And the Winner Is...

...Frightwig, of Sundappled Wood!

TBL's Note: The excellence of the following is not in any way diminished by the fact that it was the only entry. What, are you all out of town already? Lucky sods...

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Frightwig wrote:

I don't think there are just one or two problems that could be easily addressed with a team that is carrying poor-to-mediocre hitters at every position but Catcher. Joe Mauer is a sound hitter, and one of the best bats at Catcher in the majors, but even he has a flaw--which is that he hasn't developed much power at the plate, yet.

Otherwise...

* The 1st baseman's line has slid to .241/.310/.441. Dougie haters, say what you will, but he never stuck us with a .310 on-base pct. even in his down seasons. And when Doug was going good (2001, 2003), he was much better than Justin. I'm sad to say that, measuring by VORP (Value Over Replacement-level Player), Morneau ranks 16th amongst AL 1st basemen. The list of those above him includes some part-timers such as Eduardo Perez, Travis Lee, Tino Martinez, and Matt Stairs. I wouldn't have thought this possible before the season, but Justin Morneau is the least productive regular 1st baseman in the AL this year.

* At 2nd base, Nick Punto for some reason has hit much better (.282/.335/.420) than he has when playing anywhere else on the field (a sad, sad .185/.257/.215). Abernathy has been a decent fill-in when he's played there (.308/.378/.385 in 44 PA's). Far too many at-bats were wasted on Luis Rivas and Bret Boone, however, and it hurt to see Luis Rodriguez tail off badly after a promising start. Those latter three combined to hit .230/.281/.274 at 2B, turning the position into an absolute sinkhole most of the season.

* At SS, Bartlett provided Guzman-level offense for the first 5 weeks. Then the manager pulled the plug on him and replaced him with a veteran utilityman whom we knew most certainly would be much worse at the plate. No surprise: Castro has hit .257/.276/.383 as the SS. Punto and Rivas have been auto-outs at the position, as well. The team's most promising option spent half the season raking AAA pitching. Ron Gardenhire made that choice.

* At 3rd base, Michael Cuddyer has hit pretty well since the start of May, and Glenn Williams had a hot couple weeks. However, Cuddles did have an atrocious April, and Gardenhire again wasted a lot of at-bats at the position this summer on utilitymen who blotted out the sun whenever they came to bat. Terry Tiffee, .200/.211/.236 in 56 PA's at 3B, has been a terrible disappointment, too.

* In LF, Shannon Stewart is having the worst season of his career, batting .283/.333/.403 when playing the position. A poor obp for a leadoff man, and a lousy slg pct. for a corner OF. By VORP, the only everyday LF in the American League who rates lower than Stewart is Scott Podsednik--and Pods has 108 fewer plate appearances. Nobody in the local media talks about this, but Stewart has been a huge drag on the team this season.

* In CF, Torii Hunter had one good month, when he hit .330/.410/.681 in June. The other three months, he hit .249/.315/.377. Then he broke his ankle. Most of the time, the most expensive player in the lineup this year was making outs and generating no power. Playing in his place, Lew Ford in about 160 PA's has hit .255/.323/.403 at CF. For all the talk about how "Lew needs to play the field to keep him focused at the plate," his .246/.316/.369 line when he plays the outfield this season really fails to back up the theory.

* In RF, the lineup has Jacque Jones hitting .255/.338/.454 at the position. By VORP, he rates 10th amongst Rightfielders in the AL. He still struggles to hit lefties consistently (.213/.265/.385), which handicaps the lineup since Gardenhire has given him 131 plate appearances against LHP this year. This season he's also lumped most of his best production in two months, April and July, while disappearing for much of the rest of the season, the charms of the Tony Gwynn Fairy notwithstanding. He would be very good in a platoon, but as an everyday regular his overall production is just mediocre for the position.

* At DH, LeCroy is hitting .255/.339/.490 in about 177 PA's; Ford is hitting .265/.339/.400 in 190 PA's. Matty is a nice weapon against lefty pitching (an eye-popping .319/.427/.648 vs. LHP) but struggles with righthanders. Ford is hitting .280/.355/.420 vs. righthanders, but is struggling badly with lefty pitching and leaves the lineup short of much power when he's the DH. When other players have been given a day to rest as the DH, it's generally been a disaster. Batters at DH besides Ford & LeCroy have hit .237/.310/.313. Ouch.

A team could get along OK with a few of these noodle bats in the lineup, but a decent offense generally needs a few average bats, a couple more who aren't All-Stars but still very good, and at least one or two Stars who can carry the show. The 2005 Twins don't have any real Stars in the lineup, not a single hitter who remotely resembles an MVP candidate, and there aren't even many average hitters on this team, either. Combine that with the manager's preference for no-stick utility players, and his refusal to platoon Jones, and there you have it. An offensive disaster.

Terry Ryan has his work cut out for him this winter.

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TBL Comments:

I love the position-by-position analysis. I'd like to take a moment to consider just what Terry Ryan needs to do this winter so that we're not looking at the same problems again next year.

1. It's about time this team made a commitment to Jason Bartlett.
The kid's young--only 25--and certainly not stable offensively, but he's got a metric ****load of talent and needs the time and space to develop against major league pitching. The rest of this season will do for a start. But yanking him between Minnesota's starting nine, Minnesota's bench and Rochester didn't do him (or us) any favors this year.

2. Fix Justin Morneau.
I don't know what's wrong with him this season (though I have my suspicions--see item #3), but he's certainly not living up to his potential. I still believe he can become a .280-ish hitter with awesome power, but whatever he needs to get out of this rut, he's obviously not getting it. Time for better baseball minds than mine to bend their frontal lobes to the problem

3. Get a hitting coach.
I'm sure Scotty Ullger is a perfectly nice man, and he makes a swell substitute manager when Gardy gets his weekly ejection from the game, but he's not getting the best out of even a small percentage of the Twins hitters, and we need to get the best out of at least half of them to compete. I remain unnerved by the sheer quantities of players who have trooped through this roster after doing unnatural things to AAA pitching only to fall abruptly and permanently flat on their faces upon reaching the major leagues. Of course a certain percentage of AAA players will never make a successful transition to the bigs, but did we sign all of them?

4. Free Matthew LeCroy.
He needs playing time to get into his ball-flattening groove, and history has shown us that he just won't find it here. We could use that roster spot and he could use a team that could use him frequently.

5. Solve the second-base problem.
Inside or outside the organization, we need a second baseman. It could be Punto. It could be Rodriguez. It could be an offseason acquisition. But the infield chaos that pushed our defense to the brink of collapse in the first half still threatens. Presumably Cuddyer is back in the role of anointed third baseman, and if Bartlett is given the starting shortstop role for real this time, that only leaves us with one question mark--right in the middle of every double play. (While this isn't strictly a suggestion to improve the offense, one could argue that instability in the field takes players' minds off their duties in the other half of the inning.)

6. Acquisitions.
I'm a big advocate of promotion from within, but I think we've pretty much picked our AAA organization clean of ML-ready hitters, with notable lack of success. The right guy (who by virtue of playing for another team hasn't been listening to certain people's advice for the last few years) could breathe life into the offense, and maybe teach our homegrown boys a thing or two.

That's all for now. Silva pitches tonight, and that's always a good time! Be sure to tune in.

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Dome-Day Challenge, Part 2

Tacking on one more day, in hopes of getting a response from someone who will actually be in town this weekend. Otherwise, TBL will be keeping the tickets for herself. So there.

What's wrong with the Twins offense, by Tuesday noon. Start typing!

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TBL's Dome-Day Challenge 2005

Your attention, please.

TBL has in her grubby little paws two lower reserved tickets to the Sunday, September 4th game versus Cleveland. These tickets will be sent to whoever writes the most thought-provoking answer (whether TBL agrees with it or not) to the following question:

What has pushed the Twins offense from its usual fair-to-middling level headlong into outright pathetic failure? Or, conversely, are things really not as bad as they seem on the hitting side?

Email me your answer. All entries will be posted for the edification of the public!* Bloggers and non-bloggers alike are eligible. Heck, everyone is eligible. Can your cat type? Anyway, get going--you have until Monday noon.

(If you can't make that game or don't want the tickets, enter anyway! Just mention you don't want/can't use the tickets in your email. If you win, the tickets will move on to the next honorable mention, but you'll still get your digital laurels to rest upon.)

A few stats to get you started:

Year	Avg	OPS	Runs	HR	AL Rank: Avg	AL Rank: Runs
2005	.260	.723	556	113	11th	13th
2004	.266	.763	780	191	10th	10th
2003	.277	.772	801	155	3rd	6th
2002	.272	.769	768	167	5th	9th
2001	.272	.770	771	164	4th	8th

partial season

The Twins have now played 78.4 percent of their season, for those of you who may want to do the higher math.

* TBL reserves the right to edit typos, because she's picky that way. Content will not be altered!

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One

I'm trying to find the words to describe last night's game.

It didn't start off like a pitcher's duel. The first batter squibbed a single against Santana and then stole second. Oh, dear.

But this was Santana, not Pre-All-Star-Break-Radke or Mays-Come-Lately. Johan said, "I spit upon your runners in scoring position", and he sat the next three batters down. And then the duel began in earnest.

Freddy Garcia gave up a walk in the bottom of the first, but nothing came of it. There was a double in the third by the same Whine Sock who got that single, and it elicited pretty much the same reaction from Santana. In the fourth, it was Santana who gave up the walk, and then came a long, long fly ball to left, and the only way to haul it in was for Shannon Stewart to make like a paintball against the outfield wall. Splat he did, and out of the game he went with a strained or dislocated shoulder, but the out was recorded and the duel continued.

And then...

...nothing happened.

One-two-three they went down in the bottom of the fourth, the top of the fifth, the bottom of the fifth, the top of the sixth. People were starting to whisper "no-hitter" in the seats. The Twins had two walks, it's true, but their line read 0-0-0. Two pitchers were pitching shutouts and one--the wrong one--had yet to surrender so much as a single.

Cuddyer led off the bottom of the sixth with a roller down the line that shot under the third baseman's glove. He cruised into second base, the crowd went wild, and the jumbotron flashed the official ruling on the play.

E5. An error. A #&%$ing error on the #&%$ing third baseman and are you blind, Mr. Official Scorer? Well, on second thought, it wasn't exactly a screamer, was it? I mean, his glove was right there, just not down far enough.

Sigh.

But oh, look, we've got a runner on second, and Abernathy's hit a grounder to the right side and he's out easy as you please but Cuddyer's at third with one out! But then Michael Ryan, who hasn't had a hit since the Clinton administration and is currently filling in for Our Hero Stewart, hits one right at the third baseman and Cuddy has to hold up and there are two outs. But Punto is up, and Punto has been hitting like nobody's business and he'll bring Cuddy home, won't he?

Actually, no, he won't. He'll launch a heart-stopper deep into right field and Jermaine Dye will run backward and leap and crash into the wall (a lot like Stewart but without the injury) and catch the damn ball, dammit all to hell.

And on we go to the seventh, which looks a whole lot like the middle innings with six guys up and down in about five minutes flat. Still the Twins line reads 0-0-0, and I'm starting to squirm a little in my hard blue plastic seat. Okay, I'm starting to squirm a lot, and I start praying to the Baseball Gods (for They are ineffable, but certainly wise and good). I tell Them, Yes, I do want to see a no-hitter in my lifetime, and I really want to see one live and in person, but not this no-hitter. Just let us get a hit! One measly hit! Please?

Santana teased them with a two-out single in the top of the eighth, then snatched the third out from the jaws of his first pitch to Ozuna. Out comes Freddy Garcia for the 8th, still pitching a no-hit shutout. I'm starting to think maybe the Baseball Gods (for They are flaky, but fair) are with Garcia tonight.

But wait, what's this?



One hit. One long and lovely hit over the centerfield baggie. The Twins would go down 1-2-3 afterward, and it didn't matter.

The Dome erupted in a cacophony the likes of which it hadn't seen since the first home playoff game in 2002, after all those long years of draught. The teflon trembled, the seats shook, and the crowd crowed. It was wild and glorious and it was magic.

We surged to our feet as Crazy Joe Nathan took the mound in the ninth. Every pitch was greeted with a swell of sound, yelps of joy or groans of anguish, depending on the umpire's ruling. When the second batter walked, I thought the boos would blow the umpire right out of the building. When Nathan struck out the dangerous Paul Konerko for the second out, I feared for the structural integrity of the Dome. And when Aaron Rowand worked the count to 2-2 (I was jumping up and down like a demented bunny from barely-restrained tension) and then struck out with a mighty swing, I swear they must have heard it in Wisconsin. Or at least St. Paul.

Twins win on one hit, one run, and one unforgettable night.

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Guerrier Revisited

Okay, so I'm probably the one who jinxed Guerrier before his last outing. Never put a pitcher on in the tenth immediately after a blogger urges the masses to stop being so down on the guy...

That aside, those six runs were the first he's given up since the break, ending a streak of 18 1/3 scoreless innings over 11 games. It's also by far the most runs he's given up in an outing. He gave up three runs twice, once in April and once in July. He's given up two runs twice, in June and in July. He's given up one run four times.

In other words, he's yielded 20 earned runs all season, in the course of nine appearances totalling 12 2/3 innings. On the flip side, he's dealt 38 1/3 scoreless innings in 24 appearances.

Thirty-three games, and he's given up three or more runs thrice, two or more only five times. When he trots to the mound, your chances are almost 3 to 1 against any runs scoring against him. And as for inherited runners, he's logged a Rincón-like 70% stranded (30% scored).

Not bad for a rookie, eh? I think we can forgive him for Saturday.

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Consider, If You Will...

Theoretically, a single half-inning could last forever.

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Swingin'

Offensive Woes

The Twins have a .239 team average since the All-Star break.

That's 14th (aka "dead last") in the AL. They're also 14th in home runs, slugging, and OBP. They're 12th in total runs scored. They're first in strikeouts, but unfortunately that's not in reference to the pitching staff.

They have a 16-19 (.457) record since the break and have lost six of their ten completed series. One of those series losses was a sweep.


Offensive Wows

The Twins have won 10 of their 17 games in August and 6 of their last 7. They are currently on a 5-game winning streak with wins against Oakland and Seattle bookending a 3-game sweep of the [censored] Whine Sox.

During the current streak, the Twins have posted 58 hits, 27 runs, 6 home runs (half by Matthew LeCroy), 5 other extra-base hits, and 8 stolen bases (half by Nick Punto). They have won three of their five completed series this month.

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This is what we've been waiting for since, oh, May-ish. And it is indeed a thing of beauty.

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