Well, hey. The twins won two! First doubleheader sweep since 1972*. They may be a truly wretched baseball team, but little bright spotslike this make it worth it for me. Last place is not guaranteed. No fate but what we make. Here's hoping that this is an omen for September.
*sean may have something to say about this.
Liaaaam Hendriks vs. Luke Hochevaaaar
Liam was a tough luck loser last time. I predict a pitcher's duel.
Cole "Home Run" De Vries against Will "Wait, Who?" Smith.
I predict a riot. Of runs.
That doesn't make sense, but what I'm saying is... there will be runs. Scored. By baseball teams.
Go Twins!
Hey! The Twins are playing. Cool. Span's back in the lineup! Cool.
Dempster vs. Duensing.....
...whelp...at least Blackburn isn't a major leaguer anymore.
If you haven't yet, check the game log for good news regarding cooking cinnamon rolls in stoves and approximately one metric tonne of hilarity. Seriously, I laughed out loud no fewer than five times reading through the game log. The people who showed up brought it - good times.
Also, the Twins lost.
Diamond's on the mound tonight. That's good.
Vargas takes the mound for the Mariners. That's good-ish (he doesn't strike many out, doesn't walk many, and gives up a fair number of long balls, but seems to be getting lucky so far this year.)
Go twins!
That didn't turn out nearly as bad as I thought it would...
...I mean, we still lost...
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
Blackburn (5-7, 5.73 FIP, -2.4 k/9) vs. Price (14-4 3.19 FIP, occasionally strikes people out)
Judging simply by the matchup, this one looks like it might be hard to pull off a victory.
DeVries had a very DeVries-ian start, Revere, Casilla, and Carroll came through in the clutch, and our bullpen did another fantastic job.
You're not allowed to talk about those things.
We come to praise, not bury Joe Mauer, for heroic feats, both in power (taming monsters) and patience (ball 3. seriously.)
Time is running out for Ben Revere. If he's going to hit an honest-to-God over the fence homerun, you'd have to figure it'd be here or New Yankee bandbox. The problem, of course, is that in his entire career, he's only hit four balls in the air out of the infield. Things look grim, but this is the ballpark that has walls just over 300 feet from the plate (seems gimmicky, but I've been assured that it's not) If he really got into one, and the wind was blowing out at about 30 miles an hour, and the fielder Canseco'd it, he might have a shot.
Cole DeVries takes the ball for the good guys today. I've mentioned it before, but I really thought that when DeVries was sent back down that first time that he was gone for good. Instead, he's pretty much become our second best starter. I like his strikeouts, such as they are*, I love his walk rate, if he can figure out how to avoid throwing two or three BP fastballs every single game, I'd be good with him the rest of the way. Good Lord, though, those home runs... he gets grounders on fewer than a third of the balls hit in play, and a full 15.8% of those fly balls leave the playing field. If he keeps this up, I don't know how we're going to be able to rely on him come playoffs.
Clay Buchholz is also pitching, but he's a thoroughly mediocre pitcher, and no one cares about him.
* Fun Fact: At 6.2 k/9, DeVries has the highest rate of any of our starters (including injured ones), and the third highest strikeout rate of any pitchers who are still with the team who have pitched more than 15 innings this year. How is that even possible??