Category: Sports

How messed up is it that a guy –Pat Neshek in this instance– can come in with runners at second and third and nobody out, give up a sacrifice fly, yet nonetheless retire every batter he faces, and get a blown save out of the deal?

That whole game was sort of messed up, really. The older I get the more I’ve come to despise pitcher’s duels; or maybe it’s just that the Twins seem to find themselves turning up on the losing end of pitcher’s duels on a fairly regular basis, and these days the very term “pitcher’s duel” usually just means the Twins aren’t scoring any runs. Which is frustrating and entirely too common of late.

Still, you have to tip your hat to Scott Baker and the club’s bullpen: twelve innings pitched, four hits, fifteen strikeouts, and one walk. The bullpen’s line was pretty staggering: five IP, zero hits, zero walks, and six strikeouts. Ron Gardenhire and Rick Anderson are going to have to cross their fingers, though, for a solid (and long) outing from Boof Bonser tomorrow, because the entire bullpen’s pretty tapped out after the first two games against the Blue Jays.

The really good news tonight is that the Tigers lost, allowing the Twins to gain a game in the Central standings.

I’m starting to wonder about which Twins might be All Star selections, and am beginning to suspect that this might be one of those years where, despite a bunch of pretty worthy candidates, Minnesota might end up with only one or two picks. Johan Santana’s on track to pitch the last game in Chicago before the break, and as deserving as he is, I can’t imagine Jim Leyland taking a guy he can’t really use. And given how much time he missed, should Mauer get serious consideration?

Right now I think you could make a case for any of the following (in descending order of merit, and throwing out Santana’s scheduling conflict): Torii Hunter, Justin Morneau, Santana, Pat Neshek (a dark horse, I realize, but I really think set-up guys should get full consideration), Joe Nathan, Mauer, and Luis Castillo.

I’m guessing Hunter and Morneau will go, and, if Leyland thinks he can afford a symbolic pick based entirely on respect, Santana.

That one felt…I don’t know, it felt bad, I guess, like a game in late September with hope sliding away with every pitch and a cold autumn rain beating the leaves from the trees along the boulevards (cue Barber’s “Adagio for Strings”).

Maybe that’s just because it was a Friday night, and Friday nights don’t mean much when you get to be a sour old bastard who doesn’t go anywhere and depends on baseball to get him through the otherwise blank stretch of another weekend.

Those games in the eastern time zone are also a sort of panicky proposition; you know that once the game is over there is still going to be a whole lot of hobbled Friday night clock to kill.

It was a grim game all around, I suppose, or at least feels that way after the fact. The Twins actually managed to score first –an increasing rarity– but then in characteristic fashion proceeded to scuffle their way through six scoreless innings as Boof Bonser let the Marlins chip away and build a 4-1 lead. As has so often been the case with Minnesota’s starters, Bonser pitched well enough to win but also just poorly enough to lose. Most nights of late that usually means the latter proposition, and Boof was yanked after six innings despite having thrown only 66 pitches –fucking National League rules.

I’m not quite sure why Juan Rincon was in the game in the first place, but I really have no idea why he was sent out to the mound for a second inning after the Twins managed to tie the score in the eighth. From what I understand Ron Gardenhire admitted he fucked up in his post-game remarks. That’s big of him, and I understand a manager might be a tad bit preoccupied when his MVP first baseman is coughing up blood in the dugout.

Still. Juan Rincon? After his last couple outings? When the entire bullpen was rested and ready to go? Big mistake. Costly mistake.

I have no idea how severe the Morneau situation is (a bruised lung, I just heard), but when a guy is wheeled away on a stretcher with an oxygen mask over his face that can never be much of a good thing for a team’s morale or prospects. Particularly on the night Kenny Rogers returned to the Detroit rotation and pitched like he’d never missed a start, pushing the Twins six-and-a-half back in the Central.

Finally, should the Twins trade Torii Hunter? All of sudden that’s all anyone wants to talk about, and the whole thing just depresses me at this point, so I’ll just say, sure, why not? Trade the man. Let’s get it over with. I’m tired of hearing about it.

The first two games of the Mets series were a perfect snapshot of the Twins’ see-saw season to date: An 8-1 loss and a 9-0 victory in the span of 24 hours. Five hits one night, thirteen the next. Go figure.

Actually, if the season ended today, you could put the last eleven games in a time capsule as a condensed version of the sort of maddening team the Twins have been all year. They lost two-of-three to a dreadful Washington club (and, in typical fashion, looked hopeless against a couple of stiffs in the process), swept a decent Atlanta team, lost two-of-three to Milwaukee, and then split the first two games of the New York series in absolutely schizoid fashion.

What was the difference tonight?

Beats the hell out of me. Gardenhire swapped Jeff Cirillo for Nick Punto, and Cirillo proceeded to go 3-5 with a run and an rbi. At least for one night that looked like a pretty smart move, and given that Cirillo is a career .298 hitter you kind of wonder why it took so long to give it a shot.

And the Mets, of course, committed four errors and looked anxious all night against Santana.

This much seems certain: We’re not likely to see Santana put together such a strange –if nonetheless very attractive– pitching line (complete game shutout, four hits, 92 pitches, and one strike out) any time soon.

I don’t have the energy to write an entire entry in Irish or Cockney slang, but that’s what I feel like doing every time this team slips into its offensive (and I do mean offensive) imitation of a World Cup soccer team, which lately seems to be several times a week.

I just took a look, and it really has been as bad as I thought I was imagining: In sixteen June games the Twins have scored three or fewer runs ten times. Guess how many of those they won.

Two.

I guess a sharp character like me could conclude from that that a team can’t win very many games in the major leagues if they don’t score more than three runs. I’m also guessing that it’s awful tough to win when you only score one run, which, after tonight’s loss in New York, the Twins have now done three times this month. They scored zero runs once as well –that one was a real soccer match of a baseball game, a 1-0 loss to Oakland and Joe Blanton.

I suppose I should be somewhat concerned about Juan Rincon, given his last couple outings, but what difference does it really make if a guy trots in from the bullpen and gets the snot knocked out of him every night if the offense isn’t going to score any runs?

Not much, I guess, not on a night like tonight.

Yesterday, that was a different story, but thank God the Good News version of the Good News-Bad New Bears was swinging the bats for the Twins in the finale against the Brewers, sparing us yet another offensive snooze-fest.

It’s maybe time to face this fact, though: neither version –the Sunday afternoon version, or the Monday night version– appears to be good enough to be good enough.

If you see what I mean.

And I’m pretty sure you do.

You can’t explain or make sense of so much of the shit that happens during the course of a baseball season, the streaks and slumps and befuddling momentum shifts, the steady supply of wholly unexpected developments of both the pleasant and the not-so-pleasant variety.

All those things –the day-to-day intangibles– are what make the sport so maddeningly difficult to predict. I still can’t imagine how anyone makes money gambling on Major League baseball.

That said, there are always things that seem predictable, even if only in hindsight. Past performance is not an indicator or guarantee of future results, as the investment people like to say. Except, of course, when it is. Nick Punto hit .290 last season, but nothing he’d previously done in his Major League career suggested that was his expected level of performance. As a result no serious fan should be surprised that he’s hitting .227 thus far in 2007.

Some players are so consistent –consistently good or consistently bad or simply consistently mediocre– that you do sort of know what to expect. Some players. If you spend a little time browsing through Total Baseball you’ll pretty quickly recognize how difficult consistency of any sort is to maintain at the highest level of the game. Consistently great players are so rare precisely because they are such great players, and consistently lousy players don’t generally get a chance to build long and undistinguished careers unless they’re specialists of some sort.

The most common sort of consistency –in baseball as in life– is mediocrity. Every team has to fill its roster somehow, and mediocrities get opportunity after opportunity to drift from club to club and make ridiculous money on their way to qualifying for a generous pension.

There remain, though, certain things you simply can’t predict or explain.

All of this is nothing more than a long-winded and roundabout way of marveling at the performance of Carlos Silva, who has demonstrated pretty conclusively that there is no more mysterious and unpredictable phenomenon in baseball than a sinker-ball pitcher (with the possible –and I guess likely– exception of a knuckleball pitcher, but those guys are rarities).

Silva was mostly terrible last year (246 hits in 180-and-a-third innings pitched, and a 5.94 ERA), but because he’d been effective in the past (he had a 3.44 ERA in 2005) he was trotted out there again and again –and managed to win 11 games in the process– with the hope that he’d eventually get around to finding his out pitch again.

When the sinker-ball goes, though, it just seems to go, and when and if it reappears it does so just as mysteriously. Silva didn’t have many proponents outside (and probably even inside) the Twins’ organization coming out of a spring training in which he was 0-3 with an 11.02 ERA and surrendered 29 hits in 16-and-a-third innings).

Yet there he was Wednesday night, finishing off the Twins’ first complete game shutout of the season.

Surprising, but, then again, not so surprising.

Friday night’s blow-out loss to the Brewers at the Dome, that was simply disappointing, and sometimes that’s really about all you can find to say about a baseball game.

They can’t all be surprising.

I say it all the time, but baseball’s a beautiful game when it’s played well, and when everything clicks it looks so easy.

Time and again this season, however, the Twins have demonstrated just how hard the game really is, and how ugly it can be.

The thing is, though, is that after Tuesday’s win they’ve crept back to .500, and to within five-and-a-half games of the Central lead. Given how brutal the team has looked at times, that seems frankly astonishing.

The opener of the Atlanta series provided a template of the kind of game the Twins need to play, and the kind of team they can be: Seven different guys scored runs; the first three guys in the batting order (Castillo, Mauer, and Cuddyer) were on base seven times; Bartlett and Punto at the bottom were a combined 4-8; Morneau and Hunter each drove in runs and also scored; Kevin Slowey was pretty much as advertised (and the Twins have won all three of his starts); and the bullpen was stalwart as usual –Guerrier, Neshek, and Nathan all have ERAs under two, and at this point those first two have to be the MVPs of the pitching staff.

Hell, Neshek might be the team’s MVP thus far. So much for the idea that this guy was going to be a novelty act, or that he was strictly a specialist against right handers. He has been phenomenal, and night after night has been thrown out there in the kind of old-school jams relievers used to have to try to wiggle out of all the time. It’s an added bonus, of course, that he’s just so damn much fun to watch.

This here is the latest phenom to make the Twins look sick, a guy who hadn’t even made it into the fifth inning –the fifth stinking inning— in any of his previous starts.

What the hell?

Seriously, what the hell?

Where do you want to lay the blame? At this point I can say only this: it ain’t the bullpen’s fault.

That was Jason Simontacchi, folks, right-handed, thirty-three year old definition of a journeyman. This is a guy who bounced in and out of the minor league systems of the Pirates, Royals, and Twins before finally getting a shot with the Cardinals from 2002-2004; a guy who blew out his shoulder and disappeared entirely from the Major Leagues before landing in Washington this year; a guy who entered Friday’s game with a 5.61 ERA, playing for a team that was 24-36.

A textbook Twin killer, in other words.

And, yes, dammit all to hell, that was Cristian Guzman batting lead-off for the Nats, Cristian Guzman who hit .219 last year and is being paid over four million dollars this season by Washington; Cristian Guzman who, after going 4-5 with three runs scored and an RBI Friday night, is now hitting .339.

That was Jason Simontacchi. That was Cristian Guzman. Those were the fucking Washington Nationals.

And that was Carlos Silva, and that was Joe Mauer batting second, and those were the erratic, underachieving Minnesota Twins.

It wasn’t pretty.

It wasn’t pretty at all.

I’ve always loved west coast road trips and those late-night games that give a guy the chance to get home from work, maybe go to the gym for a couple hours, grab a bite to eat, and then sit down in front of the television to watch baseball as the clock drifts toward midnight.

They fit my life and my schedule perfectly. Hell, I’d be happy as a clam if the Twins could find a way to play part of their schedule someplace that would allow me to watch the games in the middle of the night. I once saw a game between two Swedish teams –or maybe it was the Swedish National team against the Norwegians– that took place above the Arctic Circle at midnight, played entirely without the aid of artificial light. Afterwards I went out and ate pizza with a bunch of Swedish baseball players. Early that morning, as I staggered back to the apartment where I was staying, I thought, ‘This is the life.’

It really was the life, now that I think about it. Midnight baseball on a soccer field carved out of the tundra. A game in which every player who came to the plate batted left.

That doesn’t, of course, have a damn thing to do with the nonsense I witnessed tonight, or over the last five days. I’m not so sure, though, that I like those late west coast games anymore.

And I don’t much like the Twins at the moment, either. I might well like them again tomorrow, or sometime next week, but right now they’re on my shit list.

Sorry, boys, but nine runs in five games ain’t gonna cut it. Playing from behind night after night and day after day ain’t gonna cut it either. Streaky, inconsistent, bullshit baseball just ain’t gonna cut it with me right now. I’ve got too many books I want to read and too many records I could be listening to while I shimmy around my apartment. And there’s that miniature log cabin I’m trying to build out of Slim Jims that has been sitting half finished on my dining room table for almost six weeks now.

What I’m saying, I guess, is this: I can’t deny that I have a lot of time on my hands and a non-existent social life, but, dammit, I can find other ways to waste that time. Plenty of other ways. I’m not a fair-weather fan, and I’ve too often proved that I’m capable of following a truly shitty team from wire-to-wire. This hot-and-cold stuff, though, this game of tease and torture, this I will not abide.

I’m just telling you, you bastards.

Consider yourself warned.

Brad Zellar is getting very weary.

Very, very weary.

Riddle me this: Did that team that lost on Saturday and Sunday in Oakland look like a club that is 7-3 over its last ten games (counting the two weekend losses)?

Hardly. It’s weird how quickly momentum can dissipate over the course of a major league season. Just as the piranhas are heating up (at the top and bottom of the order Castillo, Punto, Kubel, Bartlett, and Tyner were on base twelve times on Sunday), the guys is the middle of the order pull a vanishing act. You’re gonna see this stat everywhere, but it’s a dead horse worth kicking: Cuddyer, Morneau, and Hunter were a combined 1-12 on Sunday, and 4-43 in the Oakland series.

What, really, makes the little engine run? It apparently ain’t the piranhas; the Twins scored a grand total of five runs in three games. Getting on base is a fine thing, but it doesn’t mean anything if the big boppers aren’t doing their jobs and smacking the ball around the yard –and out of the park. With four runs the magic number anymore, Earl Weaver’s old standby, the three-run homer, is more important than ever. The Twins are going to go as far as their pitching and heart of the order can take them; small ball really isn’t going to win enough games in the AL Central.

The disappearing act in Oakland was especially painful given the rock ’em-sock ’em series between Detroit and Cleveland. With the crazy unbalanced schedule it’s more possible than ever for a team to shave away at a division deficit, and in scuffling on Saturday and Sunday the Twins blew a chance to truly climb back into the fray with the Tigers and Indians.

Finally, I find this modestly alarming: with just two months of the season under his belt, Johan Santana is one loss away from equaling the total losses from all but one of his ML seasons to date. He’s at 6-5 now, and lost just six in each of his Cy Young years. His career high for losses was seven, in 2005 (when he was 16-7).

How about Kevin Slowey, though? That was fun to watch, and he looks like a guy (knock wood) who’s going to be consistently fun to watch for a long time.