The Rake Magazine

Tag: twins

  • Pitching Coach Rick Anderson on the Kids in the Twins Rotation

    Jeff Roberson/AP

    Of the boatload of people who deserve kudos for the Twins’ surprising season, which incredibly has them in the thick of a pennant race just six weeks before Labor Day, pitching coach Rick Anderson belongs near the top of the list. Having traded away their Cy Young Award-winner (Johan Santana) and top young prospect (Matt Garza) and watched their innings-eating middle-rotation guy (Carlos Silva) signed away in free agency, the Twins’ starting rotation for 2008 amounted to a a well-past-his-prime veteran, Livan Hernandez, and a collection of unproven kids as the club took the field on Opening Day in early April.

    Nearly four months later, Hernandez is in danger of being the first hurler in 29 years to surrender 300 hits in a season, yet the Twins have soldiered forward through the dogged improvement of four pitchers between the ages of 24 and 26, none of the highly regarded prospects deemed to have the stuff of an ace. But under Anderson’s steady tutelage and encouragement, each has made a quantum leap forward.

    As a pretty staunch baseball fan, I realized with some embarrassment that I couldn’t really differentiate between the quartet–lefthander Glen Perkins, and righties Kevin Slowey, Scott Baker and Nick Blackburn–and figured others might also benefit from a more detailed thumbnail sketch about their pitching make-up, specifically their strengths and characteristics and what challenges they most needed to surmount to continue their improvement. So, on Saturday before the middle game of the Twins’ three-game series with Texas, I asked Anderson to do just that. Here’s his take on the four cherubic horsemen.

    Kevin Slowey

    Command guy. He throws anywhere from 87 to 91. He works with control and command and he’s got to live on the corners and keep the ball down. He’s also got all four pitches, but his main strength is his command and location. His one thing is sometimes he’ll get a little bit up and get a little frisky and get under the ball and try to overthrow a little bit. If he starts getting up around 91, 92, he’s overthrowing and has got to back down a bit, keep his arm slot up and work the corners and keep the ball down and stay under control.

    Glen Perkins

    Stuff. He’s probably got some of the best stuff of anyone on our team. The ball runs everywhere, moves everywhere, and he’s got a good feel for what he is doing; he’s confident and he attacks the hitters. He is not afraid to pitch inside, which is another good thing you like to see in a pitcher. His big thing–and I’m probably saying this about all the kids–is staying under control, not trying to do too much, let the ball work for you. But his ball goes everywhere and he’s very deceptive and the biggest thing with him is he’s fearless.

    Scott Baker

    You know Scotty came up and down about three or four times over the past few years and in the middle of last year he kind of felt it and figured it out, that you’ve got to throw downhill and locate your pitches, that it is all about command and moving the ball in and out and trying to throw hard. And that’s what he’s learned and he’s got command and heck, every time out now he gives us a good effort. He’s controlling his pitches, he uses all four like the rest of them, but his key is keeping the ball down and being deceptive; and he is deceptive.

    Nick Blackburn

    He’s come out of nowhere. Last year we didn’t even know who Blackburn was until he started doing well in Triple A. He’s continued to progress. He come up last year in September and tried to throw it by everybody and got hammered around pretty good. That was his biggest challenge, coming up here and learning that it is not how hard you throw, it is locating your pitches. It is being under control, like I said about the rest, and letting your pitches work for you. It is changing speeds and it is all about keeping the hitters off balance for him and not just trying to throw it past the hitters. He’s got a good fastball, but his whole thing is just changing speeds and keeping the hitters off balance.

    As a bonus, I’ll throw in the fifth member of the starter kiddie corps, Boof Bonser, who has been banished to the bullpen.

    The biggest thing with Boof is getting things under control. He’s got a good arm, he throws in the low-90s, a great curveball and he’s got all four pitches because he also throws a slider and a change-up. It is just a matter of–when he started he was just overthrowing everything and getting the ball up and so we’ve put him out in the bullpen and just told him to focus on two pitches, fastball and curveball and master those two and then we can add the other things as we go. He’s done a good job out of the bullpen and been a little more consistent.

     

  • Mean Business

    The Minnesota Twins mean business in their new commercial. Morneau, Cuddyer, and Mauer wear ultra-cool Twins fan gear. They begin strolling to the soundtrack of Led Zeppelin’s "Dazed and Confused." In slow motion, the camera catches each individual, like a shot out of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. On location, at the under-construction open stadium, it’s spring. Air gusts ripple Cuddyer’s ringer t-shirt with the "TC" logo. He tosses a ball into the air playfully; then he sticks that tobacco rock ball into his mouth, suggesting the Twins will be outdoors and reckless, without restraints.

    Morneau, the heavy hitter, walks with his bat resting on the back of his neck. His two hands grasp each bat end, as though bound to some ancient torture device, illustration the persecution of playing inside the big-topped circus atmosphere of the Dome. Mauer holds his bat like a cane, until he laughs. In one quick swoop, he kicks the barrel and catches the bat — no more crutches to endure for the Minnesota Twins. The franchise will be outdoors soon, and Hell will break loose.

    With a fierce glare and clenched teeth, Morneau orders Pete to lay something into him. No one knows anyone by the name of Pete, meaning Morneau screwed his line in the commercial. They air it anyway to convey his tough-guy, testicular fortitude is what the fans have been hankering for.

    Each player takes turns knocking home-runs.

    Morneuo’s blast lands upside First Avenue, proving the team will rock with legendary force in their new ballpark. Never, ever will the Twins be constrained by a demeaning domed novelty garbage pile. Cuddyer cranks one. The ball soars like a missile and decapitates Mary Tyler-Moore’s statue, showing the world the franchise will not put up with junk, nor be treated as a bunch of nobodies. The Twins will turn heads or heads will be rolling, or we will be heads and shoulders above the rest and so on. Using both hands, Mauer hurls a damn boulder into the air.

    It tumbles awkwardly. He grips his bat while the stone is in the air, and sends the rock out beyond to Mary Jo Copeland’s shelter for the homeless. As suspected, Mary Jo is outside Sharing and Caring Hands, and, in the middle of the day, hustling a crack deal to a fiend.

    Splat!

    The homeless addict is rubbed out of existence by the powerful blast, symbolizing the Twins mean business in their new commercial.

  • Confidence Game: A Case of the Yips in the Motor City

    AP Photo by Duane Burleson

    We’ve been spoiled. While the Twins starting pitching and offense have too often been an iffy, up-and-down proposition throughout most of the 21st century, the bullpen has pretty consistently owned the late innings and protected leads. It was easy, in fact, to take them for granted. It didn’t seem to matter what collection of spare parts and previously anonymous warm bodies showed up in Florida in mid-February; by the time opening day rolled around Ron Gardenhire and Rick Anderson would have assembled a pen that was generally one thing Twins fans didn’t have to spend a lot of time fretting over.

    Eddie Guardado, LaTroy Hawkins, J.C. Romero, Bob Wells, Jack Cressend, Tony Fiore, Juan Rincon, Mike Jackson, Johan Santana (remember him?), Jesse Crain, Aaron Fultz, Matt Guerrier, Joe Nathan, Dennys Reyes, Pat Neshek….I’m sure I’m missing a few, and, yeah, some of those guys took their lumps in Twins uniforms before they found their niche; others were salvaged from some other organization’s scrap heap. The bottom line, though, is that since the Twins millennial turnaround the bullpen has been a constant.

    Fans who have been paying attention long enough –anyone who, say, still shudders at the name Ron Davis, or remembers LaTroy’s brutal stint as the closer — know what a luxury that is. Still, the various meltdowns and injuries (Romero, Rincon, Crain, Reyes, Glenn Perkins) notwithstanding, the late-inning guys have been nothing if not resilient and relentlessly effective.

    Which is what makes what’s happened the last week –in Chicago and, especially, in Detroit –so startling. Coming into this season the starting pitching was, charitably speaking, a question mark, and with few exceptions the starters have been pretty damn good. Better, certainly, than any of us had any reason to expect. And they sure as hell should have won three games the bullpen has coughed up in spectacular and debilitating fashion.

    The culprits in the first two cases –a 7-4 loss to the loathsome White Sox, and Monday night’s 11-9 heartbreaker in Detroit– have been the uncommonly reliable Matt Guerrier and Pat Neshek. It’s too early to be seriously concerned, I suppose, but these weren’t just instances where Guerrier and Neshek were getting nicked. No, they were getting rocked. Granted, Jermaine Dye’s seventh-inning single off Neshek that tied the score in Chicago was the result of a decent pitch and a very ugly swing, but it seemed to open the floodgates, and they’ve been open pretty much ever since.

    Both Guerrier and Neshek are finding way too much of the plate with their fastballs, but also, most notably, with their breaking balls. Maybe it’s the cold weather, but Neshek in particular doesn’t seem to have either access to the velocity he’s showed over the last couple years or that Frisbee-like movement on his slider.

    I guess what makes these early struggles a bit alarming is the fact that both guys were in the A.L. top ten in appearances last year (74 for Neshek and 73 for Guerrier). Guerrier set a career high for appearances and innings (88), and pitched two or more innings 14 times. The rotation being what it is –and, sorry, Livan Hernandez is fun to watch, but the league’s eventually going to catch up to a guy with his stuff and his strikeout ratio– the fortunes of this team depend heavily on the seventh and eighth-inning guys getting the game to Joe Nathan. If this shit keeps up all those dollars the Twins are paying Nathan are going to be more a pension or a retainer than a salary.

    It’s probably also too early to get too concerned about Joe Mauer, but I don’t think it’s too early to start to recognize and perhaps accept what he is. And what he is is a very good catcher with a pretty swing. Folks, our Joe is not a superstar. He’s not a guy who can carry a team for a week or two at a time. He’s not even a middle-of-the-order guy. He belongs in the two hole until he demonstrates otherwise, and I honestly don’t expect him to ever demonstrate otherwise.

    When Carlos Gomez gets on base (and this looks like it’s going to be increasingly infrequent as other teams get the book on him: feed him a steady diet of sliders down and away and fastballs up and in), Mauer’s skills are ideally suited to move him over and even drive him in, provided doing so doesn’t require much more than an occasional line drive or sacrifice fly. He has excellent plate discipline and bat control –perhaps, as many people will tell you, too much discipline and control. Mauer is what he is, and moving him to third base or the outfield, I’m pretty sure, is not going to change the kind of hitter he is. He’s a natural, a controlled, instinctive hitter, but I’m afraid I’ve seen no indications over the last several years that he’s willing to change, adapt, or even learn anything new. If he gets better he might be Wade Boggs.

    I never much liked Wade Boggs.

  • The Postponement Blues

    Early April baseball in the Midwest can be a flat-out teeth-kicker. Baseball, of course, can kick your teeth in on a regular basis no matter the month, but shit like last night is brutal, even if it (literally) comes with the territory. Couldn’t they at least have given us a rain delay, so we could have stretched out the night a little bit?

    Remember when the Twins used to play in the American League West, back before the greedy fucks starting monkeying around with the divisions and came up with the utterly inane unbalanced schedule? Back then the Twins played in a division with teams like California, Oakland, Texas, and Seattle. Now you’ve got five northern teams in the Central, and at least for the next two years the Dome provides the only sure refuge from the dodgy weather in the first weeks of the season.

    Maybe somebody can explain to me how the schedule makers manage to send the Twins on their first road trip of the year –in the second week of April– to Chicago, Kansas City, and Detroit. It makes absolutely no sense.

    The weather we’ve been having –on opening night, for instance, and last night (both in Chicago and here)– has already had people wringing their hands about the wisdom of building the new downtown ballpark without a retractable roof. I understand that, certainly; I also wish like hell the Pohlads had poneyed up for a roof, and have some pretty raw memories of making the trek up to Met Stadium as a kid only to have to sit through rain delays that resulted in eventual postponement. I’ve also been rained out in Kansas City, both parks in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and New York.

    No doubt about it, it sucks. It always sucks. It messes with the day-to-day, day-after-day rhythms of the game, particularly early and late in the season. But while sitting through close to a thousand games in the Dome –the Twins moved into the dump the year I moved to town– I’ve gained a little perspective on rainouts. For the last ten years, for every game I’ve attended, I’ve made a plus or minus notation in my scorebook. Pluses represent all those games where I would have been at least relatively miserable sitting outdoors watching a baseball game. A double plus generally means either the game wouldn’t have been played were it not for the Dome, or I wouldn’t have slogged through the weather to sit through it. A minus has come to represent sort of the Dome version of a rainout: those are the afternoons or evenings where it felt like a crime to be sitting indoors on a beautiful day watching a game that was invented to be played outside on beautiful days.

    I can tell without going back through all of my scorebooks that the minuses probably outnumber the pluses by at least five-to-one, which is something I suggest we all keep in mind during the dark early days of this season, and when the Twins finally do move into that new ballpark in 2010.

    Shit, just on principle I’m going to feel obligated to gut out games in the new yard even on miserable April and September (and –knock wood– October) nights, because I know how damn grateful I’m going to be for all those beautiful days and nights in between.

  • Paper Tigers, etc: Seriously, People, It's Still Too Damn Early to Even Have This Conversation

    AP Photo, by Paul Battaglia

    I walk away happy as a clam from any baseball game that features a successfully executed suicide squeeze. It’s a great, gutsy, and increasingly rare play, and last night, with the Kansas City Royals in town (I actually heard some radio guy refer to them as the "red hot Royals"), the Twins –with ex-Astros (Adam Everett and Mike Lamb) at both ends of the squeeze– worked it to perfection. That, of course, was a good thing, since the Twins in the early going are once again playing like a team that needs to scratch and claw for every run.

    Eventually you have to suppose opposing teams are going to figure out a way to keep Carlos Gomez off base (the obvious solution: don’t give him anything to hit, let alone bunt), but right now he’s making it look easy, and with a guy who has that kind of speed leading off –and Joe Mauer hitting behind him– the Twins have the potential to manufacture a run every time he gets on base; once he gets on first he’s demonstrated he knows how to get around.

    As far as the anemic offense is concerned, there’s probably no point in getting too wound up about it just yet, even if the production (12 runs in five games) is disconcertingly reminiscent of last year’s misery. Surely, though, you’d think, the middle of the order will come around, and surely, you’d think, the bottom of the order can’t possibly be as bad as it was last year, even if you have the sinking suspicion that the bottom of the order very well could be as bad as it was last year.

    We’ve had several years now to watch Justin Morneau –and I’ve watched him very closely– and when the guy is going bad he’s an absolute train wreck. Right now he’s not even close to being right. I know he and hitting coach Joe Vavra have access to videotape up the wazoo, and I can’t for the life of me understand why Morneau has such a hard time figuring out what he’s doing wrong. I mean, yes, I know, it’s an extremely difficult thing, hitting major league pitching, but he looks anxious and off balance and he’s jumping at pitches and beating them into the ground. His first (and thus far only) hit this year might have been the only truly decent swing he’s had in five games, and it was exactly the kind of swing –waiting on a pitch he can’t pull and driving it the other way– that keys his success when he’s going good.

    The Cuddyer injury is unfortunate, but if it gets Jason Kubel a chance to play every day for a couple weeks it might be a blessing in disguise. I’m already tired of Craig Monroe (five strikeouts in nine at bats), and Kubel’s present situation resembles nothing so much as where Cuddyer was a few years ago. Kubel is now a couple years removed from his catastrophic knee injury, and it’s time to see what he can do when given a chance to play every day. I know there are plenty of folks out there who have given up on him, but anybody who saw the guy swing the bat in his minor league stops before the injury can’t help hoping he can still be the player he was once projected to be. And naysayers should keep in mind that Kubel is still just 25 years old.

    Another guy I really don’t like in the early going is Brendan Harris. He showed he could hit a little bit last year in Tampa Bay, but he appears to be seriously lost on defense. Even watching him in pre-game drills he looks stiff and hapless and clumsy around the bag. A good hitter can go through slumps at the plate that temporarily obscure how good he really is, but first impressions on defense are generally pretty reliable. And given the emphasis the Twins place on making the plays in the field, I think Harris is going to be on a very short leash.

    The good news: the starting pitching has actually been pretty damn stout. That was a very sharp and very encouraging comeback from Scott Baker last night (the guy had thrown 41 pitches through two innings, and managed to leave with two out in the sixth, a one-run lead, and a respectable pitch count of 84), and the bullpen looks to be as outstanding as ever. And after one turn through the rotation the starters have walked just one batter.

    Today we’ll get our second opportunity to marvel at Livan Hernandez, one of the most brazen slop tossers in the big leagues, a guy with the stuff to be a Town Ball ace. Try to just enjoy the show, and for the time being I’d advise you to fend off all thoughts of Ramon Ortiz and his April tease of a year ago.

  • Opening Night: And So It Begins. Again.

    AP photo by Tom Olmscheid

    Representatives of the local sporting press —of which I am a decidedly derelict member— were packed cheek to jowl in the Herb Carneal Memorial Press Box at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome Monday night. It was not, as you might imagine, a pretty picture. If somewhere there exists an International Society of the Churlish, on any given night the average press box is chockful of ideal candidates for membership.

    The occasion for this particular gathering, of course, was Opening Day of another baseball season. The opener has long been regarded as one of the Holy Days in all of sports, which means that all sorts of characters —myself, for instance— who tend to make themselves scarce the rest of the season feel obligated to put in an appearance. When it comes to Twins baseball there are, unfortunately, way too many media types who are sort of professional sports versions of Christmas and Easter Only (CEO) churchgoers. I can assure you, though, that wherever you find a bandwagon you’ll find an unruly hoard of media members jockeying for position at the wheel.

    I’ve been as guilty as the next guy (or gal) in recent years, but I’m also penitent. Because I swear to you I really am a true believer, and I’m absolutely determined to get right with the baseball gods. Even if it means slogging through a foot of snow to watch a team carrying the weight of almost zero expectations.

    I also feel the need to confess that I really wasn’t in the mood to slog through a foot of snow tonight to watch a team carrying the weight of almost zero expectations (surprisingly heavy burden, that). I’m glad I did, though. Almost every time I’ve forced myself to make the drive-and-trudge to the Dome I’ve walked away glad I did.

    I love the game, and I was surprised and cheered to see such a large contingent in the press box last night, and even more surprised and cheered to see 49,596 paying customers in the stands —the largest crowd for a Twins game since September 1996.

    We all saw a hell of a game. And I know it’s ridiculous to place too much stock in a team’s performance in the first game of a long baseball season, but given that Torii Hunter was in the house, and given that everybody in attendance (or at least everyone who was paying attention) knew by the third inning that Johan Santana had been dazzling in his Mets debut (7 ip, 3 hits, 8 strikeouts, and 2 earned runs), it seemed somehow important, if not urgent, that the Twins give those nearly 50,000 people something to cheer about, and maybe even something to believe in, on an otherwise miserable night in Minnesota.

    And they delivered, which was a beautiful thing.

    Livan Hernandez, the (maybe) (purportedly) 33-year-old righthander who was acquired so late that he doesn’t even appear in the team’s 2008 media guide, and a guy whose opening day start was already being trotted out by doomsayers as a harbinger of a season of protracted misery (this despite the fact that the big Cuban was making an opening day start for his fourth club, and has long been in the habit of giving his teams a couple hundred innings a year), anyway, yeah, that Livan freaking Hernandez –for at least one night, anyway– went out and dispelled all visions of Sidney Ponson and provided a glimmer of hope that he might be, at the very least, the second coming of Carlos Silva, light somewhere in the vicinity of ten million dollars.

    You can all do the math on your own, but out there all over the country last night –including in the opposing dugout at the Dome– there were hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ex-Twins laboring for other teams.

    And in every single case I say good for them, and good for the Twins.

    I wasn’t thrilled with the Johan Santana deal. Like everybody else I wish the Twins could have gotten more in return. But the reality is they didn’t trade Santana for four players; they traded him for four players and 150 million dollars.

    And the Twins didn’t just swap out Hunter for 22-year-old Delmon Young. They shaved ten years off their roster and millions of dollars from their payroll (The Angels are going to pay Hunter $90 million over five years). Anybody remember what kind of player Hunter was when he was 22? I love Torii, but trust me, down the road there won’t be a Twins fan who would trade him even up for Delmon Young.

    Or, based on an admittedly small but nonetheless thrilling sample size, for Carlos Gomez, the 22-year-old who was the centerpiece of the Santana deal and trotted out most of his highly-touted tools in his Twins debut. What did we see? Well, shit, you know what you saw, and everybody and their grandmother is going to tell you what you saw, but I’m pretty damn sure it was more than potential. The kid is 6′ 4" and he can fly. We’d heard all about that, but he ran down balls in the gap, went 2-3, stole a couple bases (both on pitch-outs), drew a walk ("It might be the last one," Ron Gardenhire said), scored a couple runs, and exhibited perfect manners and genuine charm in the clubhouse. This was a guy who sat in front of his locker after arguably the most important game of his young career and talked quietly about gratitude and joy and having fun, a guy who admitted to choking up before he took the field.

    Directly across the clubhouse from Gomez was Pat Neshek, who came into last night’s game and struck out three of the four men he faced, including Vladimir Guerrero with the tying run on second and first base open. Neshek is a guy who exudes joy and gratitude; practically every time he opens his mouth it’s apparent he still can’t quite believe he’s been given the opportunity to go to work every day in a major league ballpark. The dude’s a vegan, for crying out loud, a fucking vegan warrior in a major league clubhouse. And he’s more than happy to talk about that fact, and to insist that the decision had nothing to do with athletic performance and everything to do with a "lifestyle choice." He’s also more than happy to talk about every pitch to every batter in every game he appears in (and seems to remember all of them in precise detail). When Gary Mathews Jr. blooped a two-out double in the eighth to put the tying run on base with Guerrero coming up, there were all sorts of people sitting around me who felt certain that the prudent choice was to walk Vlad. And when Neshek’s first two pitches missed badly outside it definitely looked like the Twins had made the decision to pitch around him. "Nah," said Neshek. "I was going after him all the way. That’s what I do, get right handers out. You know he’s hacking, so there are a lot of places to miss. I love that challenge." At which point he broke into a huge smile that even blew his eyes wide open. He shook his head, raised his arms in a what-are-you-gonna do gesture and said, "It’s a really fun game."

    You spend any time in the Twins clubhouse –and this goes back years now– and you’ll hear some variation of that line repeated again and again, starting in Ron Gardenhire’s office. I’ve long made a habit of poking around in visiting clubhouses and I can tell you that I’ve seldom, if ever, heard that sort of thing espoused anywhere else.

    But the Twins, of course, are right, and I think they’re on the right track. It is a fun game, and it was particularly nice, on a perfectly worthless night for baseball, to get a compact, well-played reminder of that fact.

    It’s the sort of thing that can get a guy going to church –or the baseball park– again on a regular basis.

  • What Do I Know?

    Here’s what I’d like to know: Since when are the New York Yankees in any position to play hardball with the Twins? Given the pitching situation in New York, and given the fact that this is a team that is now in the (for them) desperate position of playing second-fiddle to the Red Sox, would you not think that the Twins should have all the leverage in a deal for Johan Santana?

    You have to imagine that the new Yankee regime would be willing to pull out all the stops to get Santana, and if they’re not, they for damn sure should be, or fuck ’em.

    There are all sorts of reasons to be wary about any deal with either New York or Boston. Because of the high profiles of the two east coast Goliaths, their prospects tend to be over-hyped in comparison to those of almost any other team. What do you really know about Phil Hughes or Jacoby Ellsbury? Or how about Melky Cabrera?

    My guess is probably not enough. Ellsbury was dynamite in the postseason, and we heard the Hughes hype all last season. But what sort of players are they? Relatively young players, which means relatively unproven players. Based on his minor league numbers, Hughes looks like he could become a dominant pitcher. He’s a big kid, long and lean. I like him, but as with any 21-year-old pitcher I’d be concerned about injuries, at least until I get more of a chance to watch him pitch.

    I’ll admit that Ellsbury is the guy I’d most like to see included in a deal with the Red Sox, but that’s based almost entirely on his performance in the playoffs. The guy is a burner, seems to know how to get on base, and he looks like a more-than-solid outfielder. Despite the power he flashed in the postseason, however, there isn’t much in his minor league record to indicate he’s going to be a reliable home run threat. He’s also 24 years old.

    I don’t want Melky Cabrera, I know that much. And I don’t want Coco Crisp.

    The main virtues of the other guys whose names have been floating around is that they are –at least for the time being– cheap. And, of course, they have potential. It would be nice, however, if the Twins could get at least one guy included in a Santana package who is something of a proven commodity.

    That may not happen. Nothing may happen. And I’d certainly rather see nothing happen than watch the Twins knuckle under to Hank Steinbrenner’s demands. I hope that won’t happen, and I don’t think that will happen. I’m pretty sure Bill Smith knows he’s in the driver’s seat.

    The dream scenario, I think, would be for the Mets to swoop in and steal some thunder from both the Yankees and the Sox, but for that to happen I’m pretty sure they’re going to have to be willing to cough up Jose Reyes.

    That’s a deal I’d love to see happen.

    As far as the Tampa Bay trade, I’ll just say I like it just fine, even if the Twins are now back out there trying to convince somebody to give them a pitcher with Garza’s potential. In the meantime, I’ll take Delmon Young and his purported baggage, and I’ll wager that before Torii’s three years into his contract with the Angels Bill Smith is going to look like a genius. It’s not easy for me to forget all those years I watched Torii flailing at fastballs in the dirt and up in his eyes, and, defensive magnificence aside, he was a long time delivering on his promise. The money the Angels threw at him is insane.

    All the same, I’ll miss Hunter. He was a good guy, always accessible and good for a quote. I don’t know that I buy the notion that he was some sort of clubhouse leader, but I do know that with both Hunter and Santana gone, Minnesota’s clubhouse will have a huge charisma void.

    And, finally, speaking of a charisma void: what the hell is up with Carlos Silva? I haven’t even heard much in the way of rumors surrounding The Jackal.