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Well the Twins lose 5-3 as the bullpen kind of implodes and the offense quiets down. Facing an all-star like Ervin Santana meant that the Twins hitters would have to be on their game, and one of them - Justin Morneau - certainly was. It also meant that the Twins pitchers would have to remain steady against a formidable Angels lineup, and one of them - Kevin Slowey - certainly was.

Unfortunately baseball is about more than one pitcher and one hitter, it is about Carlos Gomez playing like an amateur in center field. It is about the relief staff consistently falling behind hitters and giving pitches to hit. It is about Gardenhire making some questionable decisions (removing Slowey with one out and runners at second and third after 6.1, leaving Reyes in to pitch to Texiera who promptly ripped a double). But most of all it is about 162 games and needing to be one game better than the team in second place on October 1.

That is why baseball is the game of attrition and the Twins are now in the midst of a new war that they cannot shake free from.

Earlier this year we documented the almost absurd meanderings of the Twins record as it stayed right around .500 and never once reached more than three games over .500 or three games under .500. Well, now, they are in a battle with the White Sox to claim first place, and they cannot (either team) shake free of the other.

At the all-star break the Twins were 1.5 games behind the Sox. When the Sox came to town on July 28 the Twins were 2.5 games back.

Here is what the Twins game-back position has looked like since then.

1.5, 0.5, 1.5, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, +0.5, tied, 1.0, 1.0, 0.5, +0.5, 0.5, +0.5, 0.5, 0.5, tied, tied, tied, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 0.5, +0.5, +0.5, 0.5.

Through those 26 game the Twins and White Sox have never been separated by more than 1.5 games in either direction, and for the last 23 they have remained within 1 game.

So, today the Twins lose, and the Sox win with the help of another A.J. Pierzynski, Doug Eddings production, and the Twins will trot back out there tomorrow. It is an aggravating and internally churning way to live, but it is also the dream of every baseball fan. A true pennant race. A true chance.

This is our 100th post here at Twinscast and to celebrate we will keep it short and sweet with a simple declaration:

Pinch me, I think we can win this thing.

Actually a few more things, Bryant and I are eternal optimists but we did not believe that we would be talking about anything meaningful in August and September. I remember back at some point when the Twins were continually hovering around .500, I wrote a post called, ‘The Twins that time forgot’ kind of a cheesy concept of picking out historical Twins and writing about their last days with the Twins. I believed that the bit would be necessary for maintaining content on a website devoted to a team going nowhere.

But, that isn’t necessary anymore. We’ve got more content than we could deal with. Last night I was locked out of my house so I sat in my car, in my garage and listened to the game while bugs flew near my face. The Twins bullpen was amazing, the night was amazing, there were few places I would have rather been at the time.

The Twins are going somewhere now, damn if it isn’t a hell of a ride.

August 22, 2008

AL Central

Chicago White Sox    73-53      -

Minnesota Twins       73-54     .5

AL Wild Card

Boston Red Sox          73-54      -

Minnesota Twins        73-54      -

“If it’s Delmon Young you’re bitching about at this point in the season, you’re too baseball stupid to be taken seriously.”

- quote from Rubechat user ‘The DFC Work’ on August 19.

I think that is going to be my new phrase that I utter to the lot of moronic simpletons who always seem to emerge in late August when they realize that the regular season for football is still a month away and the Twins are in the division hunt.

You’re too baseball stupid to be taken seriously.

Go follow the Vikings. Go follow a god damn sport that only requires the attention span of one game once a week. Do that, have fun. Scream from your spleen and enjoy the type of game that requires three hours of simplistic understanding and can be emotionally gripped on a week-to-week basis. But, please, for the love of God, ignore the sport that has 162 games over the course of six months. Please, do me a favor.

And this goes for every person I know who rips into Delmon, and there are plenty of them.

There was the jackass at the Twins-Yankees series (the first series) who sat in the lower level next to the bullpen and just screamed, “You suck Delmon” whenever the crowd got quiet. He wore two earrings, had glasses on, called me a “fu– stick” and flicked me off when I yelled out, “Yeah Delmon, you pathetic 22-year-old Major League Baseball player, get a life!”

It goes for the copy editor I work with who bitched about Delmon’s error in Sunday’s 10-8 win, and his 0-4 performance in that game as well. Ignoring the fact that Young’s emergence has made him just as important as any hitter in this lineup over the last two months.

It goes for every idiot who’s head must ache from knee-jerk reactions to a 22-year-old right-fielder hitting .288 with 53 RBI and seven home runs.

In the past two months Young is hitting .306 with six home runs and 31 RBI. Justin Morneau, hitting in front of Delmon for most of those two months, has done what in that same stretch? .305, eight home runs, 43 RBI.

Does he swing at the first pitch too often, maybe. But, some hitters believe that the first pitch is often when the pitcher is trying to get a fastball over to get ahead in the count. Sometimes I wonder why Mauer always, always takes the first pitch, but hey, he’s a great hitter, so let him be. Right?

Of course, at 22, Mauer hit .294 with nine home runs and 55 RBI.

Wow those numbers look eerily similar to someone else that continues to draw the ire of every whitebred idiot in a baby blue Hrbek jersey at the Dome..

Oh and Morneau, when he was 22, spent 44 games with the Twins - his numbers? .226 avg., 4 HR, 16 RBI. Morneau didn’t have a full season until he was 24, and he hit .239 with 22 home runs and 79 RBI, he struck out 94 times to 44 walks.

But of course that is all happenstance, right? They were young, inexperienced players right? They made the defensive plays - they didn’t run like they have a turd in their pants? Is that it?

So Delmon makes some errors in left-field, a notoriously difficult position to play at the Metrodome. He doesn’t get to some balls and he has a lot of balls get past him, often leaving fans just shaking their heads - me included.

But I personally think that Delmon plays baseball hard and plays the game the right way. I think that his errors are mental but are not because of laziness, it’s just the breaks of a young man learning the game in his second season.

Could he be better? Sure, who couldn’t. But the fact that for some reason Delmon Young continues to get blamed for the problems of the Minnesota Twins offense or that people will continue to pinpoint his at-bats for reasons that the team lost, I just refuse to accept those notions.

He’s 22, there are ten players in all of baseball who are 22 or younger and have at least 100 at-bats this season. Young is leading all of them (including Evan Longoria, Billy Butler and Jay Bruce, and of course, Carlos Gomez) in batting average at .288. Only Gomez has more at-bats. His home run totals are off pace by a long shot but he is only behind Longoria (who has 60 fewer at-bats) in RBI’s.

He’s going to be a very, very good baseball player. There’s just no doubting that. He is in the kind of organization where players mature very effectively (see Morneau, Justin; Mauer, Joe; Kubel, Jason). He will learn and he will get better. But, to expect anything more at this point is just asinine.

Get some perspective, you idiots.

 (I think the guy on the right was fired already, am I wrong?)

I am not going to jump on some bandwagon bashing of Carlos Silvawho was absolutely terrible last night in his return to the Metrodome. I just want to consider everything that has happened to Silva since last September and what it all looked like at the time and how it looks now.

It is easy to mock and ridicule the Mariners signing of Silva, but lets consider a few things. His 2007 stats featured 202 innings and a 4.19 ERA, which is not terrible. Even if it is not good. The fact that the Mariners decided to sign him to such a ridiculous contract (4-years $48 million) was laughed at by Twins fans, but Silva was considered one of the best pitchers in the free agent market. Even if it was a very thin market.

Here are some quotes after Silva signed the four-year $48 million deal.

Silva: “It is wild. Everything is wild. Wild is having this life.”

Wild is having this life?

Silva sounds like Jeremy Piven after the first season of Entourage. I think that is the exact same statement uttered at the last Power-ball press conference. The amazing thing about that quote is it reeks of amazement. When you sign a career deal there is supposed to be a certain sense of entitlement, ‘I have worked hard for this…’ ‘this is the culmination…’ etc. There is none of that from Silva.

Bill Smith (on his offering Silav three-years, $18 million, as oppossed to the deal he signed): “I did have a conversation with his agent. It’s a tremendous thing for Carlos Silva.”

This quote is funny because of what is completely unstated, and that is Smith essentially saying, “Sweet Jesus Christ I can’t believe anyone would pay Carlos Silva $12 million dollars a year.”

After the trade it has become obvious that Silva made the 100 percent right choice in signing with Seattle. He is able to chew out his teammates in the locker room even though Silva himself has been awful. He can carry the guise of being a leader because of his contract, the lack of Erik Bedard, and the youth of King Felix, without actually being any kind of leader, or having any leadership ability. Silva chewing out his teammates for not trying hard enough is like George W. Bush calling out Donald Rumsfeld for mismanagement of the executive branch.

He has been godawful in every respect:

Silva in 2008: 4-14, 140 innings, 6.36 ERA, 59 K’s, 26 BB’s. There are any number of ways to break those statistics down into more amazing statistics but I think they can just sit there, and breathe.

From the Twins side of things there is very little to debate here. Silva was a pitcher in the Livan Hernandez mode. Occasionally he would throw a complete game one-run effort that would make you feel like he was revitalized, but he always reverted back to form. In fact Hernandez contract and season with the Twins should have the effect of making every Twins fan pleased (remember Hernandez recorded nine wins somehow) and every Mariners fan cringe. Pitchers like Silva are a dime a dozen, and certainly not worth $36 million over the next three years.

Still, you have to feel great for Carlos. He is a competitor, and always was. I still remember him chucking that ball into the upper deck after beating the Royals in a complete game. They called him the Big Chief and he believes in that. He believes that he has an important role in a major league clubhouse.

He didn’t earn the money he is making, but someone wanted to pay him $48,000,000 regardless of statistical data or common sense - and, if you’re Carlos Silva, there is nothing wrong with that.

Due to almost unsustainable popular demand we here at Twinscast have decided to let our fans in on some information about the composer of our new outro song ‘Twinscast: Doin’ me.’ His name is Seth Evans, that is him to the left, he is a 22-year-old student at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Seth is an aspiring musician that Bryant and I met in Nebraska a few years ago. He liked the podcast when he heard it and decided to write a song explaining that he couldn’t quite explain what exactly it was that Twinscast was doing to him.

We did not object. Part of our draw for even doing this podcast was to get our voices over the internet waves to see if any ladies would ovulate. That hasn’t happened yet, but this is pretty, pretty, pretty close.

The lyrics are below, if you want more of Seth let us know and we can try to get some more original material on the site.

 Twinscast: Doin’ me

Twinscast, now, whatcha doin’ to me?

Oh baby Twinscast, said all these things you doin’ to me.

Now baby Twinscast, now say what you doin’ to me?

All these things that you’re doing to me,

I don’t even know what they’re doing to me.

Said I don’t even know what these things that you’re doing to me, are doing to me, Twinscast.

I went to the Twins-Yankees game yesterday. Even though I didn’t want to in the morning.

Some days you just want to lie on a wood floor and forget about the sun outside and the fact that it is summer and all of your friends want to go out and embrace life. “Have you seen the women out there today?” One of those friends said to me yesterday. And I had, and I was intrigued, but sometimes that isn’t enough. Some days you just want to crawl back inside.

But as a baseball fan this selfishness doesn’t work. It is one thing to skirt your responsibilities to your personal relationships, but it is another to just abandon your team when they are making some kind of miracle run towards October. You can always pull your life back out of the gutter and redeem yourself and all those souls you’ve harmed, but you can’t watch a team no one believed in push and push back and push again, to the surprise of everyone.

Some people speak of baseball as being representative of life but I think it is more essential to life. Sports is the new religion in America, the breeding ground for the disconnected and the leery searching for something better out there.

I was blinded by baseball yesterday. I was completely numb to my life. And it was amazing.

People often talk about drug addicts as pathetic creatures, the way they slink through society, their eyes bleeding on the inside and their brain completely hapless. But I think of them differently, I think I understand that what the drug addict seeks is what we all are striving for, to feel so alive that your common receptors shut down and your brain takes over on a purely philosophical level. The stars or the wind or the leaves, these become amazing to the drug addict. The ant crawling over his face. There is no need to be concerned with the essentially trivial matters like money and dreams and The Future - embracing the moment and recognizing the universal oneness of yourself, that’s when life breathes.

So it was yesterday, maybe Adam Everett hit a homerun, but it took me around 30 minutes to realize what that actually meant. All that I noticed when it happened was how big the baseball became, the way the outfielder was lying on the ground - seeming to writhe in pain. I didn’t want to comprehend the game but just let it be. The fact that Everett and the Twins have walked such an odd journey over the past six months didn’t factor into my enjoyment or understanding of the moment. It was just Everett, isolated in time.

Maybe Glen Perkins became a father before the game but during the game that wasn’t what was important to me - what was important was being able to predict the speed of his fastball because it was always 91-miles-an-hour. I found amazing comfort in that, I didn’t even care what the score was. Didn’t even realize that Johnny Damon wasn’t playing.

I screamed, even if no one else did, and felt alive. Part of me wanted to say those usual phrases that make me enjoy the game of baseball and hate everyone I sit near, phrases like, ‘Get the f— out of your chairs you slimy, whitebred, honky-tonk, rich f—s.’ But I didn’t.

Maybe I would have if it was some other Monday and the world seemed right and in place - but it wasn’t, and neither are the Twins, nothing is Right in the World now, but the redefinition of existence in the Twin Cities is starting to grow on me.

The Texas Rangers, the Boston Red Sox and the Detroit Tigers are three teams built for offensive fireworks. They are three teams that have done everything they can to produce lineups that strike the fear into opposing pitchers. Those three teams lead the American League in runs scored: the Rangers at 651, the Sox at 576, and the Tigers at 569.

Then, coming in fourth in runs scored in the American League, is the Minnesota Twins with 567. Many fans and national pundits may wonder where those runs come from. The Twins have the second fewest home runs in the American League at 81, even if they lead the league in triples with 32, they are still ninth in extra-base hits overall.

The most dangerous aspect of the Minnesota Twins offense this season has been their ability to produce with runners in scoring position. It is a statistical category that has lead many writers to muse that once the clutch hitting dries up, so does the Twins chances of making it to the postseason.

The Twins are hitting .316 with runners in scoring position. This number is baffling. It is 26 points higher than the Baltimore Orioles (their nearest competition in all of baseball), and if they continue at that pace, it will be the highest team batting average with runners in scoring position this decade. Last year the Detroit Tigers hit .311 on their way to the American League Central title - that’s as high as it gets since 2000.

When the Twins made their run in 2006 there was a similar feeling of embracing every opportunity to drive in a run - it was marketed by Mike Redmond’s “Smell ‘em” euphemism, where Twins hitters would rub their noses after bringing in another run, 2008 feels much the same.

This season the Twins are hitting for a high average in all situations, their team batting average of .278 is third in the AL and only .002 behind the Texas Rangers who lead the league. But still, it is hard to categorize just how much of a difference there is between that .278 team batting average and the .316 average. So, maybe this is the best way.

These are your Twins hitters this season excluding Matt Macri, Howie Clark, Randy Ruiz and all the pitchers. The three categories noted are their batting average, their batting average with runners in scoring position, and the difference. They are listed in descending order of improvement

Lamb: .236/.368/.132; Buscher: .304/.400/.096; Cuddyer: .252/.347/.095; Monroe: .202/.283/.081; Punto: .275/.343/.068; Morneau: .311/.372/.061; Gomez: .257/.307/.050; Mauer: .317/ .356/ .039;  Span: .315/.345/.030;  Harris: .268/.278/.010; Casilla: .313/.322/.009;  Young: .290/.298/.008;     Kubel: .268/.264/-.004; Tolbert: .265/.200/-.065; Everett: .185/.100/-.085; Redmond: .274/.143/-.131.

Every hitter except for Kubel, Tolbet, Everett and Redmond improves when stepping to the plate with runners at second or third. Some of the jumps are astronomical, like Lamb’s 132 point improvement, or Gomez’s 50 point improvement, while others are minimal. Still, you look at Morneau and Mauer - two of the best hitters in baseball, and then notice how their numbers jump with RISP and it’s hard to understand how hitters who are so talented can get that much better in those situations.

Awhile ago Bryant and I held a chat with Soxcast and they asked us, as Twins fans, to explain how this team competes when they seemingly shouldn’t. The only answer we could come up with was that they get the hits when it matters most. It is not an easily categorization. It is not something that many people believe can be sustained. The idea of the “clutch-hitter” is something that statisticians dismiss with fervor, so the idea of a “clutch-team” would seem to be impossible.

Of course there was this mention in the New Yorker last week about a change of heart by Bill James:

“James published an essay, “Underestimating the Fog,” in which he seemed to backpedal on some crucial points. He suggested, for instance, that clutch hitting—long since dismissed by Jamesian rationalists as a myth—might exist after all, and that his colleagues just weren’t looking hard enough. Diehards in the statistician community wondered if James hadn’t gone soft with age, and begun seeing ghosts.”

The New Yorker article was dealing with James supposedly having seen a lemur in Boston, something that would seem to be impossible since lemur’s come from Madagascar. Still, if you’re a Twins fan you may understand why James - a man who watched the Boston Red Sox complete miracles in 2004 - is starting to believe in clutch-hitting, starting to believe that a lemur might be wandering down from Sherborn into Boston.

Because here the Twins are, a team that was supposed to be rebuilding for two years from now; and it is August 7 and they are in second place by one game, and their bats continue to flaunt against any notions of common sense, or predictability. Sometimes, in the late season of baseball, you just have to let these miracles in.