* Is anyone else glad that Redmond insisted on calling for Nathan’s breaking balls on a full count to two consecutive hitters? Because the radio guys said it looked like Nathan really didn’t want to throw those, and wanted to go with his fastball. He spun up a couple of hangers, and there you go. Can someone tell me why Mike Redmond is still on our team? And can someone also tell me why catchers seem to get worse at calling a game as they get older? Posada has gotten worse at calling games, Pudge Rodriguez has got worse at calling games, even Varitek has gotten worse at it. And I don’t remember Redmond actively doing shit he knows the pitcher doesn’t have confidence in before this season. This asshole has got to go.

Anyway, there’s been a lot of talk lately about Nathan, in the context of the old “is Joe Nathan okay?” conversation that we have every season around this time. Actually we usually have it a little bit earlier in the season, I think … but I contend that this phase of his season is based on innings pitched or appearances or something, not the calendar, and since we haven’t had as many leads this year as we normally do, we haven’t used Nathan as much. Usually the conversation bounces between the extremes of “we’re paying this old man too much money and he sucks!” and “he must be injured, he needs rest” and “he’s fine, just keep rolling him out there.” It’s easy to go to extremes when you’re talking about a closer: all his moments are in high leverage situations, and if he has a bad day, you lose, simple as that. So if he stuggles for a little bit, the team has a lot of trouble winning games.

But have we seen this before from Nathan? (Obviously, I had to pick where his struggles started and ended. Some years it’s more pronounced than others, and I had to just pick the best dates I could. You can disagree about the specifics, I suppose, but I think this ought to give you a general idea.) Let’s take a look at the numbers.

2004 opening phase, 4/15-8/18: 49 G, 51 IP, 0.35 ERA, 2 ER, 62 K, 15 BB, opponents: .160/.234/.211
2004 struggle, 8/19-8/24: 3 G, 2.1 IP, 23.14 ERA, 6 ER, 3 K, 2 BB, opponents: .600/.647/.867
2004 finish, 8/25-10/2: 17 G, 15.1 IP, 1.17 ERA, 2 ER, 20 K, 3 BB, opponents: .115/.164/.135

2005 opening phase, 4/5-8/30: 57 G, 58.1 IP, 2.31 ERA, 15 ER, 74 K, 21 BB, opponents: .177/.251/.263
2005 struggle, 9/3-9/6: 3 G, 3 IP, 6 ER, 18.00 ERA, 5 K, 0 BB, opponents: .462/.429/1.000
2005 finish, 9/7-10/2: 9 G, 8.2 IP, 0 ER, 0.00 ERA, 15 K, 1 BB, opponents: .103/.133/.138

2006 opening phase, 4/6-8/13: 46 G, 50 IP, 1.44 ERA, 8 ER, 71 K, 9 BB, opponents: .173/.216/.263
2006 struggle, 8/15-9/11: 9 G, 9.1 IP, 3.86 ERA, 4 ER, 11 K, 4 BB, opponents: .129/.222/.226
2006 finish, 9/12-10/1: 9 G, 9 IP, 0.00 ERA, 0 ER, 13 K, 3 BB, opponents: .100/.182/.133

2007 opening phase, 4/2-9/1: 56 G, 58.1 IP, 1.70 ERA, 11 ER, 60 K, 11 BB, opponents: .210/.250/.286
2007 struggle, 9/4-9/17: 6 G, 7 IP, 5.14 ERA, 4 ER, 7 K, 1 BB, opponents: .231/.259/.577
2007 finish, 9/18-9/30: 6 G, 6.1 IP, 0.00 ERA, 0 ER, 10 K, 7 BB, opponents: .182/.379/.227

2008 opening phase, 3/31-8/21: 55 G, 55 IP, 0.98 ERA, 6 ER, 61 K, 13 BB, opponents: .185/.239/.277
2008 struggle, 8/25-9/16: 7 G, 6.1 IP, 5.68 ERA, 4 ER, 6 K, 4 BB, opponents: .240/.367/.480
2008 finish, 9/18-9/30: 6 G, 6.1 IP, 0.00 ERA, 0 ER, 7 K, 1 BB, opponents: .050/.095/.050

2009 opening phase, 4/8-8/19: 49 G, 46.2 IP, 1.54 ERA, 8 ER, 61 K, 11 BB, opponents: .160/.217/.245
2009 struggle, 8/21-?: 6 G, 6.2 IP, 8.10 ERA, 6 ER, 9 K, 6 BB, opponents: .300/.417/.700

So my personal feeling about Nathan’s struggles is mostly correct: that he does, in fact, struggle every year, and it always happens at roughly the same time. He always gets through about 46-58 innings before he enters a sort of a dead-arm period and becomes hittable — in some cases quite a bit worse than hittable: he can put up some pretty ugly numbers during the struggle period.

Be the struggle period usually doesn’t last very long. In his first couple yars, it lasted just 3 games; his longest struggle was in 2006, which also happened to be his least struggly struggle period (his opponents OPS stayed below .500). In the other years, it lasted between 6 and 7 innings.

One thing that stands out for me is that his 2009 struggle period showed up in the smallest amount of innings in his career, though not (quite) the smallest amount of appearances. In severity, it’s middle of the road; his 8.10 ERA is 3rd out of 6, and his 1.117 OPS is also 3rd of 6. And we’re getting close to the end of it. It’s likely that it’s over now, and at most we can anticipate 3 more games during his struggle. While the Twins are at a point of the season where they can’t afford a struggling Nathan for three more games, it’s not really Nathan’s fault that he reached this level of usage this late in the season. He either should have gotten more save opportunities (blame the offense, or the starting pitching, or the bullpen), or should have gotten more non-save appearances (blame Gardy’s “old” fashioned closed-mindedness).

And the reason not to fear using him more often, given his dead-arm period? Look at his post-struggle numbers. In 45.2 IP, he’s given up 2 ER, for an absurdly awesome 0.39 ERA. Once his struggles end, Nathan dominates through the end of the season.

While it obviously hurts when we lose because of Nathan, I don’t think there’s anything to worry about. We’ve seen this before from him, and he’s always gotten out of it. We just have to hope he gets out of it soon and that the rest of the team can give him enough opportunities that his late-season dominance makes a difference.

The loss yesterday hurts, but remember we still have SEVEN games left against Detroit. 3 at home, 4 at Comerica.  It doesn’t really bother me that we have to play in Detroit.  From what I recall we don’t play unusually terrible there compared with say Cleveland or Chicago.  You won’t see Gardy bitching about a stadium we travel to 10 times a year and blaming said stadium on all of our failures.  Cough (Ozzie) Cough.  Excuse me.  We just need to keep winning, and getting quality starts from the back end of the rotation the rest of the season.  If Baker-Pavano-Blackburn-Manship-Duensing can pitch like they did the most recent time though the rotation for the entire month we will be in good shape.  Joe Nathan is going to spectacularly blow saves too often down the stretch. He is just too good. I’m going to chalk yesterday up to a bad day.  Nothing more.

The Tigers play the Indians at home this afternoon.  I for one will be following on gamecast and cheering on the Tribe.

We’ve now lost seven of our last nine games, and are sliding pretty rapidly out of contention. The team is kind of up and down right now; winning big, losing big, losing close — but never winning close. This weekend really demonstrated the team’s penchant for that — and it does make it feel like we’re closer to being good than we probably are. It’s getting really easy to look back at all these close games and pick out ones that we really should have won, that were just out of reach, that slipped from our grasp at the last moment.

Of course, it doesn’t really work that way. You can only hope that we regress back to the mean in the near future — but it’s worth pointing out that the only accepted way to reliably outperform .500 in close games is to have a good, well managed bullpen with talented arms. I don’t think I have to point out that the Twins don’t have one of those; in fact, they don’t have any part of that. It’s a bad bullpen, with little talent, and it’s managed poorly.* I don’t think we’ll be winning more than our share of close games in the coming weeks.

* I think it’s worth pointing out that this doesn’t matter. Gardy could be The Official Genius Of Bullpen Management Of All Time, and the pen would still suck — there’s no amount of “putting guys in at the right time” that can paper over the fact that none of them can get through a scoreless inning.

As you can probably tell, I’m not feeling very optimistic right now about the Twins’ chances. But at least the early returns on the Pavano acquisition have been promising, and there’s always the chance Smith stays active on the waiver wire like he said he would. Realistically, though, it’s probably time to start taking what enjoyment you can from the games without hoping too much for a win, or being broken too much by a loss.

That it’s happened in early-mid August is somewhat disappointing, but that’s later than many teams.

But since this is an offday, which I still hate, let’s get some craziness in here. It’s time to start cheering up, folks.

• For those of you who like a little schadenfreude — I personally don’t get off on it, but I know a lot of people love it — it must feel good to see the Red Sox get swept by the Yankees and drop to 6.5 games back … and into a tie with the Rangers for the wild card. If Boston fails to make the playoffs this year, I wouldn’t be too surprised to see them go on a Yankee-esque spree over the offseason … except without a free agent class as top heavy in talent.
• I’m not a big rumors guy, but this talk of Alex Rios going to the White Sox on waivers frightens me. The mass media thinks it’s a great move for the Blue Jays to shed that salary — oh noes, he’s signed for the next 5 years! — because Rios isn’t currently living up to the hype he created by being fairly awesome at a young age. I think it’s kind of funny about Rios — nobody really knew who he was while he was building up a case as a pretty damn good player, all of a sudden people noticed and he got a big contract and they started paying attention, and he’s struggled a little bit to make the leap. So, given that he stumbled just while people were doing what they could to overrate him, the pendulum has now apparently swung back in full force. When Ken Rosenthal says the Blue Jays would simply be better off getting rid of his salary for nothing, that means he’s “rated” pretty low. On the other hand, Rosenthal is kind of a nut, and he tries to create news, and he seems to have something against the Jays right now,* and Rios’s contract is actually a bargain. I really hope the White Sox don’t get their greedy little mitts on Rios — that’d be a much more significant acquisition than Peavy, and would make their outfield (and lineup) pretty ridiculous. Can Bill Smith block this somehow? Do I have to go to Comiskey and start cutting phone lines or something?

* Remember all that “Halladay will be traded, I guaran-god-damn-tee it, because the Blue Jays suck now and will suck next year and will always suck so they don’t deserve Halladay as much as real teams like the Yankees and Red Sox” nonsense? Well, Halladay didn’t get traded. And Rosenthal still hasn’t backed down on his bullshit. Or apologized to Jerod Morris for screaming at him for reporting things as if they’re true when you pretty much just made them up on your own. Just saying.

• I saw this morning an article about the interesting possibility of the collective bargaining agreement changing (soon?) to add a slotting system to the draft. I think Calcaterra’s take is better than the original article, so if you’re going to read only one then go for Calcaterra’s (as usual). It’s a good point that players who are drafted aren’t even eligible to be in the union — and most minor leaguers don’t get to apply to be in the union either. You have to wait until you’re on a 40 man roster. (I suppose that might be one reason the Twins talk about “rewarding” players by putting them on the 40-man, even though that sometimes leads to us losing a promising prospect in the Rule 5 draft.) I’m totally in favor of a slotting system in the draft, and it’d neuter the new strategy of the wealthy and successful teams to keep their farm system stocked — paying way over slot for guys who slipped past where they should have gone due to “signability concerns.” Take that out, and the draft’s ostensible goal — crappy teams get better picks so maybe they’ll get less crappy — is a little bit closer to reality. It may actually be possible that this changes in the next few years, and I’d be pretty happy about it.
• Interesting article today over at The Hardball Times about the monster seasons being put together by Justin Morneau and Prince Fielder. It concludes with a bit of a fantasy slant, but the analysis of Morneau is pretty good: > While he had a great 2006, Morneau did not deserve the MVP that year. However, this season, he could top 130 RBIs and 39 home runs based on his ZiPS projections, which would actually beat his 2006 numbers. His wOBA is over .400 for the first time in his career, though it is still not at an elite level. This has a lot to do with his low OBP and walk rate. His walk rate has increased to 12.2 percent this year, but it is still far from great. His career OBP stands at .353, which trails Fielder’s career mark of .379. >Morneau’s limitations in getting on base have dragged his runs totals down. Even in his 34 homer season in 2006, he only scored 97 runs, and he has never topped 100. He isn’t a horrible run scorer, but in comparison to other first base options he could be better. It is worth noting that Morneau has a shot at his first 100 run season this year, but again, he could be scoring a lot more runs if his walk rate were better.

I’ve complained about Morneau’s awful plate discipline in the past, and pointed out that I’m impressed that he’s able to hit with such power and draw as many walks as he does while seeming to have intermittent (at best) ability to recognize a breaking ball and a penchant for chasing unhittable pitches low and away. Given that it’s literally the only thing keeping him from being one of the elite players in the game. (I mean moreso.)

Oh. And there’s one last thing. If you’ve gotten this far, you might want to do a little more reading. So I’ll send you over to Posnanski, where he’ll talk in his typically longwinded and brilliant style about what it means to “quit,” especially when you’re talking about a team sport. You know how people always say stuff like “oh, the team just quit,” or “yeah they lost, but at least they didn’t quit,” et cetera? Well, that’s what he’s talking about. And I think he hits it right on the nose.

Quitting in sports isn’t about QUITTING. No, I think it’s about something else. While I don’t think that players ever stop TRYING to do well, I do think that in a bad environment players will stop believing that any of it matters very much. And I think that comes closest to what we’re talking about here. This might not be the best comparison — and you might not even relate to this — but for me there was always a very different feeling when we played baseball games around the neighborhood than we we played official Little League games. Sure, we TRIED in the neighborhood games. I would suggest we tried just as hard as we ever did in the real games. But we weren’t wearing uniforms, and we didn’t have coaches, and we we didn’t have dirt infields, and there were no repercussions for messing up other than your friends busting your chops. There was this sense that the Little League games MATTERED in a way that the neighborhood games did not. You played with a certain attention and inspiration that was missing in the neighborhood games.

Although I will say that I always felt the extra attention and inspiration in the neighborhood games much more than in the official games. Maybe they shouldn’t have forced us to wear those stupid looking uniforms.

And after reading Posnanski’s post, would you say the Twins have quit? I wouldn’t.

That is all. Hopefully it tided you over a little bit while you contemplate why the Twins seem to have so many offdays lately.

Despite missing the first month of the season and slumping for the most recent one, Mauer has produced this year like a transcendent superstar — he’s put together 43.4 Runs Above Replacement so far this year, which is amazing at this point of the year even without considering the time missed. Everyone knows this — everyone also knows that Morneau has done pretty well, at 35.6 RAR he’s also a pretty big star.

Aside from the two superstars, we also have Kubel and Crede over 20 RAR, at 21.9 and 21.1, respectively, along with a couple more solid players in Span and Cuddyer at 18.9 and 12.5 RAR on the year so far. So how can a team with 2 superstars, 2 good regulars, and 2 more solid regulars end up with a bad offense? Well, before I answer that, guess who the 7th best offensive regular has been thus far.

Seriously, guess.

I didn’t think you’d get it — it’s Jose Morales. That’s right, in extremely limited time in the majors, during which Gardy kept him on the bench as much as possible, Morales produced 7.0 RAR. I’m not advocating for that much more playing time for Morales, after all I’d like Mauer to get as much time at catcher as possible. And he’s proven extremely durable so far this year, and Redmond hasn’t been an unmitigated disaster as a backup — I mean, he sucks, and at $1M per year we’d expect him to produce about 0.2 WAR. He’s at 0.1 so far, so he’s right on pace to be exactly what we’re paying him for.

The problem is not Morales or Redmond. The problem is that the rest of the team has been unable to produce more in the entire season (so far) than Morales produced in a month and a half of extremely (and unacceptably) limited playing time. After a good week, Gomez has jumped up to 4.0 RAR (0.4 WAR), making him the last guy on the roster that isn’t replacement-level or worse. (And knowing Gomez, he’ll be right back down at 0.1 by Monday.)

Redmond, Punto, Harris, and Buscher are all completely replaceable at 1.0 RAR. The real problem, of course, is the guys coming in below them: Tolbert at -9.3, Young at -13.3, and Casilla at -13.7 RAR, all in very limited playing time, have been hemorrhaging wins from this team. If none of them had played at all this season, and instead we’d had easily found AAA-caliber players at their positions, we’d be more than 3 wins better right now, and would be in first place. So the next time you wonder about what it’d be like to be leading the division, don’t blame Mauer and Morneau for not being better, and don’t blame Bill Smith for failing to acquire a top player at one of our positions of need, and don’t blame the pitching (too much) — just blame the fact that Tolbert, Casilla, and Young are fucking terrible at baseball and have sucked as much as anyone in the league.

Oh, another useless thing. Apparently David Ortiz tested positive for steroids in 2003. The famous list of 104 strikes again — boy is it a good thing that thing wasn’t destroyed like it should have been, right? Of course, it was pretty obvious that DOrtiz had done steroids as soon as he went to the Red Sox — in 2003. He went from a 120 OPS+ to a 144 OPS+ right then (which is a big jump), from 1.3 WAR straight to 3.4 WAR. From a merely good hitter to one of the best in the league. Subjectively, he went from a regular-sized guy who wasn’t good enough at hitting to stick as a DH and wasn’t good enough at fielding to stick as a 1B to a big fat slugger pounding homers at a prodigious rate. Pictures of him before 2003 are tough to find, but the last time I looked he’d put on a whole lot of weight as soon as he put on a Red Sox uniform.

That’s all fine. But can we be sure he started in 2003 once he got to the Red Sox, and never did anything when he was with the Twins? I don’t think so. He was starting to get bigger in his last season with the Twins, he did hit 20 HR, and his OPS+ in previous seasons? 101 and 106, before his 120 in 2002. He very well may have noticed that the Twins weren’t high on him, and that he was at risk of washing out of the league. You can’t be sure. But that’s not my problem. I’ve pretty much gotten over all this steroid bullshit.

My problem now is that these names keep getting leaked to the press, one or two at a time. The test was supposed to be anonymous, and the list was supposed to be destroyed years ago. It wasn’t, of course. And now some dickhead lawyers are keeping up a slow trickle of names. My take on that? I think every time the steroid conversation subsides a little bit, these guys leak the next biggest name on the list. It’s basically as sleazy as possible, and given how many more names are on that list, this is going to continue for a long time. My advice? Don’t get too worked up. It’s just not worth it any more.

Oh … one last thing. I’d hereby like to apologize to Garrett Jones. I know he’s having a great time for the Pirates right now, really hitting the crap out of the ball — but that’s all about to end. I picked him up for my fantasy team, and if there’s one thing I know about guys on my fantasy team, it’s that they immediately start sucking. Or get injured.

Alright everyone, hopefully this little bit of rambling tided you over a little bit during this brutal offday. I know it helped me. Tomorrow, we start a pretty big series against the Angels. Go Twins.

* 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.

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.”

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.

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.

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