A fantastic, albeit unusual game from staff ace Johan Santana paired with four Mets erros led the way for Twins to walk away with a big win in game two of their three game set with the NL East leaders.
Santana pitched a complete game shutout, the second of the month for the Twins, the other being Carlos Silva's game against the Braves. The oddity in the game wasn't in Johan's dominance, thats obviously par for the course, the oddity was in the fact that Johan struck out only 1 batter, that being Paul Lo Duca for the second out in the 9th inning. Behind him, Santana received solid defense, especially from Jason Bartlett who snared a few hard hit balls, helping to keep the Mets off the board. At the end of the night Santana finished with just four hits allowed and no walks. While it wasn't typical, I for one am thrilled. Santana had been having trouble all season with getting into many deep counts and often failing to work deep into games, hopefully this game will show a reversing of that trend. As we're now into mid-June, its certainly time that Santana begins to dominate as he always does. If he can begin to find a happy medium between his pitch counts and strikeouts he could have his best season yet.
The bats were solid tonight if unspectacular as the Twins managed 13 hits, but just three extra base hits, all doubles. After being held to four singles last night, the Twins clearly find themselves in yet another small ball rut. While the Twins did score nine runs, clearly one must wonder how many fewer it would've been had the team not received the aid of four errors from the Mets.
The Good
- Johan Santana: 9IP, 4H, oBB, oK, 0R. Nothing more to say.
- Jeff Cirillo: 3-5, one double, one run, one RBI. Tonight brings his average up to .253. Unspectacular indeed but if he can continue to hit, it may force the Twins to consider making Cirillo a regular fixture at 3B.
- Jason Bartlett: Went 2-5 raising his average to .247 and scored a run while making a few solid plays on defense in support of Johan's gem.
- Justin Morneau: No fireworks tonight but a solid 2-5 with a pair of singles bring his average up to .279 after a recent dip.
- Joe Mauer: a 2-4 performance with a double, a walk, two runs and and RBI hopefully signals the end of his "drought."
The Bad
- Luis Castillo: Another 0-fer has Luis 0-21 over the past 4 games and his average down to .306. This of course closely following the heels of Torii calling him "twofer," for two hits a game.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Sunday, June 17, 2007
TWIT: Acceptable Outcome
Weekly Roundup
Six games against two winning teams, all of them at home. In that situation, I feel like one could make the case for 4-2 being the low and high-end outcome for the week. As it went down, the week created about as many mixed feelings as possible, with the Twins cresting early on during their pitching-rich sweep of Atlanta, then tumbling to a lucky win after a blown lead to prevent a sweep on Sunday against the Brewers. After getting wrecked 11-3 in the series opener on Friday, the weekly run differential ended up slightly positive, at 31-30 in the Twins favor. Setting aside the Friday and Sunday pitching meltdowns, the Twins allowed only 10 runs in four games. Those games do count, however, and the Twins were lucky to come out of them 1-1, largely thanks to Justin Morneau’s big day and the belated return of Joe Mauer’s bat.
Last week, I described the difficulty of winning with so much of a drag on the offense coming from the players formerly known as piranhas. In several of the games this week, it became abundantly clear that pitchers have changed their approaches against these hitters and no longer care if they miss with a pitch in the strike zone. The complete lack of power is preventing players like Punto and Castillo from taking advantage of a disciplined approach at the plate, and allowing pitchers to remain economical with their counts. Castillo, for instance, is currently drawing a walk in 6.2% of his plate appearances, down from 8.6% last year and 10.3% for his career. Why would Castillo be losing half of his walks this late in his career, when players tend to start picking up a few more walks? I suspect it has to do with the fact that pitchers tend to face four or five batters in a row in the Twins lineup who cannot really do any damage, even on a mistake pitch. If the lineup ends with Redmond, Tyner, Cirillo, Bartlett, then starts over again with Castillo- or includes Punto somewhere within that stretch- the likelihood of any of the hitters driving the ball is extremely low. As a result, there is almost no disincentive for a pitcher to throw right down the middle to save pitches, because extra base hits will not serve as punishment. On the other hand, Nick Punto, who has spent a good deal of time in the #2 hole, is walking more frequently than usual, possibly because he has a real hitter behind him. Putting Mauer after Castillo may help the top of the order somewhat, although the early returns have been unimpressive.
Biggest Success
Torii Hunter had a tremendous week, with 13 total bases and six runs batted in. Instead of picking him again and discussing the same issues that have been in play all year, I am going to give a sort of season achievement award to Pat Neshek, easily one of the easiest Twins to love. Neshek had an unsurprisingly excellent week, pitching four innings over three appearances, striking out four, walking one, and yielding one hit. Neshek has been an absolute rock all year, posting a ratio of 38 strikeouts to 24 base runners over 32.7 innings. Two homeruns over 32 innings is not an alarming rate, although his style will never allow him to be much better- lefties will occasionally get a read on him very early on and absolutely tag a pitch. Neshek ranks 11th in all of baseball in WXRL, a measure that combines a relief pitcher’s saved runs with the leverage of the situations in which he saved them. At 2.3 wins so far this season, Neshek is sniffing some pretty rare air, even without pitching in the team’s highest leverage situations. Without factoring in leverage, Neshek’s ranking catapults up to 8th in all of baseball, ahead of far better known pitchers like Jonathan Papelbon and Billy Wagner, also having strong seasons. The .162 BABIP is not nearly sustainable, even with his quirkiness, but the fact that he ranks third on the staff in VORP (17.4) shows that he can fall quite a bit and remain extremely useful. While I was once concerned that Neshek’s delivery made him so susceptible to lefty slugging that he would never be a successful closer, I am no longer worried about the seemingly certain departure of Joe Nathan.
Biggest Disappointment
I already got into Luis Castillo’s problems, so I won’t beat his .296 OBP to death. I will also give a free pass to Joe Mauer, working his way back into the lineup with a sub .600 OPS. Instead, I am starting to get more concerned with the plight of Scott Baker, who has been consistently bad since his initial success. This week, Baker started sharply against the Brewers in the series opener, then fell apart in the fourth inning. He started the inning by giving up two singles, which is fine, and he even rebounded by striking out Bill Hall. From there, he hit Johnny Estrada to load the bases- a crucial mistake. Clearly rattled, he left a pitch up against Geoff Jenkins, who pulled the ball way out for a grand slam. Baker finished the inning, but compounded the problem by giving up a single, a walk, and a two run double in the fifth, never truly regaining his composure. The point of rehashing this bad memory is that it serves to illustrate how Baker has repeatedly followed misfortune with mistake after mistake. To be a successful starting pitcher, he is going to have to find a way to rebound from mistakes, maybe by challenging hitters a little more, maybe by going to his breaking ball earlier in counts. One way or another, the 7.33 ERA and the 2.0 HR rate are problems that need to be solved.
On the Horizon
It does not get any easier from here, as the Twins open the week by traveling to
The Big Picture
With
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
