Daily Archives: July 7, 2009

The Twins in a nutshell: average offense, average rotation, excellent defense and bullpen.

The offense is three-tiered, with the MVP-quality performances of Joe Mauer (.389/.465/.648) and Justin Morneau (.323/.399/.601, 21 homers, 69 RBIs) on top, the similarly alliterative Jason Kubel, Michael Cuddyer, Joe Crede, and, uhm, Denard Span at or above league average in the middle, and the punchless skill positions of shortstop, second base, and center field (currently occupied by Brendan Harris, Nick Punto, and Carlos Gomez, respectively) dragging things down from below.

The manner in which the Twins are punting offense at those three skill positions is a throwback to the days when teams couldn’t really expect to get much production from their middle infielders, which is to say, it’s outdated and inappropriate to competing in the DH league in 2009. The Twins are at least getting elite defense from Gomez in center and Punto at second base, but Harris is a complete dud on both sides of the ball, which underlines just how poorly Alexi Casilla (.180/.242/.225 and since demoted to the minors) and Matt Tolbert (.184/.275/.232 and benched) had to perform in order for Harris to make his way back into the lineup.

The presence of Harris in the lineup while Delmon Young rides pine behind Cuddyer, Kubel, Span, and Gomez underlines just how much the Matt Garza trade has blown up in the Twins’ faces. Young has now hit .285/.326/.392 in 204 games as a Twin and is well south of that overall mark this season. Meanwhile, Rays shortstop Jason Bartlett is headed to the All-Star Game on the strength of two and a half flukey months of hot hitting. Bartlett’s bat will come back to earth, but his glove will continue to outshine Harris’s. Meanwhile, Matt Garza helped the Rays reach the World Series last year as the ALCS MVP.

The Twins aren’t hurting for starting pitching. Their rotation of Scott Baker, Kevin Slowey, Nick Blackburn, Francisco Liriano, and Glen Perkins is comprised entirely of home grown pitchers 27-years-old or younger and includes two lefties (Liriano and Perkins). They have so much home-grown pitching that even their injury replacements come from the farm, as is the case with 23-year-old Anthony Swarzak, who will start for the injured Slowey on Thursday. Still, Garza was likely the best of their bunch given Liriano’s disappointing post-Tommy John performance, and while they tried to deal from that strength to correct a weakness, all they managed to do was create an additional weakness at shortstop. Young is just 23, leaving open the possibility of significant improvement, but he’s heading in the wrong direction for the Twins to hope for a way to salvage that trade.

The Johan Santana trade isn’t looking much better, though that comes as less of a surprise given the lack of bargaining power the Twins had and their rejection of superior offers from the Yankees and Red Sox. Like Young, Gomez is just 23, but he’s never shown any ability to hit in the majors. Most agreed that the Mets rushed him in 2007 due to injury-created need and that the Twins needed to give him more development time in the minors, but Gomez hasn’t spent a day in the minors since joining the organization. He might be the best defensive center fielder in baseball, but that doesn’t make up for his .250/.293/.353 line in 225 games as a Twin.

As for the three minor league right-handers included in that deal, Phil Humber was designated for assignment earlier this year, Kevin Mulvey has been solid but ordinary as a 24-year-old righty in Triple-A this year (4.17 ERA) and is trapped behind the aforementioned home grown starters, and Deolis Guerra has yet to impress in his third full-season in the Florida State League (though he is just 20).

The Yankees swept the Twins in a memorable four-game series in the Bronx in mid-May. The first three wins were all walkoffs, two of them coming in extra-innings. The difference in the entire series was five runs. Since then, the Twins have dropped two of the losing pitchers, letting the A’s claim lefty Craig Breslow off waivers and demoting Jesse Crain to Triple-A. You can bet the Twins remember that series all too well and will come out with some extra fire for this week’s three-game set in the Homer Dome.

Things kick off tonight with a battle of aces. Scott Baker doesn’t lead the twins in any major pitching category, but his 1.41 WHIP and 4.11 K/9 add up to make the 27-year-old righty their best starter despite his 4.99 ERA and .500 record. Indeed, Baker fell one inning short of his sixth-straight quality start in his last outing, but still held the Royals to one run over five inefficient frames. Over those last six starts, Baker is 4-0 with a 3.20 ERA, a 0.97 WHIP, and a 4.38 K/BB. Much to my surprise, Baker hasn’t faced the Yankees since 2006, when he beat them twice.

CC Sabathia takes the hill for the Yankees. CC’s coming off a disappointing outing in which he couldn’t locate his pitches yet still struck out eight Mariners in 5 2/3 innings. Two starts prior to that, he was pulled in the second inning due to tightness in his bicep. Otherwise, he lasted a minimum of seven innings in each of his other nine starts since May 8, going 6-1 with a 2.75 ERA in those outings and only passing 113 pitches once (tellingly in the one loss).

Francisco Cervelli catches CC yet again tonight. Brett Gardner roams center. Hideki Matsui hits fifth behind Alex Rodriguez with Nick Swisher batting sixth and Robinson Cano dropping to seventh ahead of Gardner and Cervelli.

Finally, this series marks the Yankees last trip to the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome barring an only moderately unlikely postseason matchup. Good ridance, I say. I’m happy to have the place confined to my 1987 World Series box set, bringing us one step closer to the end of Astroturf and indoor stadiums in baseball.

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While much of the country is glued to their computer screens and TV sets watching the Michael Jackson memorial in what already seems to be an endless mourning (cashing in) period, here is the irrespressible Charles Pierce on the return of Manny Ramirez:

I thought the hype ladled onto Manny’s return was excessive, even by ESPN’s elephantine standards for excess. (I mean, honestly, breaking into ESPNews for every minor league at-bat? What if there had been a sudden fantasy-baseball emergency somewhere?) That’s Bonds treatment. Or A-Rod. I always thought Manny Ramirez was a notch below them as a subject for hyperpituitary voyeurism. However, it was of a piece with Manny’s greatest gift as a professional athlete—his innate ability to make everything about baseball that is self-reverentially loathsome look ridiculous. In the great, hushed temple that baseball is perennially building for itself in its own mind, it’s Manny’s who provides the dribble glasses, the whoopee cushions, and the exploding cigars. It is his holy mission to take the living piss out of the self-important, the moralistic, and the people who cling to baseball in order to defend their inherent right to be 13 years old for the rest of their lives.

…At his best—not as a hitter but as a public person—Manny Ramirez always has been most valuable in his ability to be a walking (if an occasionally completely unwitting) satire on baseball’s pretensions, which sorely need to be mocked on a very regular basis. He worked to fashion himself into one of the most feared hitters in the game. By any reasonable standard, he has “respected his talent” a hell of a lot more than did, say, Mickey Mantle, who left too many of his best days on a barstool in Manhattan. Without ever being completely aware of it, he spoofed the whole notion of baseball “professionalism,” which should have been left a bleached pile of bones by the side of the road back in 1970, when Jim Bouton published Ball Four. He was more than a flake. Flakes—like Bill Lee or Moe Drabowsky—generally are aware that they’re flakes. They glory in it. Manny is something sui generis—as natural and instinctive an eccentric as he is a hitter.

When Deron Johnson died in 1992, the notion of baseball mortality really started to hit me. Oh, I had already been assaulted with the tragic mid-career losses of Roberto Clemente and Thurman Munson, but their deaths had occurred while I was still a child, when I still didn’t fully appreciate life and death. By the time that Johnson died, I was 27 years old and working fulltime. Here was a guy I remembered well from my earliest days watching baseball. Deron was strong, sizeable, and seemingly unconquerable.

A burly right-handed slugger who won the National League’s RBI title in 1965 with the Cincinnati Reds, Johnson died in the spring of ‘92 while still employed as the batting coach of the California Angels. Johnson, only 53, had been diagnosed with lung cancer the previous June. After the diagnosis, Johnson asked the Angels’ beat writers not to mention his illness in print. He continued to coach while carrying an oxygen task with him. For those player and coaches who knew him, such toughness was typical of Johnson. Even after he became too ill to coach, he continued to refuse hospitalization and treatment because he wanted to live out his remaining days at home. Once again, for those who knew him, such a decision typified a family man like Johnson.

Throughout his career, Johnson struck a gruff, intimidating pose. (Like Alex Karras in Blazing Saddles, he once punched a horse, which had kicked him.) In reality, Johnson was a soft touch, a likeable man who developed a close rapport with teammates, and later as a coach, with his hitting pupils. Johnson was so well liked, by both players and front office types, that the Philadelphia Phillies once dealt him to the Oakland A’s as a way of helping him earn a World Series ring. Phillies president Paul Owens received only minor league utilityman Jack Bastable, a non-prospect who would never make the majors, in return from the A’s. Owens could have held out for more, but he wanted to send Johnson to Oakland, where he would have a better chance to play in his first World Series.

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PBS has been airing re-runs of the great Jacques Pepin and Julia Child show, Jacques and Julia. Last night, Em and I watched their beef episode. Emily watched in horror while I was greatly amused–both at Jacques and Julia as well as Emily’s reaction.

It’s incredible how much filming food has changed in recent times (it looks so much better now). Anyhow, you can’t ask for more than these two, who genuinely liked each other. They just got together, drank wine, and cooked. They let the editors piece it together into a show. Some poor writer had to watch each episode and piece together the recipes because J & J made them up on the spot.

In his seminal essay Comedy’s Greatest Era, written for Life magazine, the critic James Agee wrote of Buster Keaton:

Very early in his movie career friends asked him why he never smiled on the screen. He didn’t he realzie he didn’t. He had got the dead-pan habit in variety; on the screen he had merely been so hard at work it had never occured to him there was anything to smile about. Now he tried it just once and never again. He was by his whole style and nature so much the most “silent” of the silent comedians that even a smile was as deafeningly out of key as a yell. In a way his pictures are like a transcendent juggling act in which it seems that the whole universe is in exquisite flying motion and the one point of repose is the juggler’s effortless, uninterested face.

Agee went on to describe Keaton as having a “mulish imperturbability under the wildest of circumstances.” Remind you of anyone we know? How about our man Rivera. In his latest column for SI.com, Joe Posnanski writes:

His career almost ended before it began, and he was almost traded (twice) before the Yankee pinstripes looked right on him. On the field, he has triumphed under the most intense glare in American sports. Off the field, he has been quiet to the sound of invisible. And all the while, he has looked calm, stunningly calm, the sort of superhuman calm that Hollywood gives its heroes.

Yes, if there is an expression that conveys the Yankee myth, it would be the countenance of Mariano Rivera in the ninth inning.

This picture was drawn by an illustrator named Larry Roibal who keeps the most fantastic blog of his drawings.

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