Crain down, Mijares up.
Jesse Crain has been placed on the DL with shoulder stiffness, LEN3 reports. It is apparently minor, and hopefully he will be good to go in about 10 days time. In the meantime, the Twins have called up Jose Mijares. After an awful spring, he has put together a nice start in Rochester. He is currently on a 6.1 scoreless innings stretch. I’m not sure who will slide into the 8th inning role, but the top choices have to be Guerrier or Breslow. I am not basing that on anything other than those are the two guys Gardy probably trusts the most. Hopefully we see Nathan used a little bit more, but that usually doesn’t happen this early in the season.
I like what I have seen out of Morillo, although from the scouting reports it sounds like he will have trouble throwing strikes consistently, so its best if he is used in low leverage situations. This is a blow to the Twins already weak bullpen. Hopefully Mijares can step it up and be useful in his (hopefully) short stint in the majors.
The list of people I don’t trust out of the bullpen has grown to include the following:
Ayala, Dickey, Morillo, Mijares, Guerrier, Breslow. So everyone but Nathan is what I’m trying to say.
3 comments3 Comments so far
Leave a reply
This is pretty bad news, considering the fact that Crain was pitching well. Hopefully this isn’t one of those increasingly common no-big-deal-he’ll-be-back-in-a-couple-weeks-oh-wait-I-meant-season-ending-surgery scenarios.
We now need every starter to follow the Perkins route: 8 IP, 1-2 R, hand it straight to Nathan.
This off day came at a great time. Let’s hope our starters can go deep against the Red Sox and Indians lineups.
.500 with 8 games to go in the month, as I said earlier this month, 11-11 after 1st month of baseball is certainly nothing to complain about… especially with our lineups changing every day, Mauer not here, bullpen and starting pitching not being the greatest out of the gate… Morneau not being himself at the plate and on and on, we could pinpoint a lot more I’m sure… but looking forward, i see a split in Boston, 2 of 3 in Cleveland and 1 of 3 vs the Rays to finish as I predicted (hoped) at .500 for April… and that’s just being a realist! Once Mauer returns and May gets rolling along, I think you can take a narrower view at the flaws of the team and hopefully come up with ways to address them before the summer months come and go… long way to go…