Don't Panic.

I was going to write about how much one-run losses hurt, especially when you have four of them in a row.  A one-run loss is, after all, pretty much by definition a game you could have won had just one or two things gone differently.  But then, yesterday evening, I heard that my old parish in North Sioux City/Dakota Dunes/McCook Lake is going to flooded for the second time in three years.  Then, a few hours later, I heard that my adopted home town of Wessington Springs was devastated by a tornado that wiped out three business and destroyed at least a dozen homes.  And suddenly, one-run losses don't bother me quite as much.

So let's celebrate Kyle Gibson.  In his last three starts, Gibson has pitched twenty-one innings.  He has given up nine hits and five walks while striking out sixteen.  As I assume you know, he has given up zero runs.  By any measure, that's pretty good.  Even better, two of those starts came on the road, which should permanently put to rest the home/road thing that never should've been a thing anyway.  Now, obviously, no one can keep up that pace.  Gibson is going to have bad games again, maybe very bad games.  But he is looking like someone we can rely on most of the time, which gives us two pitchers (along with Hughes) that we feel comfortable sending out to the mound.  That's approximately two more pitchers than we had last year.

The offense is in a slump.  You don't need me to tell you that.  What the Twins need to do now is resist the temptation to panic and start making moves just to make moves.  The temptation is to shuffle the lineup, or start running more, or start using more bunts, or doing something to shake things up.

It's tempting, but it's usually a mistake.  The Twins presumably have what they consider good reasons for using the players they are and batting them in the order they are.  They have what they consider good reasons for using the strategies they do.  Unless they now believe those reasons no longer apply, there's no reason to change.  Making random moves just under the theory that, well, we have to do something is rarely a good strategy, and in fact generally leads to making a bad situation worse.  Just as Kyle Gibson can't keep up his positive pace, the offense can't keep up its negative pace.  These guys will start to hit again, and they will start scoring more than two-thirds of a run per game.  The Twins need to stay the course and not panic.  Things will get better.

And what better time for them to get better than when we play the White Sox?  They come in for four games, with Yohan Pino making his major league debut in the first one.  Sounds like a sweep to me!  In fact, it sounds like a sweep that will propel the Twins to a season-ending ninety-two-game winning streak!  We'll just have to settle for 124-38!