Fire Gardy

Seriously. These are grown men. How is it that they are completely unable to win a game on the road? They have lost 10 of their last 15 road games.  This is a very winnable division and the Twins have not taken advantage. It seems like nobody wants to win. The complete mismanagement of the bullpen by Ron Gardenhire (see I used his full name, that means he is in trouble) is unacceptable for a manager during a pennant race. I don’t care if people thought we would be terrible when predictions came out in march, it is September and we are in it.  There can be no “well, it was a nice run while it lasted” or “we’re playing with house money now” mentality.  If this team can get into the playoffs, I know they probably don’t stand a chance BUT it will give our young pitchers the big game experience they need.  Can you imagine if we have a real rotation and lineup for the entire season next year? No more Lamb, Monroe, Everett, Hernandez, etc. And our rotation will be playoff tested.  While this may contradict what I just said, it will be nice for our pitchers to pitch in meaningful games in September, but it would be even better for them to win those meaningful games and get to the playoffs.

Whoever wins the division will almost certainly start on the road against the winner of the AL east.  Both of those teams are very tough, that is why we need to get at least some momentum going in.  LaVelle mentioned the tie breaking scenarios the other day on his blog and none of them sound appealing. In fact, I think there is only one. We play a one game playoff against the White Sox in Chicago. That would be terrible. Turrible.

Having Michael Cuddyer back helps, but people forget he was pretty worthelss before he got hurt.  I do not think he deserves to be slotted into the starting lineup everyday just because there are lots of people who have Michael Cuddyer t-shirt jerseys who come to games once a week. His ability to do magic notwithstanding I think he should DH against lefties (like he did last night) and pinch hit. Hopefully that is Gardy’s plan for him.  Depending on how his foot is I might rotate him into the OF when someone needs a day off, but I like how everyone is playing.  Gomez has been lost at the plate but you can’t deny he is very valuable defensively out there.

We are approaching our windmill point (that is a back to the future 3 reference, meaning point of no return) where every game is a must win.  We can’t hope for the white sox to lose. We need to continue winning on this road trip and AT LEAST win 2 of 3 from them next week when we play. Hopefully we will be within 2 games when this happens. It seems like we have been within 2 games for about 6 weeks, so at worst we need to set it up so a sweep or 2 out of 3 puts us in first.  Leading by 4 games would be nice, but I don’t see it happening.  Go Twins!