Category: Twins

The Twins are 9-3 in their last twelve games, and have gained exactly nothing on the White Sox. I can’t quite decide whether that should be encouraging or discouraging news for either Minnesota or Chicago. Flip a coin, I guess. I suppose, really, it all depends on whether or not you believe the Sox are for real.

As I’ve said before I think Chicago is a much improved team, but I sure as hell don’t think they’re going to continue to play at the torrid pace they’ve managed to sustain into the season’s second month. The White Sox have now had two eight-game winning streaks, and are 16-4 over their last twenty games. The Twins have gone 12-8 over the same stretch.

The pitching staffs, even beyond the top two starters, are probably pretty comparable over the long haul. At the moment, of course, Chicago leads the league in team ERA (at 3.04), and four of the five guys in the rotation have ERAs under three. That said, the Twins –at 3.43– aren’t that far behind, and if anything are performing better than they were last year at this time.

Minnesota clearly has the edge in the bullpen, and has superior control up and down the pitching staff. I also think the Twins have more pitching depth than the White Sox. Barring injury, the key is probably going to be the guys at the back of the rotation for both teams, and if (or when) any of those guys falter Minnesota’s bullpen and depth should be the key factor in the race.

Chicago’s much-ballyhooed small-ball approach has been only modestly successful so far. The team batting average is only .258 (opponents, however, are hitting a ridiculous .228). Paul Konerko leads the team in homeruns with nine, but his batting average is .198. Jermaine Dye is batting just .210. Scott Podsednik is hitting .250, but he’s also walked twice as often as he’s struck out and has swiped sixteen bases.

The White Sox have a marginal edge in homeruns over the Twins, but otherwise Minnesota has a higher team batting average (.283), more total bases, more doubles, runs, and walks. They’ve also played half their games without Justin Morneau in the line-up.

Morneau has obviously been unreal since coming back from his beaning. Despite appearing in just sixteen games (and accumulating only sixty-three at-bats) he leads the team in homers, RBIs, total bases, and triples. Even assuming that he’s in the midst of an astonishing streak and is going to cool off, the guy is already making comparisons to Kent Hrbek look almost foolish. The question right now is really the question it seemed ridiculous to ask six weeks ago: have the Twins ever had two young guys –or two guys, period– hitting in the middle of their line-up who were capable of generating such excitement?

That if Dougie Baseball was still flashing the leather over at first and saving more runs than most first basemen produce with the bat we’d already be looking at the White Sox in our rearview mirror?

Oh, and by the way, Justin Morneau’s slugging percentage (.780) is higher at the moment than Mientkiewicz’s on base-plus-slugging (.749).

Also, doesn’t it strike you as sort of funny that if Gardenhire hadn’t inserted Morneau in the game yesterday as a defensive replacement (did you ever think you’d see the day?) he’d never have gotten the chance to hit that bomb off lefthander Trever Miller (who was, of course, brought in specifically to face him)?

Turn that frown upside down Twins fans.

I could, and should, just leave it that, because I really didn’t get much of a chance to pay attention to today’s game. I needed to roll a rock up a hill, so I had to take a pass on sneaking away to the Dome. I also felt like I needed a break, quite honestly. It’s been a tough several days in Twins Territory. And in a lot of ways, with Juan Rincon’s suspension, the stadium business, and the mini-skid on the playing field, it felt like the return of the old familiar Good News/Bad News Bears doppleganger Twins.

Still, I seldom miss a game. I pretty much always find a way to either attend in person, listen on the radio, or watch on tv, but today, for only the second time this season, I had to make do with a half-assed attempt to follow the action on my computer at work. That’s not a very satisfying experience, quite honestly, and I never quite have the feeling that I’ve actually watched or listened to a game. It’s sort of like playing pull-tabs; every time the screen refreshes you sort of hold your breath, and as things unfold in maddening slow motion you often get the feeling that nothing ever happens in a baseball game. It certainly felt that way through the early innings today, and I thought, this is what my wife must feel like when I make her sit through a game.

When I saw the line-up Ron Gardenhire was sending out there against C.C. Sabathia I have to admit I didn’t have much in the way of expectations. No Mauer or Morneau, no Jacque Jones. Luis Rivas back out at second. I’m sure they must have done it a few times last year, but I can’t remember the last time the Twins went with an entire line-up of right-handed hitters.

After Radke got out of the first couple innings without giving up a run I got sidetracked and didn’t get a chance to check back until the sixth inning, when the Twins were suddenly up 6-0 and Sabathia was long gone. I pieced together what had happened as best I could, and then sort of forgot about it again. When I finally took another look it was over. A nice, tidy two hour and twenty-six minute baseball game.

Just looking over the boxscore, though, it looks like it was a much more interesting contest in real time. Radke obviously pitched well –complete game, three hits, eight strikeouts and no walks. I don’t feel like figuring out his game score, but that’s certainly the best pitching performance by a Twins starter so far this year, and after the first couple games of the series I thought this Cleveland line-up might whack the ball all over the yard against Radke.

It’s weird to see that the Twins scored nine runs, yet still managed to strand ten runners. That’s a lot of guys on base: thirteen hits, five walks, and two hit batters. It’s also curious that Rivas, batting in the ninth slot, walked twice; and Jason Bartlett, despite going 2-5 with two RBIs and two runs, still managed to strand five runners.

I see as well that Gardenhire got ejected, and Matthew LeCroy demonstrated why he deserves a spot on the roster. The bullpen got a breather. And Terry Tiffee did more at the plate in one game than Corky Miller is likely to ever do in a complete season.

I guess the only bad news on the day is that the White Sox eeked out another one-run game against the Royals. With the ridiculous unbalanced schedule, before it’s all said and done that woebegone team of curs in Kansas City might well end up handing the division to somebody.

ON AN UNRELATED note, John Garry –a scion of one of my hometown’s legendary masculine dynasties– and I have been kicking emails back and forth for the last couple weeks trying to figure out which player in Major League history has managed to hit the most homeruns with the fewest RBIs. John, I’ll confess, has done most of the leg work to date (okay, all of the leg work), although most of his findings so far have confirmed many of my own suspicions.

Specifically, we –or, once again, rather John– were looking for full-time players with a roughly one-to-two ratio of homers to RBIs. I’ve pored through Total Baseball trying with no success to find anybody in the modern era who has managed to slip below that ratio. I also sort of thought that for the sake of integrity the player in question should have hit at least ten homeruns. John figured the likely candidates had to be either power hitters who played on truly lousy teams, or leadoff hitters with some power.

Here were some of John’s early findings:

Harmon Killebrew, 1963: 45 HRs/95 RBIs (and only 18 doubles)

Dave Kingman, 1973: 24 HRS/55 RBIs

Steve Balboni, 1990: 17 HRS/34 RBIS (John: “The key to his success was a .192 batting average. He had 51 hits and 17 of them were homers.”)

Interestingly enough, the only other guy John found with a one-to-two HR/RBI ratio played on the same team –the 1990 Yankees– with Balboni. That year, Kevin Maas had 21 homers and 41 RBIs, and the Yankees lost 95 games. (John: “They were fourth in the league in homeruns and last in runs scored.”)

It’s amazing how quickly a breaking story can be covered from every conceivable angle. Early yesterday the reaction to Juan Rincon’s suspension was a mixture of shock, incredulity, and outrage. The details in the initial press release were sketchy, at best. It wasn’t clear what exactly Rincon might have ingested to merit the suspension, but it quickly became apparent –based on the immediate suspension– that it was something included on the list of banned performance enhancing drugs.

It sucks to the tenth degree that MLB doesn’t release information on what chemical is detected in the dirty piss of violaters of its policy, because the secrecy ultimately raises as many questions as it answers. I’ve looked at that list of banned substances, and there are all sorts of things on there I couldn’t pronounce and which I wouldn’t recognize on a cold medicine label, let alone within the fine-print catalog of multi-syllabic nonsense that accompanies the average nutritional supplement.

We can presume, at any rate, that Rincon fucked up, and I’m not going to excuse his mistake, whether it was committed in ignorance or calculation. There’s been plenty of talk and analysis of the whole issue already, and though I’ll admit that I was initially shocked by the news, I’m not quite sure why.

But maybe that’s not quite true. I was shocked because Rincon is such a soft, mild-mannered, and physically unimposing character. None of those facts, of course, precludes the possibility that he used some sort of PED. Maybe, as some people have speculated, he used a little something to help his recovery time between appearances. Maybe he took something that he picked up somewhere, assuming because it came from a seemingly innocuous source that it was safe.

Whatever the case, I sure would like to know what that little something was, and whether, in fact, it was a little something or a big something. I’d also be interested in hearing how long these banned substances supposedly stay in a player’s system. Does Rincon’s result mean he ingested or injected something in the last two weeks? The last month? The last three months? Maybe none of that matters. I don’t really know, and I’m not sure I care.

I do wonder whether the team’s doctors or trainers might bear some share of the blame for the Rincon fiasco. Over the years there have been a number of occasions where I’ve had reason to wonder what’s up with the medical staff of the Twins. I wondered about it most recently during Grant Balfour’s sore arm saga, which, it sure seems to me, was allowed to drag out far too long, to the point where there was open suspicion that Balfour was a malingerer. We went through a similar situation with Joe Mauer’s knee last year, and if you want to go back even further (to Joe Mays and Eric Milton, for instance, or Scott Erickson) I think you’d notice a sort of disturbing pattern.

Don’t you think it’s kind of strange that when push comes to shove the agents of players tend to send them elsewhere –to the physicians of other teams– for a second (or third, or fourth) opinion? If Balfour hadn’t gone to Cincinnati would we all still be wondering about the source of his lingering forearm pain? Now, though, we know that he’s facing season-ending Tommy John surgery, and we’ve heard that just such lingering forearm pain should be a red flag for significant elbow damage.

Ultimately, I suppose, there’s no getting around the fact that Rincon’s to blame, even if he made a mistake of ignorance. It’s his career, his reputation, and his money that’s on the line, and the final responsibility is his.

What’s sort of disturbing about all this –for me, certainly, and I’m sure for most fans of the team– is that the obvious implication is that if Rincon is doing this shit, then so could literally anybody else on this team, or any other team.

The bottom line, though, is that it’s a ten-day suspension, and Rincon will be back in the fold soon enough. How people respond or what his suspension does to his reputation doesn’t particularly concern me, although I’ve no doubt the people in the organization are plenty worried about those angles. It does strike me as kind of pathetic that Juan Rincon is the most high profile player to be affected to date, but if this turns out to be merely an ugly blip in the season and the rest of the Twins pass their piss tests with flying colors, I hardly see how this can be the sort of thing to damage the team’s reputation in the long term.

I just got word that Juan Ricon has been suspended for ten days after testing positive for a banned substance under Major League Baseball’s new drug policy.

Scott Baker will be recalled from Rochester to take Rincon’s place on the roster.

This makes absolutely no sense to me. Among the possible candidates for steroid use in the Twins clubhouse –presuming this is related to the whole steroid brouhaha, which I don’t know for certain– Rincon would be nowhere on that list.

After mercifully disappearing for the first nine games of the season that song was back Saturday night. Lee Greenwood, I guess it is. I’ll take the blame (see this if you need any further explanation), because from here on out I’ve decided that I’ll take the blame for everything that goes wrong this year.

I sure as hell can’t come up with any other explanation for the song’s reemergence that makes a lick of sense. Unless this Lee Greenwood character is somehow related to Hal Greenwood who, though a convicted felon, has old ties to the Twins through his days at the helm of Midwest Federal.

And, look, I’ve got nothing against America, at least as a vague concept governed by a constitution that, though generally excellent, nonetheless failed to provide adequate protection against bad taste. If you’re dead set on turning the seventh-inning stretch into an exercise in patriotic indoctrination, though, there are certainly classier ways to go about it. There are surely better songs about America, songs that aren’t the work of bottom feeders like Lee Greenwood. Someone in the comments below took exception to my criticism of that jingoistic piece of herd trash on the grounds that America is at war. All the more reason, I say, to find offensive the spectacle of a bunch of safe, well-fed yahoos making merry at a sporting event and singing along with a crass ditty that could have been written by a computer program at the Pentagon.

Okay, that’s all I’m going to say about that. Now I’d like to bitch about Bartolo Colon, if I could, a guy I regard as one of the more unsightly specimens ever to squeeze himself into a Major League baseball uniform. I can’t stand to watch the man, who, as he demonstrated today, is capable of pitching performances that are almost as nasty as he looks (or, as he showed against the Yankees in his last start, as ugly). Colon looks like the bastard spawn of Harvey Weinstein and Andre the Giant’s fat little sister.

As much as I might loathe the sight of Colon, I have to admit he was pretty masterful today, painting the corners and getting the Twins to beat the ball into the rug all day long. He had to be masterful, of course, to beat Johan Santana. Santana was pretty damn good himself. Eight innings, two hits, two homeruns. There’s no shame at all in giving up a solo shot to Vladimir Guerrero, but Jose Molina? You’ve got to keep Jose Molina in the yard, and that shouldn’t be a terribly tall order –the guy had five career homers before today, for crying out loud.

Oh well. It was a pretty good game, and a good series. It is, though, a dirty rotten shame that Shrek had to be the guy to put an end to Santana’s streak.

I had an incredible time at the ballpark tonight –and, yes, I’m in a good enough mood that I’m going to go ahead and refer to the Metrodome as a ballpark. It was a strange and amazing game, and a seriously gutty, inspired, and lucky performance by Carlos Silva. There was a point in the second or third inning where I was looking at my scorecard and going back over every batter in the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim California Angels lineup, certain I’d gotten so caught up in the fireworks on the field that I’d somehow missed three or four runs.

But, no, there it was: four runs.

The next thing I knew the Twins had tied it up, then taken the lead, and, finally, coasted to the victory.

A bunch of other thrilling stuff happened at the game tonight, which I may or may not tell you about one way or another eventually. I’m too fried right now. It was a long day, and I walked back to my car from the Dome feeling tremendous but completely drained. I was –in accordance with a lopsided agreement I’d made over a month ago– expecting my old pal Uncle Jumbo to take me off the hook tonight. He was going to handle Fridays. That was the deal.

Instead I came home to a rambling phone message from a clearly intoxicated Jumbo. This tirade, apparently, was in lieu of a column, although early in his heavily slurred monologue I think he said something like, “Write this down. My machine is broken.” I couldn’t make it all the way through his tantrum –I absolutely wasn’t in the mood– but I can tell you that there was a long-winded diatribe about Justin Morneau.

Justin Morneau. The guy who went 3-4 and scored two runs in a 7-4 victory that was Minnesota’s fourth-straight win. The guy who is now hitting .432.

“I can’t believe what I’m seeing!” Jumbo shouted into the phone. It sounded like he had a mouthful of potato chips. “Those morons have turned Justin Morneau into a fucking banjo hitter! The cursed and diseased Canadian who along with that other big white kid was supposed to be the Great Very-White Hope, who was supposed to hit forty homeruns! They’ve given the big bastard a Tony Gwynn makeover! This team is hopeless!”

I listened for about five minutes, and then I hung up the phone. I’ll try to gut out the rest of the message in the morning, and if there’s anything of interest to report I’ll let you know.

Back in the day –this was in 1987– I used to have this Nancy and Sluggo tee-shirt that I believed was some sort of magic talisman for the Twins. Whenever I wore it to a game the Twins won, and somehow I figured out, or thought I figured out, that when I didn’t wear it they would inevitably lose. I know all sorts of fans have these crazy superstitions, but the thing was, mine was real. It actually worked. I started making notations in my scorebook (an ‘N/S’ next to the date of the game) on the days I wore the tee-shirt, and the Twins were something like 18-0 from the time I started wearing it religiously. This included the four straight World Series wins at home against the Cardinals.

The next year the spell seemed to be broken. The Twins lost three straight when I donned the Nancy and Sluggo shirt, and the thing was starting to get pretty ratty so I tucked it away in a drawer and sort of forgot about it.

I got wigged out during the 1991 Series when Atlanta came back to take a three games to two lead, and in an act of manic desperation I remembered the talismanic tee, and dug it out for the final games at the Dome.

And: Abracadabra, of course. Just what the doctor ordered.

I didn’t really retire Nancy and Sluggo so much as the damn thing eventually fell apart. In 2002 I scoured the Twin Cities for a replacement to no avail, and seriously considered having Nancy and Sluggo tattooed on my arm. In hindsight I probably should have gotten the tattoo. I might yet have to.

You may have noticed that earlier this season I wrote a tepidly hopeful appraisal of Luis Rivas, in which I pointed out that he was still relatively young and had once been regarded as a promising and fundamentally sound player. It wasn’t too late, I said, for Luis to turn things around.

I was guilty of wishful thinking. I can see that now. No dice for poor Luis.

A couple weeks ago I took a pull at the wishbone again, this time in defense of Kyle Lohse. I parroted all the things people in the Twins organization have been saying to me about Lohse for several years. The guy had great stuff, a terrific arm; he just needed to learn how to pitch. I might have predicted that he would lead the team in innings pitched and win sixteen games. I might have. I don’t care to look back, actually, and see what sort of nonsense I might have written about Lohse. Because I was apparently wrong, and I’m man enough to admit that.

Either that, or maybe I’m to blame. Perhaps these poor bastards just can’t bear up under the weight of my expectations.

Exhibit –what is it? C? Yes, I think it’s C: Yesterday I wrote an appreciation of Jacque Jones that was probably unwise. Granted, it’s only been twenty-four hours, but Jones was 0-4 today with two strikeouts. He also stranded three runners. Granted, he did draw another walk, but I sense I’ve done him a terrible disservice.

As I pointed out yesterday, Jones burned me bad last year, and I have no idea when I’m going to learn from my mistakes. I won’t be at all surprised if his average dips below .250 by Memorial Day, and I’ll have no one to blame but myself.

My sincere apologies to anyone who might read this and might conceivably care. I think I’m going to start paying more attention to the National League.

Speaking of which, have you noticed that the Arizona Diamondbacks are now 14-8 and in first place in the NL West, this despite the fact that they’ve scored 100 runs and given up 105? That’s sort of interesting, don’t you think?

It’s not really a surprise to me, but Jacque Jones has quietly become a better player –certainly a better hitter, and I’d argue a better all-around player– than Torii Hunter. Jones is as competitive and driven as Hunter is easy going, and he works as hard as anybody on the team to get better. He can be moody and defensive in the clubhouse, but his moods are driven as much by team failure as personal frustration, and he can also be one of the most thoughtful and engaging guys in the game. In a clubhouse full of relatively mellow and gregarious characters, his passion for baseball and his determination to play hurt and be a better all-around player stick out like a sore thumb, and right now this team could use a lot more of his fiery personality.

I wrote those words on May 28th of last season, and Jones immediately proceeded to make me look like a complete idiot. I’m accustomed to looking like a complete idiot, but I was nonetheless disappointed in the extended swoon that ruined what was at the time looking like a breakout year for Jones.

I spent the rest of the season trying to figure out what went wrong. I picked Jacque’s brain, and talked about his struggles with Torii Hunter and hitting coach Scott Ullger. Everybody just kept saying he was going to turn it around, but from where I was sitting it looked like he slipped back into some bad habits. When Jones is heading into a slump you can see it coming from a mile away. Pitchers start working him in and out, get him tentative and off balance, and then when they get ahead in the count –and Jones is always trying to battle back from pitcher’s counts when he’s fighting himself– they get him to flail at fastballs up in his eyes or sliders in the dirt. When he did manage to work the count in his favor, pitchers knew they still didn’t have to throw him a strike because he was swinging at anything. It was an ugly thing to watch, particularly since I know how hard the guy works to get better and how frustrated he gets when he can’t seem to figure the game out.

Last year there were a number of aggravating circumstances that contributed to Jones’ rough season; his father was dying, he’d been the subject of trade rumors for two seasons, and Jason Kubel was breathing down his neck.

I’ve never liked to believe that impending free agency can somehow motivate guys to play better –or not necessarily motivate, because, sure, the motivation is certainly there, but actually push them to play better. That seems counter-intuitive to me, particularly for a guy like Jones, whose struggles have always seemed to be precisely a product of pressing. I’ve also seen Jones have enough hot streaks to know that it’s never a good idea to read too much into these stretches.

This year, though, seems to be different from other years. You sense that maybe something has finally clicked for him. It’s apparent in the clubhouse, and it’s becoming equally apparent on the field. The guy is tied for the team lead in walks (and has walked as often as he’s struck out), and I don’t ever recall a stretch where he’s taken so many pitches. He’s been terrific against lefties, and is more balanced at the plate than I’ve ever seen him. All of his old anxious movement is, at least for the time being, gone. He’s keeping his hands still, and staying behind the ball, rather than jumping at pitches out of the strike zone. Watch the way he keeps his head down right up until the moment he starts his swing. This approach has resulted in a much quicker bat, and the ability to hit the ball where it’s pitched.

Particularly encouraging has been the way he follows a bad at-bat –and he had a couple rough trips to the plate tonight– with a good at-bat. He’s still diving for those balls on the outside corner in the dirt, but I can’t recall an occasion so far where he’s screwed himself into the ground trying to handle that high and tight pitch. There have been times in the last few seasons, extended periods, when you pretty much could gauge the kind of game Jones was going to have after his first at-bat. So far he looks like a completely different player from the guy we saw in the second half last year. It’s been fun to watch, and I’d be thrilled to see him put it all together and sustain this kind of productivity over a full season, even if it ultimately means he goes somewhere else to make his millions.