Fire Gardy

Before the season we here at firegardy (well, I guess just me) made pre-season predictions.  They can be found here.  I’m not doing so well.  The Indians, Cubs,  A’s (The A’s, what the hell was I on when I wrote that!?), and Mets picks look pretty bad now.  The Yankees and Rays are both in playoff contention, so its still too early to write those off as bad picks.  The Sizemore for MVP pick doesn’t look so hot because a) the Indians suck, and b) he has been hurt.  The Grienke for CY Young is still possible.  As is Gardy for manager of the year.  However, its pretty clear that someone like Ron Washington will get that unless the Rangers absolute tank the rest of the year.  My NL MVP and CY Young picks are still possible, but Johan isn’t really the frontrunner for the Cy right now.  If he tears it up in the second half as usual, that will help both my Cy Young pick and NL Wild card pick. 

How did your picks hold up?

2 comments

If the head coach of the University of Michigan lost to Ohio State every year, that is basically grounds for firing.  Ron Gardenhire has a sub 300 winning percentage against the Yankees since he became the Twins manager in 2002.  That isn’t good.  I’m not sayin he should be fired for losing to a team we only play seven times a year, but  he needs to tell the players that we aren’t facing Ruth and Gehrig everytime we play them.  We need to cut them, like in Rocky IV, after Rocky makes Drago bleed and Duke (his trainer) says  “You see? You see? He’s not a machine, he’s a man, he’s a man”  Well right now, the Twins think the Yankees are a machine.  If Liriano can come out today and shut them down for 7 innings he can show the rest of the team that they are just men.  Same as any other team (just more expensive). 

When we faced the Yankees back in May we walked them twice as much as they normally draw walks on a per game basis.  I’m pretty sure this is because our pitchers were scared of them.  Swarzak didn’t look too bad last night and he didn’t give up.  He kept trying to make his pitches, but those damn Yankees are so damn patient.  Jerks.

Let’s hope the title of my next blog post can be “They’re cut! The Yankees are cut!”, and not “If they die, they die”.

 

9 comments

Remember all that talk a while back about Cuddyer’s contract? I talked about it back in March; while Tim Dierkes rated his deal as one of the worst current contracts in baseball, I pointed out that “it’s not out of the question that he returns to his 2007 form this year in 400-450 PA or so.” And that basically, while 2008 was a throwaway year,* if 2009 and 2010 are reasonably good years the contract won’t have been that bad.

* If you want an easy way to look at disastrous contracts, look for everyone who gets injured and then make fun of the GM. You can try to price in some injury risk, but if you demand a “30% catastrophic injury discount,” any agent worth being an agent will laugh in your face and walk out of the room. This risk is part of doing business, and I think it’s cheap to retroactively decide that the GM made a bad move based on injuries that sap a player’s ability for a year.

So … how’s that contract looking at the moment, with Cuddyer hitting .277/.358/.523 with 14 HR, 18 2B, 46 R, and 46 RBI? So far this season, Cuddyer has been worth $7M, which means if he just stopped playing today, he’d be worth more than he’s getting paid this season.

Of course, Fangraphs is less than optimistic about his ability to keep this pace up, but have adjusted their projections upwards, and have him finishing just 1 run below his value from 2006 (and 10 runs better than his 2007, which is what I was hoping for this year). And if he keeps up his current pace, he’ll be worth considerably more than he was in 2006.

I know I was pretty hard on Cuddyer early in the year, but at this point it’s really looking like his offseason eye surgery did in fact kick in, right around the beginning of May* — his OPS jumped above .700 on May 2, and has been going steadily upwards ever since.

* Perhaps you recall when I wrote about Denard’s eye surgery a while back, and pointed out that he didn’t really start hitting until May of last year. See a pattern here?

So Cuddyer’s contract is looking considerably better than it did four months ago, and I imagine that next year when Dierkes looks at this again next year he might not be so quick to shit on Cuddyer.

And I really don’t mean to go back to talking about eye surgery again, but it is a little bit striking,* isn’t it?

* In April, Cuddyer hit .224/.318/.316, with 15 K and 1 HR in 88 PA. Since then, he’s hit .297/.373/.598 with 44 K and 13 HR in 236 PA. Talk about turning a corner!

At the end of the day, though, it’s good to see Cuddyer hitting — and well — for an extended period of time. Let’s hope he can keep it up and make everyone remember why we’re paying him like we are.

(Naturally, now that I’ve said this, he’ll either get injured or start sucking, probably starting tonight. The universe has a funny way of doing that. Sorry about that everybody.)

2 comments

The Twins kick off a three game set with the Yankees tonight at the Dome.  Pitching matchups are as follows:

Tuesday- Scott Baker vs. CC Sabathia

Wednesday- Glen Perkins vs. AJ Burnett

Thursday- Anthony Swarzak vs. TBA

The Twins have some pretty ugly numbers against CC.  Redmond is one of the few who does not so I wonder if Gardy will DH Mauer (since Kubel would be useless against CC) and use Redmond at Catcher.  Or even vice versa.  Other than that I’m sure the lineup will be pretty normal.  Gardy seems to have settled on one lineup most of the time.  Which is nice.  Its not a good sign when the lineup changes from day to day.  Unless of course you have too many good players, but it usually means you don’t have enough.

If we can take two of three from both the Yankees and White Sox I think we will be in very good shape heading into the break.  I’d also be happy with a 3-3 split.  The tigers have now lost three in a row, so maybe they are starting to fade for good. 

Another interesting note:  The Twins are done with the Yankees, Red Sox and Rays after this week.  The Tigers still have a bunch of games left against them.  That is a good sign.

1 comment

As some of you may or may not have noticed, I haven’t posted in a while. Shortly after my most “recent” post, I had my wisdom teeth forcibly removed  from my skull, and in return the dentist supplied me with some drugs (not as fun as you’d think). I was somewhat reticent to try to write anything while under their influence, and given how I acted on Friday night (my first post-surgery party), my reticence was most certainly warranted.* If you’re going to make a complete fool of yourself, better to do it among 20 of your closest friends and relatives, 50 slightly less close acquaintances, and a couple hundred strangers rather than do it anonymously on the open internet. I mean … right?

* If you saw me this weekend, I apologize for that.

But fortunately for everyone involved, all this time away from the keyboard has left my thumbs itching to start slammin’ spacebars again, so I’m back at the keyboard. And what better way to do it than by starting with my favorite ongoing series, Useless Offday Thoughts? And hopefully it’ll make us all feel a little better about the fact that the jerks at MLB scheduled an offday for the Twins, meaning we won’t get to escape from our soul-crushing lives for a little while.

Let’s start with a little Morneau-ing:

Twins first baseman Justin Morneau was named American League Player of the Week today, after batting .480 (12-for-25) with four home runs, and 26 total bases in six games last week.

It is Morneau’s second time winning the award, with the other coming July 9, 2007. For winning the award, Morneau wins an engraved Swiss Tourneau timepiece.

Congratulations to Morneau, I guess, but I’m now pretty worried. The last time I checked, he only has two wrists, meaning he’s now maxed out his need for expensive watches. He’ll probably stop trying to kick ass now.

But what if we went Mauer-ing? I mean, he hasn’t really done anything good to speak of on the baseball field lately, so we have to go a little deeper into his tackle-box of skills:

Joe Mauer is from Minnesota. He is white. He plays Major League Baseball. He is considered something of a pretty boy. None of these four things outlaws him from practicing his secret hobby. All of them combined into one 6-foot-5, sideburn-wearing, .400-flirting catcher, however, makes for the unlikeliest rapper in the history of rap.

“We know he loves it,” Minnesota Twins closer Joe Nathan says.

“He does it in a studio in his house,” Twins outfielder Michael Cuddyer says.

“I’ve heard stories,” outfielder Denard Span says. “I’ve heard he buries himself in the studio. But never heard the finished product with my own ears. Looking at him right now, I’m guessing it’s a cross between Vanilla Ice and Cypress Hill.”

That’s awesome. But Calcaterra’s take is somewhat unbelievable:

This strikes me as one of those deals. Mauer probably had one too many Sheep Head Ales, beatbox into a tape recorder, and the rest is somewhat inaccurate history.

I mean … unless someone spiked the milk, I’m guessing Mauer didn’t have a few too many. But maybe his walkup music next year could be a duet.

Now look, I don’t know how many of you have heard about the antics surrounding the Royals lately,* but there’s some seriously interesting stuff happening.

* Aside from the sucking, that is.

First, quasi-famous Royals fan Rany Jazayerli blogged about the Royals’ training staff, and that the one and only person* who happened to have not been fired over the course of all the many, many years of unadulterated suck the Royals franchise has suffered through is their head trainer.

* It turned out there were actually two guys, but both of them were on the medical staff.

Jazayerli wrote that this trainer is terrible, and that because of all the egregious mishandling of injuries over the years,* the dude should get fired.

* And boy, has it come to a head this year. Read the initial rant linked above to get the whole rundown, but if you want just a taste, check this out: Soria injured himself while warming up during a Greinke shutout, they kept him out of a few games where he was needed while claiming he was totally fine, then they brought him in and afterwards admitted that he was hurt, then they kept him out for a bit (not on the DL), and then they let him pitch 2 days in a row, then kept him out for almost a week and when he pitched again he sucked and finally went on the DL. Then they did the same thing with Mike Aviles, their up-and-coming shortstop of the near future, and now he’s having season-ending surgery. Then they did it again, but even worse this time, with Coco Crisp, and now he’s having season-ending surgery. Then, they did it again with Gil Meche, who they had pitching through a back injury for a while and then, after claiming he was on a strict pitch count, they had him struggle through like 120 pitches (against the Twins, no less). These are all things, he said, that are monumentally dumb, and this trainer, Swartz, probably shouldn’t be the trainer any more.

Then, apparently the Royals got ahold of that blog post, and it irked them. If you were wondering how much it irked them … well, you might think they reconsidered this Swartz fellow. If you thought that, you don’t know much about how a bad organization operates. They banned Rany Jazayerli.

They banned him from the stadium (for some reason … despite the fact that he lives in Chicago and rarely makes it to Kauffman Stadium). They banned all their team employees from his radio show. They said any other radio show that had him on as a guest would be similarly banned. They said any radio station that continued to carry his radio show would also be similarly banned.

Jazayerli was obviously pretty pissed about that, and … fellow bloggers and commenters everywhere agreed with him. After a few days of the internet echo-sphere resounding and loudening — as it is wont to do — the Royals backtracked and lifted the bans and the threats (although Jazayerli still doesn’t get access to Royals employees).

Congratulations to Jazayerli for getting un-banned, but the banning itself remains far more interesting to me. It made me wonder what it’d be like if I were banned by the Twins. I mean, I’ve known very few people to be able to get by the title of the blog, and everyone is pretty convinced we’re incendiary douchebags long before they open a browser to discover that despite being pretty opaque and longwinded,* we don’t actually want Gardy fired.

* Seriously, we’re already more than 1100 words in … how many are still reading?

So … given the polarizing title, I figure all they have to do is hear about it and discover “the internet” on a day when we post something a little bit insulting about Gardy or someone else with the team. It happens from time to time. I’m pretty sure they don’t know what the internet is yet, so for now I’m safe. But someone could bring a laptop in there at any time, and if Gardy happens to walk by when someone happens to be enjoying some bloggingest-blog craziness, I can see him getting a little bit pissed about it. Enough to complain to his higher-ups? Maybe.

I mean, Jazayerli is a Chicago-based blogger who is a foolishly optimistic fan of a non-Chicago AL Central team. If there is a better way to describe me, I don’t want to hear it (mainly because I’m sure it’d be pretty insulting … actually that could be entertaining, so maybe I do want to hear it). But at the end of the day, two things remain true: Gardy will never read a blog, and the Twins aren’t close to as pathetic an organization as the Royals. So I probably don’t have to worry about getting banned.

And we’ll finish today’s useless thoughts with a little medical news of the Twins’ own … apparently the Twins have decided to downplay Slowey’s wrist injury in exactly the same way that the Royals have downplayed all the injuries to their players this year:

Kevin Slowey’s right wrist injury is no more serious than the Twins originally diagnosed, General Manager Bill Smith said today, relaying the update after Slowey visited a Baltimore specialist.

Normally, I’d say that’s great news. But I just spent a bunch of time writing about how this doesn’t work out … and at the moment this is the single last thing I wanted to hear. Well, hopefully they’re right and Slowey will return to being one of our top starters when he’s eligible to return from the DL.

And now it’s back to wishing the Twins were playing today. I really hate offdays.

No comments