Category: Twins

Just a quick note on what felt like a very necessary win accomplished in absolutely necessary fashion, or something like that.

After Friday night’s 13-inning affair –a game that featured another shitty performance from Ramon Ortiz and valiant comebacks that ultimately came up short– the Twins desperately needed to give their beleaguered bullpen (Pat Neshek and Matt Guerrier, in particular) a breather. To accomplish that they were going to have to get a solid start from Carlos Silva. Solid-plus, something better than merely good or decent. Seven innings, minimum.

Given the Jackal’s recent track record, that seemed like a long shot, but Silva more than delivered, going seven-and-a-third innings and surrendering only two runs. And the offense did just enough against A.J. Burnett (three hits, four runs, three of them earned) to eke out a 4-2 victory, take their third straight series, and give themselves another shot (and their middle relievers another day of rest) tomorrow afternoon with Johan Santana taking the mound against the White Sox.

With the Central proving to be almost exactly as tough as everybody was predicting back in April, the Twins are facing a seriously uphill battle in closing the gap. The last week, however, has demonstrated that this is another pretty resilient team. With the bullpen plagued by injury and, increasingly, overwork, and with Slowey and Garza waiting in Rochester, doesn’t it make perfect sense to call up at least one of those guys and move Ortiz into the bullpen to eat up middle innings?

Granted, it’s improbable that either Slowey or Garza will be this year’s Francisco Liriano, but –what the hell– it still makes perfect sense to me.

Also, what do you do with the batting order when Joe Mauer finally comes back? Since Mauer’s been on the DL, Luis Castillo has been streaking in the leadoff spot, and Morneau has been a monster batting cleanup. At this point the sad truth is that Mauer would actually be a perfect guy to bat second, given his bat control, low strikeout totals, and often ridiculous willingness to lay down a bunt. I don’t think, though, that Gardenhire is going to pencil Mauer in the two-hole, or move Morneau into the third slot. Batting the two lefties back-to-back goes against basic baseball logic, but nonetheless seems perfectly logical to me. I’d want to get Morneau to the plate in the first inning as often as possible, and with Castillo and Mauer in front of him, and Cuddyer and Hunter behind him, that’s an awful lot of RBI possibilities, and little wiggle room to pitch around the MVP.

I don’t quite get this: The Twins have two guys in the AL top ten in home runs, RBI, and slugging percentage. They have a leadoff hitter who is eighth in the league in batting average. The club is second in the American League in fielding percentage, fifth in team ERA, fifth in RBI, fifth in hits, sixth in batting average, and sixth in on base percentage.

Their two-time Cy Young award-winner is tied for fifth in wins, and 12th in ERA. There are two guys in the bullpen –Neshek and Guerrier– that have allowed fewer walks plus hits per innings pitched than Santana.

The team’s starting catcher and reigning batting champ goes on the DL, yet his backup is hitting .306.

Hunter and Morneau are all over the AL leader board –Morneau is second in the league in home runs, ninth in RBI, and tied for sixth in runs scored. Despite Alex Rodriguez’s ridiculous April, Morneau now trails him by four home runs, and Hunter has crept within three for the league RBI lead.

Yet despite all these positive numbers the Twins are 22-24 and in fourth place (six-and-a-half back) in the Central.

I’ll let KRS-One pose the million-dollar question: Why is that?

The knee-jerk answer: it’s the piranhas, stupid.

Or consider this: the troika of Ponson, Ortiz, and Silva –all of them question marks coming out of spring training– have combined to go 7-14.

Or this: the Twins are 13th in the league in home runs (Morneau and Hunter have combined for 25 of the team’s 35 homers, and Morneau has hit six of his in three games).

Of course you could take the glass-is-half-full approach and conclude from all those numbers that the Twins are a lot better than they’ve played so far.

You could also decide that with one more injury or a prolonged slump from one of the stars and this team is going to be lucky to win 80 games.

I’m an optimist, though, so I’m going to go with that first scenario until the Twins have kicked me in the kidneys so many times that I’m pissing blood.

Tonight’s game, along with last Friday’s win in Milwaukee (Bonser’s 11 strikeouts, Hunter’s grand slam), was a blueprint for the kind of team I thought the Twins were going to be coming into the season.

Sort of, anyway.

It still perplexes me that the guys in the middle of the order are being forced to pretty much score and drive in all the runs (Luis Castillo is batting .319 with a .368 OBP and he’s still a distant fourth on the club in runs scored –behind Morneau, Hunter, and Cuddyer). Considering how well those guys have done (and the absence of Mauer), it’s odd that the team has struggled as much as they have to score runs.

The reason for that, of course, is that nothing much has fired on all cylinders for the Twins all season. Going into tonight the team had lost four of Johan Santana’s last five starts.

They didn’t lose tonight, and the way Santana (and Neshek and Nathan out of the bullpen) pitched, the firepower of Morneau and Hunter was pure gravy, though certainly lots of fun to watch. Still, Morneau and Hunter drove in all seven of the Twins’ runs, and the 3-4-5 hitters (Cuddyer, Morneau, and Hunter) scored six of them. And those three pitchers combined for this extraordinary line: 18 strikeouts, five hits, and two walks.

Hunter’s season has been an astonishing thing to witness, and I’ve never placed much stock in that old monkey business about guys putting up huge numbers in the last years of their contracts; the game’s just too damn hard to play for even great players to just crank it up a notch at will when there are tens of millions of dollars on the line.

I’m still not sure what the hell Hunter’s doing differently this year, but he certainly looks like a guy who’s all of a sudden got things figured out. How often, though, does a guy make such great strides after he’s turned 30 (and Hunter will turn 32 in July)? Granted, it’s May, but the guy is on pace to post career bests in everything. He should easily have more doubles by the All Star break than he had in either of the last two seasons, and despite the fact that he’s slugged over .500 just once in the last six years, his slugging percentage currently sits at .616.

I can’t figure it out, especially since he’s been hitting without any real protection all season.

At any rate, that $12 million option the Twins picked up in the off-season –which I thought was a dicey move– is looking smarter all the time, even as Hunter is looking more and more like a guy who is pricing himself well out of Minnesota’s budget.

It will be a damn shame if Torii finally puts together a monster year and the Twins finish in the middle of the division.

You’d sure like to see your team hold a 4-0 lead, particularly since the Twins have had so few early leads of late. And, yeah, Dennys Reyes is the lefthanded specialist out of the bullpen –or was– but he hasn’t done much of anything to justify that position thus far in ’07, and his stellar 2006 is looking more and more like an aberration. It was supposedly a big surprise that his shoulder was bothering him even before he entered yesterday’s game with the score tied at five, but why was it such a surprise?

The Reyes situation is pretty much Jesse Crain all over again. Both guys signed extensions in the off-season, sucked early on, were sidelined with ‘tenderness’ but somehow managed to avoid the DL, and came back only to endure more suckiness, this suckiness apparently attributable to injuries, the severity of which went unrecognized by the team’s medical staff.

I don’t quite understand how a guy whose arm was aching a few weeks ago is supposed to get better by pitching to Major League hitters, but what the hell do I know?

It also seems to me that the Twins have had a number of eerily similar situations in recent years (Liriano last season, for example), situations where the team’s doctors clearly failed to recognize the severity of a pitcher’s injury until it was too late.

The loss of Reyes and Crain does put a strain on the Twins’ bullpen, but at this point, considering the way they’ve pitched, it’s sort of a case of addition by subtraction. Given Minnesota’s history of nurturing reliable and unsung middle relievers –there’s a long list by now, the most recent examples being Matt Guerrier and Pat Neshek– you always kind of figure they’ll find a way to patch something together. The way things have been going, though, this season figures to be a test of the club’s scouting and coaching resources.

Is Ramon Ortiz headed the way of Sidney Ponson? How much rope do the Twins give him with Garza and Slowey waiting for a shot at Rochester? Consider that Ortiz was 3-1 with a 2.57 ERA on April 27. Here’s his ERA after his last four starts: 3.23, 3.80. 4.89, 5.36. I’m guessing that impressive start is going to give him a considerably longer leash than Ponson had, especially given that the Twins are on the hook for his $3.1 million salary.

How much have the Twins missed Joe Mauer? They’d started their slide before he went on the DL –they were 15-14 at the time– but they’ve gone 5-9 without him in the lineup.

Scott Baker’s quotes following his Saturday start in Milwaukee were even more refreshing than his performance. It’s hard to root against a guy who says stuff like this: “It’s supposed to be fun. If it’s not fun, why are we doing this? I think a lot of times we’re too result oriented and this game is such a result oriented, stat game. There’s too much emphasis on that. It’s about the process, it’s about enjoying this time.”

Yeah, well, you know…uh, boy…ummm, that was…that was…uh, that was….I’m sorry, give me a moment to compose myself…I, ummm, I’m just trying to, you know, I’m trying to get my head around this…I don’t know, it’s, uh, it’s just…it’s just really, really…I mean, seriously, Jesus, it’s really hard…that was…that was, well, I’m not really sure, I can’t quite…I cannot quite…I don’t know…I, ummm…

(Walks into the kitchen and opens the refrigerator door; stares disconsolately at the pathetic collection of 20th century condiments and takeout containers of fossilized and mold-frosted Chinese food and then drinks maniacally from a carton of chocolate milk; inexplicably removes his flannel pajama bottoms and shoves them in the garbage pail; sits down on the kitchen floor in his boxers, spits into his palm, and absentmindedly spells out F-U-C-K on the oven door with his index finger. A dog appears in the kitchen doorway and stares at him with a puzzled look on its face.)

(Points at the dog) Tell me the truth: what the fuck was that? Don’t give me that stupid look. That. Tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday. That. That. That. Why do I do this to myself? Seriously, why? I can’t…I cannot take much more of this. I won’t.

Pussies!

I’ll have to do some more digging around to figure out what exactly happened, because I left the room for what seemed like five minutes during tonight’s game, and when I came back Jesse Crain was gone and the Indians had tacked six unearned runs on the board.

I used to think I had a pretty good understanding of the rule covering unearned runs, but I’m still having a hard time figuring out how a guy could give up six unearned runs on 25 pitches. It sort of hurts my head to think about it.

It’s never nice to know one of your guys is hurt, but I guess it’s still sort of nice to know that Crain has been pitching hurt, if only as a way of explaining his lousy performance in the last month.

Ramon Ortiz was not just disappointing tonight, but alarmingly disappointing. He looked absolutely nothing like the guy who pitched so aggressively and with so much enthusiasm in the early going. Maybe that’s the problem now; Ortiz works so quickly, and is so aggressive in going after hitters, that it seems like the scouting report is encouraging opposing batters to be equally aggressive in their approach against him. The guy gave up six runs on just 34 pitches.

How nice of the Twins to pick this particular night to slug four home runs. The real problem, though, was that those home runs might have actually meant something if Glen Perkins hadn’t come in to relieve Ortiz and given up three runs of his own (two IP, four hits, two walks, 48 pitches: that line would represent a bad night for Sidney Ponson). Those three runs, and Crain’s later blowout –aided by Nick Punto’s first error of the season– made moot Minnesota’s late mini-rally.

It was nice to see Garrett Jones, though, and Morneau’s two homers moved him into second place in the AL (now just five back of Alex Rodriguez). And the offense had a pretty decent night overall –every starter but Hunter had a hit– but with all the injuries, the offensive inconsistency, and the recent struggles of most of the starting rotation, this is increasingly a team that looks to be in a serious bit of trouble.

First of all, let me say this: the new radio home of the Twins sucks.

I spent much of the weekend driving. I left Friday night with the game underway, and before I was even properly out of the Twin Cities I had lost KSTP’s signal, and spent the next two hours –headed south along the Mississippi the entire time– going up and down the dial in search of a local affiliate in vain.

It’s ridiculous. I remember plenty of times in the past when I could pick up the Twins for, at minimum, a hundred miles in any direction. Hell, I can recall listening to the Twins in the Badlands, and also in the Wisconsin Dells.

I apparently didn’t miss much on Friday or Saturday, other than continued offensive ineptitude, the implosion of the bullpen in the series opener (and another frustratingly inefficient performance from Johan Santana), and Sidney Ponson’s by-the-book swan song in Saturday’s matinee.

Mercy, mercy on that bit of news. Thank God we’ve finally seen the last of Big Sid.

I got back in time to catch the Sunday night game, and maybe it’s just a coincidence, but the Twins played like a team that had just had surgery to remove a large cancerous tumor from the top of its spine. And I’m not going to complain, but it would have been nice if the club could have found a way to distribute some of those thirty-one base runners throughout the three-game series.

It was a laugher, sure, but it was a laugher this team desperately needed, and was pretty entertaining as well. How often do you suppose a ball club manages to strand thirteen runners and score sixteen runs in the same game? All eleven guys Minnesota sent to the plate had hits, and the Twins chewed up Detroit’s bullpen just as the Tigers prepare to head to Boston for a series.

What?

What?

What the hell do you want me to say? Everybody and their crazy uncle is out there saying something, saying all manner of ridiculous somethings, and you expect me to shed some fresh light on this baseball team?

Forget it.

I’ll say this, I guess, even though I’m sure it’s already been said plenty of times already: Torii Hunter’s catch last night was the best catch I’ve ever seen him make. It was, in fact, the best catch I’ve ever seen anyone make. I was there, and the instant that ball was hit there wasn’t any way Hunter was going to catch it. He never even managed to get turned around, never even managed to turn his head, yet somehow he not only found the ball but caught it.

It was a marvelous thing to see.

The rest? Not so marvelous.

Not so marvelous at all.

Things would seem to be trending downward at the moment, wouldn’t you say?

The Twins have scored a total of 12 runs in their last five games, and managed just five in the weekend series with Boston. Their best hitter is headed for the disabled list –he’s already there, actually. The reigning MVP is batting .150 (and slugging .225) with runners in scoring position. Sidney Ponson is still in the starting rotation, and still finding a way to allow almost two base runners every inning.

Sure, Torii Hunter has a 21-game hitting streak, and has been tearing it up, but what difference has that made? I’ll tell you: None. Or basically none. The team has lost two straight series, and five of its last seven games. The schedule is increasingly inhospitable, and if things don’t get turned around in a hurry the Twins could find themselves looking at a double-digit deficit in the Central by the end of May.

It’s all very discouraging right now, but last year demonstrated that things can indeed turn around in a hurry. Of course most organizations would be lucky to have a season like that every twenty years, but what the hell.

If you’re not pissed about the whole Roger Clemens charade, something’s seriously wrong with you. The handling of that announcement today was straight out of the Vince McMahon playbook. I guess the only real surprise was that Clemens didn’t emerge from Monument Park in a cloud of smoke during the seventh-inning stretch. Or, you know, they could have had the Rocket parachute into the ballpark and land on the pitcher’s mound.

But, no, truly, the way the Yankees did handle it was actually worse. It was too hokey and sickening to even be entertaining. The man is forty-five years old, and New York is going to pay him $20 million to pitch four months of the season. The whole thing is just wrong, wrong, wrong.

It’s so fucking wrong.

Blow hamstring, blow.

That’s all I have to say about that.

Those were some of the most rinky-dink baseball games we’re likely to see all year (knock wood). Thank God, at any rate, that we’ve seen the last of the Devil Rays and that convention center/monster truck pit they call a baseball stadium.

Seriously, can you recall a series that contained more serious weirdness than that one? Hard as it is to believe, it was actually worse than the previous Tampa Bay series. Lousy (and just plain funny) base running, crap defense, poor situational hitting, infield hits galore, and balls hit into the rafters and catwalks.

The whole ugly mess obscured the fact that the Twins are facing some potentially serious questions. Joe Nathan, for one. Or Jesse Crain, for another. A batting order that has some glaring holes and still doesn’t seem like it’s structured for maximum efficiency. Maybe that’s a perception thing, resulting from the fact that when the top and bottom of the order guys produce, the middle of the lineup hitters seem to disappear, and vice versa. Joe Mauer and Justin Morneau stranded fourteen runners between them tonight, and Mauer actually looked human (all too human) several different times in the series, both at and behind the plate.

Luis Castillo’s approach is entertaining, but someone needs to tell him that there are times (with runners in scoring position and less than one out, for instance) when what is called for is a line drive or, god forbid, a fly ball, rather than a ground ball to the infield.

It’s been an oddly rubber-legged season so far, that’s for sure, and much shakier than the team’s record would seem to indicate.

This might be the most alarming stat in the early going: after blowing his first save of the season last night, Joe Nathan now has the same WHIP (walks + hits/innings pitched) as Sidney Ponson: 1.80. If you don’t know what that means, I can assure you that it’s not good. Nathan has pitched 13-and-a-third innings and has surrendered 19 hits and five walks. He’s clearly laboring, and one unfortunate result of that –besides the ugly lines he’s been putting up– is that he’s throwing way too many pitches.

The silver lining in Tampa Bay is that Pat Neshek looks increasingly like he’s got the stuff and the composure to do what he does for the long haul, and Glen Perkins has looked more and more comfortable with every outing.

Nothing’s going to get any easier in the next couple weeks, but what would really be nice right now is a stretch of top-to-bottom consistency like we saw in the second half last year.