Griffen makes his fourth career start tonight. He's pitched 18 innings and has a 2.00 ERA, but no win thanks to the A's offense.
The Twins have company at the bottom of the AL: the Mariners. They're tied at 36 wins but the Mariners are ahead in losses: 51-49. Along with the Royals, they are the only teams with fewer than 40 wins. With some good play against the A's and O's, the Twins could move into 23rd place! They're already ahead of four NL teams: Astros, Cubs, Rockies, and Padres with the Phillies narrowly ahead of the Twins.
I was thinking about the general good vibes about this season's team. In April they were awful, managing a meager six wins. May was a big improvement, with the Twins tripling their win total. June was helped by Interleague and the Twins finished 13-12 for the month. Comparing through 82 games last year, the Twins are actually a game behind: 35-47 versus 36-46 from 2011. Last year, however, had The Suck(tm) of August and September: 7-21 and 6-20 for the final two months. With the team healthier this year, they might be able to avoid the free-fall and have a chance to lose fewer than 90 games.
Final home game before the All-Star break and the Twins have a good chance to win another series. Right now, they're right behind Seattle for getting out of the AL basement.
Next Wednesday, the Twins will have completed half of the season. One of the things I love about baseball is the sheer number of games. It's more fun when the number of losses stops climbing so quickly, but with so many games we can ignore all of the crappy games and have plenty of great ones to remember.
With so many games however, it soon becomes expected that there's a game tomorrow. We still have 87 games left, but the day that ends is in sight.
Unfortunately, as is the case with bad teams, the hot streaks are short lived. The Twins are below .400 again, ensuring Seattle remains easily in 13th place. They are ahead of Colorado now though, so they've fallen out of a top-three draft pick.
Time to start another series winning streak. The Royals just swept the Brewers, so surely the Twins can take at least two out of three, right? The Pirates are next and although they have a winning record, B-R's SRS system rates them a -0.5, so there's another winnable series. Just burst the bubble that needs to be burst before something drastic happens, like the Pirates making it to the postseason. Finally, uh, let me check the master schedule I have saved to keep the sidebar updated... Right, Cincinnati is next and they're actually kind of good. That's okay, just take things one game at a time and work your way up to a bit of a challenge. Because then it's the White Sox next and it's always fun to beat them.
The Twins are 8-2 in their last ten games, which is the best in the majors. Plus, they're only a game and a half behind the Royals. Time to beat up on some more NL teams and move firmly into "mediocre".
