The Rake Magazine

Wasn't that swell?

Isn't it always a fine thing to see the local nine kick the living snot out of those shitheels from Chicago?

And wasn't it comforting to see Ramon Ortiz get his feet wet coming out of the bullpen, in a situation where there was absolutely no pressure? He did a nice job, too: three outs on seven pitches.

Sixteen hits and seven walks: Swell. Ten hits from the top four guys in the batting order, and six hits from the bottom three. That was also swell.

We've seen all manner of swellness over the last several games, and for perhaps the first sustained stretch all year the Twins have looked every bit like the team we all hoped they'd be coming out of spring training.

Meanwhile, Britt Robson, David Brauer, and I kick around some thoughts on the first couple months of the season over at Britt's blog, On the Ball. Go over there now and chime in on the conversation.

We spent a fair amount of time talking about how difficult it's going to be for the Twins to find the money to sign Hunter, Santana, and Morneau (the consensus being that Hunter is rapidly pricing himself out of Minnesota's budget), but none of us mentioned Michael Cuddyer. This is a guy who's also going to end up costing the Twins a shitload of money.

Just a quick note on what felt like a very necessary win accomplished in absolutely necessary fashion, or something like that.

After Friday night's 13-inning affair --a game that featured another shitty performance from Ramon Ortiz and valiant comebacks that ultimately came up short-- the Twins desperately needed to give their beleaguered bullpen (Pat Neshek and Matt Guerrier, in particular) a breather. To accomplish that they were going to have to get a solid start from Carlos Silva. Solid-plus, something better than merely good or decent. Seven innings, minimum.

Given the Jackal's recent track record, that seemed like a long shot, but Silva more than delivered, going seven-and-a-third innings and surrendering only two runs. And the offense did just enough against A.J. Burnett (three hits, four runs, three of them earned) to eke out a 4-2 victory, take their third straight series, and give themselves another shot (and their middle relievers another day of rest) tomorrow afternoon with Johan Santana taking the mound against the White Sox.

With the Central proving to be almost exactly as tough as everybody was predicting back in April, the Twins are facing a seriously uphill battle in closing the gap. The last week, however, has demonstrated that this is another pretty resilient team. With the bullpen plagued by injury and, increasingly, overwork, and with Slowey and Garza waiting in Rochester, doesn't it make perfect sense to call up at least one of those guys and move Ortiz into the bullpen to eat up middle innings?

Granted, it's improbable that either Slowey or Garza will be this year's Francisco Liriano, but --what the hell-- it still makes perfect sense to me.

Also, what do you do with the batting order when Joe Mauer finally comes back? Since Mauer's been on the DL, Luis Castillo has been streaking in the leadoff spot, and Morneau has been a monster batting cleanup. At this point the sad truth is that Mauer would actually be a perfect guy to bat second, given his bat control, low strikeout totals, and often ridiculous willingness to lay down a bunt. I don't think, though, that Gardenhire is going to pencil Mauer in the two-hole, or move Morneau into the third slot. Batting the two lefties back-to-back goes against basic baseball logic, but nonetheless seems perfectly logical to me. I'd want to get Morneau to the plate in the first inning as often as possible, and with Castillo and Mauer in front of him, and Cuddyer and Hunter behind him, that's an awful lot of RBI possibilities, and little wiggle room to pitch around the MVP.

I don't quite get this: The Twins have two guys in the AL top ten in home runs, RBI, and slugging percentage. They have a leadoff hitter who is eighth in the league in batting average. The club is second in the American League in fielding percentage, fifth in team ERA, fifth in RBI, fifth in hits, sixth in batting average, and sixth in on base percentage.

Their two-time Cy Young award-winner is tied for fifth in wins, and 12th in ERA. There are two guys in the bullpen --Neshek and Guerrier-- that have allowed fewer walks plus hits per innings pitched than Santana.

The team's starting catcher and reigning batting champ goes on the DL, yet his backup is hitting .306.

Hunter and Morneau are all over the AL leader board --Morneau is second in the league in home runs, ninth in RBI, and tied for sixth in runs scored. Despite Alex Rodriguez's ridiculous April, Morneau now trails him by four home runs, and Hunter has crept within three for the league RBI lead.

Yet despite all these positive numbers the Twins are 22-24 and in fourth place (six-and-a-half back) in the Central.

I'll let KRS-One pose the million-dollar question: Why is that?

The knee-jerk answer: it's the piranhas, stupid.

Or consider this: the troika of Ponson, Ortiz, and Silva --all of them question marks coming out of spring training-- have combined to go 7-14.

Or this: the Twins are 13th in the league in home runs (Morneau and Hunter have combined for 25 of the team's 35 homers, and Morneau has hit six of his in three games).

Of course you could take the glass-is-half-full approach and conclude from all those numbers that the Twins are a lot better than they've played so far.

You could also decide that with one more injury or a prolonged slump from one of the stars and this team is going to be lucky to win 80 games.

I'm an optimist, though, so I'm going to go with that first scenario until the Twins have kicked me in the kidneys so many times that I'm pissing blood.

Tonight's game, along with last Friday's win in Milwaukee (Bonser's 11 strikeouts, Hunter's grand slam), was a blueprint for the kind of team I thought the Twins were going to be coming into the season.

Sort of, anyway.

It still perplexes me that the guys in the middle of the order are being forced to pretty much score and drive in all the runs (Luis Castillo is batting .319 with a .368 OBP and he's still a distant fourth on the club in runs scored --behind Morneau, Hunter, and Cuddyer). Considering how well those guys have done (and the absence of Mauer), it's odd that the team has struggled as much as they have to score runs.

The reason for that, of course, is that nothing much has fired on all cylinders for the Twins all season. Going into tonight the team had lost four of Johan Santana's last five starts.

They didn't lose tonight, and the way Santana (and Neshek and Nathan out of the bullpen) pitched, the firepower of Morneau and Hunter was pure gravy, though certainly lots of fun to watch. Still, Morneau and Hunter drove in all seven of the Twins' runs, and the 3-4-5 hitters (Cuddyer, Morneau, and Hunter) scored six of them. And those three pitchers combined for this extraordinary line: 18 strikeouts, five hits, and two walks.

Hunter's season has been an astonishing thing to witness, and I've never placed much stock in that old monkey business about guys putting up huge numbers in the last years of their contracts; the game's just too damn hard to play for even great players to just crank it up a notch at will when there are tens of millions of dollars on the line.

I'm still not sure what the hell Hunter's doing differently this year, but he certainly looks like a guy who's all of a sudden got things figured out. How often, though, does a guy make such great strides after he's turned 30 (and Hunter will turn 32 in July)? Granted, it's May, but the guy is on pace to post career bests in everything. He should easily have more doubles by the All Star break than he had in either of the last two seasons, and despite the fact that he's slugged over .500 just once in the last six years, his slugging percentage currently sits at .616.

I can't figure it out, especially since he's been hitting without any real protection all season.

At any rate, that $12 million option the Twins picked up in the off-season --which I thought was a dicey move-- is looking smarter all the time, even as Hunter is looking more and more like a guy who is pricing himself well out of Minnesota's budget.

It will be a damn shame if Torii finally puts together a monster year and the Twins finish in the middle of the division.

You'd sure like to see your team hold a 4-0 lead, particularly since the Twins have had so few early leads of late. And, yeah, Dennys Reyes is the lefthanded specialist out of the bullpen --or was-- but he hasn't done much of anything to justify that position thus far in '07, and his stellar 2006 is looking more and more like an aberration. It was supposedly a big surprise that his shoulder was bothering him even before he entered yesterday's game with the score tied at five, but why was it such a surprise?

The Reyes situation is pretty much Jesse Crain all over again. Both guys signed extensions in the off-season, sucked early on, were sidelined with 'tenderness' but somehow managed to avoid the DL, and came back only to endure more suckiness, this suckiness apparently attributable to injuries, the severity of which went unrecognized by the team's medical staff.

I don't quite understand how a guy whose arm was aching a few weeks ago is supposed to get better by pitching to Major League hitters, but what the hell do I know?

It also seems to me that the Twins have had a number of eerily similar situations in recent years (Liriano last season, for example), situations where the team's doctors clearly failed to recognize the severity of a pitcher's injury until it was too late.

The loss of Reyes and Crain does put a strain on the Twins' bullpen, but at this point, considering the way they've pitched, it's sort of a case of addition by subtraction. Given Minnesota's history of nurturing reliable and unsung middle relievers --there's a long list by now, the most recent examples being Matt Guerrier and Pat Neshek-- you always kind of figure they'll find a way to patch something together. The way things have been going, though, this season figures to be a test of the club's scouting and coaching resources.

Is Ramon Ortiz headed the way of Sidney Ponson? How much rope do the Twins give him with Garza and Slowey waiting for a shot at Rochester? Consider that Ortiz was 3-1 with a 2.57 ERA on April 27. Here's his ERA after his last four starts: 3.23, 3.80. 4.89, 5.36. I'm guessing that impressive start is going to give him a considerably longer leash than Ponson had, especially given that the Twins are on the hook for his $3.1 million salary.

How much have the Twins missed Joe Mauer? They'd started their slide before he went on the DL --they were 15-14 at the time-- but they've gone 5-9 without him in the lineup.

Scott Baker's quotes following his Saturday start in Milwaukee were even more refreshing than his performance. It's hard to root against a guy who says stuff like this: "It's supposed to be fun. If it's not fun, why are we doing this? I think a lot of times we're too result oriented and this game is such a result oriented, stat game. There's too much emphasis on that. It's about the process, it's about enjoying this time."