Fire Gardy

The offensive woes continued as the Twins lost a close game to the Royals. Boof looked solid, but again received little run support. The lone run came on a Morneau homer in the 6th. It was a moonshot to the upper deck in right. We seemed to get most of our hits with two outs, and stranded lots of guys. Denard Span made his debut and didn’t look terrible. Tolbert has continued to impress me, but I still think he role should be that of a utility player.  Its good to see Morneau hitting the ball hard. Kubel also stung the ball pretty good.  Harris made a nice play at second as well.  Gomez made another bonehead play when he singled to shallow right and decided he should try for a double. Gomez totally could have stolen second pretty easily, so I don’t think he should have taken the risk to try to stretch it to a double. I blame Scott Ulger.We still seem to have a problem with stranding runners, and getting the leadoff man on base.  I also don’t like to have the bottom of the order leading off innings constantly. I know it is very difficult to prevent this, but it is possibly to minimize it.  We have a lot of division games coming up, going to chicago tomorrow, and then KC next weekend, with a trip to Detroit after that. This is a perfect time to rack up wins within the division. Detroit is struggling, and Cleveland seems to be starting slowly. Here’s to hoping for a successful first road trip. 

I was only able to see the first 5 innings of this game, which turned out to be the bad ones.  Slowey looked OK until he left the game with, what Joe C is reporting, a bicep strain.  Bass didn’t look very good, I really am not a fan of that guy, mainly because he really didn’t deserve to make the team.  The bats were pretty dead through the first 5, but according to the internet the woke up as I was walking from the dome back to my office.  Mauer had a good day at the plate with 2 doubles. Morneau finally got his first RBI, and Gomez was again impressive with 2 hits, although no steals. That is understandable considering Ervin was hitting 96 on the gun with ease.  Good to see Kubel hit a homer, hopefully that will earn him more ABs. I think Gardy will give more ABs to monroe (we are no longer treating his name as a proper noun) in order to “give Craig-y a chance to catch up”. It makes no sense, but that is the kind of logic Gardy will use. Not cool.  Gomez had a bunt single, I didn’t see it so I’m not sure if it was good or just lucky.  He also hit the cutoff man the one time I saw him relay a ball into the infield.  Torii got his first homer of the season, I would have liked him to have been 0 for the series, but oh well.We open up a weekend series against KC tomorrow night, they are coming off of a big sweep of the Tigers, so we can’t be taking anything for granted. I think we are sending Baker, Livan, and Boof out.

Nick Blackburn looked fantastic tonight, going 7 innings and giving up only 1 run on 5 hits, 1 walk, and recording six strike outs. I don’t think we could have expected him to do any better … especially considering the way the run finally scored in the 7th inning: infield single, sacrifice bunt, advanced on a groundout, scored on a wild pitch. That’s a pretty well-manufactured run.

But given the lineup Gardy saw fit to trotting out there, one thing could be expected: the Twins weren’t going to score in this game. Not only did they not score, only one baserunner advanced past first base (Punto, who stole second and advanced to third on an error). The only other baserunner who was actually stranded on base was Cuddyer; everyone else was either caught stealing or doubled up in one of the four double plays we grounded into. And all of them were to the second baseman.

The Twins combined for all of 29 plate appearances. I just wanted to write that explicitly. There are 27 outs in a game … and we only had 29 batters.

There’s not too much to say about this game. The Twins just didn’t hit. I realize we were facing a left handed pitcher and it’s a day game tomorrow, but by taking Mauer, Kubel, and Lamb out of the lineup, the offense becomes just about as impotent as possible.

Gardy made just a couple of questionable moves:

• Why bat Harris second? While it’s promising that he doesn’t consider the 2nd spot “the catcher’s,” and just put Redmond there … Harris isn’t much of a #2 hitter. It would probably have been better to just push Cuddyer/Morneau/Young up a spot and put Harris between Punto and Tolbert at the bottom of the order.
• Why let Tolbert bat against K-Rod in the 9th when Kubel/Mauer/Lamb are on the bench? I realize Tolbert walked and then was doubled up by Mauer, but that doesn’t change the fact that a slap hitting utility infielder with 3 major league at bats led off an inning against an elite right handed closer while 3 good left handed hitters sat idle on the bench.

Finally … Gomez. He attempted 5 bunts tonight, and all 5 of them went foul. Including the last one, which counted as a strike out in the 9th inning. Gardy has repeatedly said that Gomez needs to learn the game and that as he does, “things will be interesting out there.” Well, that was clearly a bone headed move by Gomez. The question I have is this:

Will Gardy manage to teach Gomez the proper thing to do without castrating his exciting offensive personality? Will Gomez still be allowed to use the bunt as a weapon, but be restricted only from using it with 2 strikes, or will Gardy completely muzzle him? How angry is Gardy going to be at Gomez, compared to the rest of the hitless team?

Just something to keep an eye on.

The game got off to a terrible start as the Angels ripped pretty much everything Boof threw in the first inning.  Even the outs were hit hard. After a leadoff double in the second, he reall seemed to settle down. He didn’t give up any more runs until the 5th, and the pitched a scoreless 6th before being taken out. His final line 6ip, 8H, 4R(3 ER), 4Ks and 0BB. Not to bad for his first time back against a good hitting Angels team. The bullpen on the other hand was not good. Crain pitched for the first time since last summer and gave up a run in 2/3 of an inning. Followed by Reyes, who threw two pitches to Anderson and gave up a hit. His night was over quickly. Then Brian Bass came in and gave up 2 runs (1 earned). He didn’t look good. He had the bases loaded at one point and prevented a run by throwing home to force out the runner on a chopper right back to him. Some would say he should have turned and fired to second for the double play, but it would be hard to double up Figgins and Matthews, Jr (especially since Matthews has steroids that make him run fast). Rincon didn’t fare much better in his first appearance.  In fact he fared much worse. There are really only three guys in the pen I trust. Guerrier, Neshek and Nathan.  With the game within reach after Bonser left, why not use Guerrier to start the 7th? Maybe Gardy trusts Crain and his bum shoulder more than Guerrier. The game was still in reach at that point.

The offense was downright awful. The only real bright spot was DY, who had 3 hits and scored the only run of the game. Gomez had some pretty good at bats. He wasn’t up there hacking like people said he would. He had a nice single at the end of the game but Mauer drilled one right at the SS (or 2b, I don’t recall) for an easy DP. That seemed to be the story all night. We had something like 17 groudball outs. Gomez hit a ball deep in the hole at short and almost beat it out, but the Angels have a very good infield defense and we were unable to sneak anything by them.  We were facing Jon Garland, a pitcher who we have faced a lot in the past so our inability to do nothing against him was just downright pathetic. I guess we have lots of new bats in the lineup, but Garland is far from special. Oh well, not like we were going to go undefeated all year.  I wish Torii the best, but it would be great if he went hitless against us all year. 

On a sidenote, late in the game Punto went out to warm up the pitcher while Mauer put his gear on (and Redmond did something much more fun, I’m assuming).  As he ran back to the dugout, and old lady sitting behind me yelled “Good job, Nicky!”. Do people love him so much that they will cheer for him when he does anything.  I think I saw him  hand a glass of gatorade to Boof, should I make a sign?  The guy is a utility infielder.  I’m pretty sure opposing fans who come to the dome think we are the dumbest fans ever. “Why are they cheering that bat boy after he warmed up Brian Bass?”  Also, the wave? come on, its 2008. Stop it.