Euphemisms.

Not really a lot to say about this one.  Kevin Correia started and once again was not very good.  The bullpen was not much better.  The exception was, of all people, Matt Guerrier, who pitched two perfect innings.  I have very little confidence that Guerrier can still pitch, but I would like to be wrong, and a game like last night at least gives a little hope that I might be.

The offense did very little, too, at least while it mattered.  Plouffe had two extra-base hits, one of them a two-run homer that made the score look a little bit better.

In the early innings, which is all I was able to listen to, Dan Gladden kept saying the Twins should make the Red Sox batters "move their feet" and should "make them uncomfortable at the plate".  Now, of course, to be successful, a pitcher has to use both sides of the plate.  And, of course, if you aim for the inside corner you will sometimes miss to the inside, just as if you aim for the outside corner you will sometimes miss to the outside.  If that's what Gladden meant, then I agree with him.

Usually, though, things like "move his feet" and "make him uncomfortable" are euphemisms for "throw at somebody".  That I don't agree with.  I don't think that just because batters hit the ball hard, and even hit it over the fence, the pitcher therefore has the right to throw the ball at the batter.  To me, that makes about as much sense as saying that if a pitcher is striking the batters out, the batter has the right to throw the bat at the pitcher.

Any time you throw at a batter, even if you aim lower than the head, you are taking the chance that you will seriously injure that batter.  It is not right to seriously injure someone because they're able to do their job better than you're able to do yours.  Batters hitting the ball hard are doing what they're supposed to do.  Pitchers letting batters hit the ball hard are not doing what they're supposed to do.  If a pitcher doesn't like the fact that batters are hitting the ball hard, the solution is not to give them a serious injury.  The solution is to make better pitches so that they can't hit the ball so hard.

That was going to be pretty much all for this post, but then I saw that the Twins had activated Oswaldo Arcia and sent him to Rochester.  This makes no sense.  Not that Arcia's going to win a gold glove or anything, but you're playing infielders in the outfield every night, you've got an outfielder who just turned twenty-three and who's hit over .300 at almost every level, including AAA, and you can't find a spot for him?  It's things like this that make me wonder whether the people in charge know what they're doing.  It's not helping Arcia or the Twins for him to spend time in Rochester.  We already know Arcia can hit in Rochester.  What the Twins and Oswaldo Arcia need to find out is whether he can hit in the major leagues, and the only way we're going to find it out is for him to play in the major leagues.

At any rate, today is a getaway day for the Bostons, so it's an afternoon game.  Phil Hughes, who has pitched well over the last few weeks, will go against Clay Buchholz, who this year has had some good outings but has had more bad ones.  Sounds like a win to me.  In fact, it sounds like the first of one hundred twenty-four consecutive wins.  We'll just have to settle for 142-20!