Just when you want to believe, the Twins get hammered by a bad offensive team and the Indians go out and get Ubaldo Jimenez. Of course, then the Indians go out and trade Orlando Cabrera for a minor leaguer, so I'm kinda confused, although I guess Cabrera had been relegated to a bench role of late. Also, Jimenez gave up four runs on four walks and two doubles in the first inning before being pulled, presumably when the trade went down, so he may be somewhat of an enigma, something in the lines of a Francisco Liriano.

As for the Twins, it still boggles the mind that Blackburn was handed a starting job over Kevin Slowey, especially after Blackburn's struggles last season. His ERA now stands at 4.49 with a 1.51 WHIP, which is even worse than last year when he could at least blame a sore arm for his struggles. He's now allowed at least four runs in six of his last seven starts and it was the fourth time in that stretch he's allowed double-digit hits. The one slightly encouraging sign was he still was able to get 10 groundball outs, which he must do to have any success.

How bad is it, though, that Blackburn got beat when matched up against a poor man's Slowey. Mancuso is an extreme flyball pitcher without an out pitch. His groundball rate, K rate and walk rate are all worse than Slowey's.

Oh well, at least Span wasn't traded. At least not yet. I did see one encouraging sign that the Twins will be insisting on getting a good deal:

The Twins are insisting on acquiring Storen with Bernadina and minor league infielder Stephen Lombardozzi for Span, according to Jim Bowden of ESPN.com.

That deal I can get on board, although I still would be upset that Span was traded, since he's one of my favorite players. However, Lombo's son is exactly the type of player the Twins need to focus on. He's a second baseman that can actually hit. He's a switch hitter with a career .370 on-base average in over 1,800 PAs. He's batting .318/.360/.429 as a 22 yr old in AAA. His numbers remind me a lot of a second baseman on a Twins championship team, but thankfully not his dad. If he does get traded to the Twins, we should start a pool on how long it will take for Dazzle to take a swing at him.

Finally!

The Twins finally get a win over the Tigers after losing 11 straight to them, seven this season. Hopefully, this is will start a turnaround in the season series between these two teams. It's not like the Tigers were playing well coming in. They had just lost a three-game series to the White Sox and split a two-game series with the A's, both at home. In fact, the Tigers are 15-16 in their last 31 games dating back to June 17.

The key to the game was the pitching. Baker was terrific in his start, which was abbreviated due to being on a shorter pitch count since he was coming back from a sore arm. He obviously was feeling fine after pitching five shutout innings against the Tigers, who had averaged over seven runs per game against the Twins.

The bullpen was fine as well. It only allowed one run in four innings and never allowed the Tigers to bring the tying run to the plate, which makes it difficult to blow a lead.

The Twins had their best lineup out there since April the last two days and still only managed six runs. Saturday, they had runners all over the bases the first four innings, but had to settle for four runs as Brad Penny had two hard-hit ground balls turned into double plays behind him in key situations. Maybe the most encouraging part of the offense was getting five walks and just five strikeouts. The Twins had been struggling with walks on this homestand for the most part. They got seven in the first game and four in the second, but since then they had just 12 walks in their last eight games and 46 strikeouts before today's game. It should be no surprise that the Twins averaged just 3.2 runs in those eight games.

The Twins now have guaranteed a .500 homestand, which is by no means good, but they at least avoided the disaster of a losing homestand. They can still salvage a 7-5 homestand, which would still be disappointing after splitting eight games with the top-two teams in the division.

Now that wasn't so hard, was it?

One night after a gut-busting loss on another Capps blown save, Gardy finally makes the right decision and puts Joe Nathan back in his familiar closer role and suddenly everything seems right with the world. The Twins win at home against an AL Central team and Nathan gets the save with the usual obligatory base runner. Even without a strikeout, Nathan looked good with three popups for outs and the only hit a roller through the infield, which may have been helped with Cuddyer guarding the line in the ninth.

It will be interesting tomorrow if the Twins have another narrow, late lead. I think Gardy may have been hesitant to make Nathan the closer because he has said he won't use Nathan three days in a row. I'm fine with that, since most relievers (outside of LOOGYs) shouldn't be used that often anyways. This undoubtedly means Perkins will close tomorrow, if necessary, and I'm fine with that as well, especially after he dominated Saturday night and absolutely abused Alex Gordon, who's been the Royals' best hitter, on three pitches. The interesting part will be to see who gets the eighth inning, or at least who starts it. If righties are coming up, I wouldn't be surprised to see Capps in there with Mijares warming up. The other choice would be Alex Burnett and neither one inspires a lot of confidence right now, although Capps' splits make me think he can thrive as a protected setup man. Of course, this means the Twins need Mijares to figure out his control problems as well.

It's amazing how much difference one bases-empty single can make. The Royals' Jeff Francis was in cruise control in the eighth inning Saturday before Alexi Casilla flared a single into right field. Joe Mauer followed with a ground ball through the hole created by the presence of Casilla and suddenly Francis was out of the game and ended up with the loss after Cuddyer singled off reliever Aaron Crow to put the Twins ahead.

That eighth inning and Nathan' s save prevented me from a meltdown after two bad calls by the umpires in the sixth inning allowed the Royals to tie the game on an infield out. Both were close plays, but when you have two close calls go against you in one inning of a tight game and both were shown to be bad calls, well that can be pretty tough to take. Fortunately, it didn't mean much more than prevent Pavano from getting the win and give me one more reason to have no respect for Cowboy Joe West.