starter has been pretty much exactly what his minor league numbers suggested he would do. Consider this, from last night’s postgame notes: Cuddyer now has thirty-two RBI with runners in scoring position and two outs. Of his 104 hits, fifty-two have been for extra bases. He also has nine outfield assists, which is third in the AL.
Castro over Bartlett looks more preposterous and indefensible by the day. Castro was a 34-year-old career .233 hitter with a reputation as an excellent fielder. Unfortunately, we didn’t even see much to justify that last business in his 2006 stint with the Twins.
Given what Bartlett went through when the team broke camp in Florida, it would have been easy for him to go out to Rochester with a head full of doubts and questions. Perhaps knowing that Castro was holding down the starting shortstop job in Minnesota gave him motivation and, even more likely, confidence. Regardless, he did what he had to do, Castro didn’t do anything, and Bartlett finally received his pardon in mid-June.
In fifty-six games since his call-up, Bartlett has hit .369 with a .435 on base percentage. In that same span the Twins have gone 41-15, and have crept back into contention. During Castro’s 2006 stint, the team was 29-34.
You can’t blame Minnesota’s poor start entirely on Castro, of course. He’s just not that significant. He was a blip to begin with. Batista and White were wretched, the starting pitching was a mess, and Justin Morneau, batting sixth, was scuffling. Francisco Liriano was in the bullpen, Dennys Reyes and Pat Neshek weren’t even on the radar, and there was no reason in the world to expect that we’d see Jason Tyner –let alone Josh Rabe– in a Twins jersey in the middle of a pennant race.
Four of the Twins’ opening day starters –White, Bastista, Castro, and Shannon Stewart– are either gone or have been insignificant factor’s in the team’s remarkable surge.
That the club has been able to reinvent itself on the fly, and not only climb its way out of such a huge hole but actually put itself in a position to be a factor down the stretch and into the playoffs, is one of the great baseball stories of the year.
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