Category: Twins

The bad news is that the Twins aren’t scoring many runs. The good news is that neither are the White Sox. As I mentioned the other day, the Central race looks increasingly like it’s going to come down to which team’s pitching can carry it the longest.

There is, of course, always the possibility that the offense that everyone –myself included– thought was going to be much improved this year will finally get rolling, but after three seasons (and two months) of this frustrating one-step-forward, two-steps-back routine for virtually every hitter in the Minnesota line-up, I’m not going to hold my breath.

Anybody out there still remember Richard Stanley Such, Tom Kelly’s erstwhile valet/pitching coach? Remember how Twins pitchers during Such’s looooong tenure in Minnesota never seemed to a) develop, or b) be able to sustain any consistency?

I used to waste a lot of time and energy bitching about Dick Such, and puzzling over Kelly’s maddening loyalty to the man. I remember one ex-Twin telling me how Such’s trips to the mound used to consist of such helpful advice as, “Throw strikes. You’re pissing off the manager.”

Such had his defenders, although they were fewer as time went on. Their main argument was generally, “He can’t throw the ball for these guys.” One look at the man’s career numbers as a Major League pitcher made that point all too clear.

Since Rick Anderson has been installed as Such’s replacement, the Twins have demonstrated remarkable pitching improvement almost across the board. Maybe, of course, that has a lot to do with the fact that the organization is simply producing better pitchers for Anderson to work with. Or, just possibly, perhaps Anderson really does know what he’s doing. The reality is probably a combination of those two factors.

I guess I’m just wondering if maybe right now we might be looking at some correlation between the dark ages when Minnesota’s pitching routinely posted team ERAs that were among the worst in the league, and the team’s current extended offensive malaise.

Like I said, I’m just wondering. That’s all.

Tonight Jesse Crain picked up his fourth win of the season out of the bullpen, and it looks like he’s on his way to eventually supplanting Juan Rincon as the main set-up man for Joe Nathan. He’s also looking like pretty good insurance for Nathan in the event that disaster strikes.

I love Crain enough to risk ruining his season (if not his career) by praising him in a (semi-) public forum. The guy throws in the mid-nineties and has a dynamite curveball, and though I expect the strikeouts will eventually start to come for him, so far he’s gotten the job done by getting opposing hitters to swing the bats. He’s also the one Twin most consistently willing to pitch hard up and in and drive batters off the plate, and it’s fun to watch his already crafty approach to each at-bat. I also like his unflappable demeanor. He’s the stone-faced straight man to Nathan, whose wincing, sighing, and lip-fluttering whinnying always makes me sort of nervous. Nathan’s a monster, but I’m not sure there’s a closer in the major leagues who displays such anxious body language on the mound.

It would be nice if the Twins offense could sustain a little consistency from top to bottom, but they’ve been maddening in exactly the same regard in each of the previous three seasons. There never seems to be a time when everybody in the line-up is running hot at the same time, and there have been far too many nights when everybody pretty much looks futile against mediocrities like Scott Elarton. This is still a team that’s going to go as far as its pitching will carry it, and the same seems to be true of both Chicago and Cleveland.

Tonight at least they managed to come through with a bunch of big two-out (and two-strike) hits, and I know that most stat wonks like to pooh-pooh the idea of clutch hitting, but, dammit, I know what I see, and Lew Ford has been clutch in so many key situations already this year that I have a hard time attributing it to nothing but situations and luck. Ford seems to have a knack for bearing down and getting a good swing in the tight spots of games, and I have to think it has something to do with the same curious mental makeup that makes him such a genuine and endearing character in the clubhouse.

I suppose the sort of encouraging thing about the last couple nights is that both teams have pretty much emptied out their bullpens, and if anything Eric Wedge has spent even more bullets. I think any time the Twins can come through the back end of the rotation with a 1-1 record you’ve gotta feel pretty good, although wasting a decent Kyle Lohse performance certainly qualifies as a major waste at this point.

Now, of course, the series comes down to which team’s starters can do the most to give their bullpens a breather in the next couple games. Which gives me an opportunity to say how much I like the revamped batting order Gardenhire has cobbled together. Between Stewart, Mauer, and Ford, you’ve got your three most selective guys getting guaranteed at-bats in the first inning, which gives the Twins a chance to force opposing pitchers to work deep counts and throw a lot of pitches. I wish I felt like some of the guys in the middle of the order were actually paying close attention to these at-bats, but most of the time lately it sure as hell doesn’t look like they are.

“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.

Okay, let’s add one more to that list of truths we hold self-evident: keep the fraggin’ ball in the damn park.

I suppose it was inevitable that Johan Santana would eventually run into a little patch like this, but what’s been sort of disturbing is how hard he’s getting hit. The Blue Jays had four doubles and two home runs tonight, and though you’ll read and hear all sorts of quotes about command and location tomorrow, take that stuff with a grain of salt. Those are just the standard lines after a lousy game.

Granted, Santana was obviously getting his fastball up in the first inning, but in the past he’s consistently shown he can get away with that as long as he has his other pitches (particularly that change-up) in his back pocket and can keep the hitters guessing. They’re obviously doing a pretty good job of guessing of late, and I think this may be a little case of over-confidence on Santana’s part. When you’re essentially bulletproof for as long as he was, it’s easy to think you can get away with aggressive pitching. He’s a smart guy, though, and just as long as he’s not dealing with a tired arm or something more bothersome, I’ve no doubt he’ll make the necessary adjustments and figure out what opposing hitters have figured out about him, which is really, of course, what pitching boils down to.

Though only a couple particularly meddlesome and odious characters have been brazen (or cruel) enough to call it to my attention, don’t think for a minute I’m not well aware of what has happened to Jacque Jones –for the second year in a row, I might add– since I came to the conclusion –for the second year in a row, I might add– that he had finally turned the corner.

You can scroll down to the April 27th entry and see for yourself. On that date Jones was batting .393, with all sorts of unexpected peripheral production. In the seventeen games since I once again crawled out on a limb and handed Jones a saw, he has gone 11-for-55 and his average has dropped to .295.

I swear some of these guys like nothing better than to make me look like a complete fool. And, believe me, I’m fully aware that I don’t much need their help.

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.

I don’t feel like trying to figure it out, so maybe someone else can tell me: what was the last date the Twins gained a game on the White Sox? It’s been at least nine games, right?

A long time, at any rate, considering how well the Twins have been playing. And the encouraging thing about the last couple days is that Minnesota’s pitching almost completely shut down the Devil Rays until the last few ugly innings of the last game of the series, and this was after Tampa Bay scored twenty-eight runs in sweeping the Yankees.

And then the red hot White Sox go into Tampa Bay and lose two straight. Tonight the Rays hit just about everybody the Sox threw out there, with the exception of Damaso Marte, who almost certainly should be given the closer’s job over the shaky Takatsu. It was also especially nice to see Chicago lose a one-run game for a change, and on a walk-off homerun.

Jose Contreras was wild as shit again tonight (big surprise, that), and has now walked twenty-one batters (while striking out thirty) in thirty-nine and two-thirds innings pitched. Despite which the guy inexplicably has a 3.18 ERA and .197 batting average against. Suggestion to opposing hitters: make the overpaid bozo throw strikes. In the couple games I’ve seen Contreras pitch this year he should have walked a minimum of ten, but guys kept going up there and flailing at stuff nowhere close to the strike zone.

The other encouraging recent sign that the White Sox have thus far been lucky beyond reasonable expectations was Jon Garland’s lousy performance in Toronto on Saturday, in a game in which he lasted just five-and-two-thirds innings and gave up six earned runs (and still managed to pick up the victory and run his record to 6-0). The whole damn team should have headed to the nearest off-track betting parlor and laid heavy money on Giacomo.

These are all the sorts of things that make you think maybe the genie has gone back into the bottle on the Southside. Then again, given the weirdness of those three straight up-and-down series in Tampa Bay, perhaps the Sox are just as likely to reel off another winning streak.

One last thing: I’ve finally made up my mind on the ugliest player in Twins history. I should mention that I’ve decided to be sporting by limiting the pool to guys I actually had a chance to watch play, some of whose physical flaws –more chins than the Hong Kong phone book, for instance, examples of which have been so relatively common as to be disqualifying as a sole criteria– I actually had a chance to…umm, appreciate up close. I gave David West strong consideration, and would certainly rank his physical structure (or utter lack of physical structure) as among the worst in the annals of the team. David West, I can assure you, made Matthew Lecroy look like Jack La Lanne.

The guy I finally settled on, however, is Scott Klingenbeck, a man who demonstrated every time he waddled to the mound that life is not the only thing that is nasty, brutish, and short. Check out those career numbers, by the way, and, please, somebody do the noble thing and shell out the five bucks to sponsor his Baseball Reference page.

Perhaps you have other ideas regarding the most unsightly Twin, or an all-time unsightly Twins team. I do feel, however, that eligible candidates should represent some combination of a generally displeasing physical appearance and utter ugly incompetence on the field. But that’s just me. Maybe someone comes to mind who was just so damn ugly that you feel compelled to disqualify any and all statistical accomplishments, however rarefied. I’ll confess that I can’t bring myself to feel strongly enough about this to argue with you either way.