Sunday Lineups
One trend that I would love to see Gardy stop doing is by using Sundays as a rest day for the majority of the starters. It seems like the general lineup the Twins throw out there on Sundays makes it damn near impossible to win. It bugged me even more when he would do this with Santana pitching. I understand that players need rest, (except for Bronko Nagurski, he never got off days or bye weeks) and it is difficult to play a day game after a night game, but I would rather see players off days be spread out a little more, rather than put an entire roster full of Puntos and Tyners on to the field.
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I agree. He shouldn’t use the “mass sub” mentality. Rotate through the backups instead of putting Jason Tyner, Nick Punto, Rondell White, Jeff Cirillo, my grandmother, and John Macdonald with Johan Pitching. Last season on sunday the only legit bat in the lineup was Morneau, and sometimes Cuddyer. He would inconsistently put Mauer in as the DH, which worked but he wouldn’t do it nearly often enough.
I have no problem if he decides to stick a backup in now and again, but if at any point in time we have Cuddyer, Young, Mauer, and Morneau on the bench at the same time heads are going to roll.
Also, he love affair with the batting order by position. Whoever was the catcher batted third, who ever was the CF batted cleanup, etc. That was dumb and needs to stop.
Agreed, it is like in a video game when you change the lineup to get players rest and you are just too lazy to rearrange the order.
Gardy is really lazy. One other thing we need to take care of is getting rid of Scott Ulger. When he was the hitting coach, we sucked at hitting. When he was the third base coach, the last two years i believe, we sucked at baserunning. Did anyone notice how many basepath errors we had last season. Doesn’t most of that fall on the third base coach?
I would think a decrease in baserunning performance is mostly on the third base coach. If the baserunning had always been bad, then it’d be more of a systemic coaching problem.
Everything Ullger touches turns to crap. That’s probably why he’s Gardy’s right-hand-man. He’s the Nick Punto of real life, and can’t get a job anywhere else, while at the same time Gardy sees a lot of himself in Ullger. Therefore, it is his responsibility to give him a job. Ugh.
It was unbelievable how many basepath errors there were. Remember when Cuddy loped around from second to home on a fly ball with 1 out? He jogged right by Ulger who clearly did nothing to correct the mistake made by Cuddyer. It is one thing when a player forgets the situation, but another when a coach does. The player has to have a lot more on his mind then the base coach does, and it was unacceptable to make errors like that in in a little league game, not to mention professional baseball.
That was a boneheaded move by Cuddyer. There are no two ways about it.
However, you HAVE a third base coach because players are wont to do boneheaded things. And the third base coach is supposed to know how many outs there are, as well as the rules on force-outs. (We can’t criticize Ullger too harshly, since I suppose it’s possible that he just doesn’t know the RULES OF BASEBALL.)
All I know is that Ullger should spend more time sitting than standing. And not in the dugout. He should be in the stands. Without a jersey. And he should have to pay for a ticket. And Pohlad shouldn’t have to pay him.
I think all members of the twins, players and coaches, should have most of their pay in performace bonuses. Players, with individual performances, while coaches should be paid based on how whatever players they coach perform. So Anderson gets paid based on pitchers performance, Vavra based on overall hitting, etc. These bonuses will be pre-determined by the front office. So, Anderson should have easier performance goals because he has no proven pitchers, whereas Vavra should have higher performance goals because he has what should be a pretty good lineup. And the manager should be paid based on overall team record or something. While this system i have presented has some pretty obvious flaws, I think its a start. Too bad the union won’t ever allow this to happen, because as we all know terrible players like Nick Punto and Kyle Lohse deserve to get paid a lot for detracting from the team.
Well in that system Anderson would probably get paid the most, since he’s actually good at what he does.
Vavra would be screwed, unless he decided to give a percentage of his earnings to Carew and Killebrew in return for teaching the guys how to hit.