ANAHEIM — The first-place Twins take a four-game winning streak into tonight’s game against the Angels.

A matchup to watch: Jason Kubel vs. Jon Garland. Kubel is a .400 career hitter against Garland — 8-for-20 with three home runs and 11 RBI.

Nick Blackburn held the Angels to one run on five hits over seven innings on April 2, but the Angels won 1-0 behind Ervin Santana.

Updates to come…

Update (8:15 p.m.): Apologies, folks. No big news to report pregame. With the time difference, I’ve been cranking out copy for our first print editions.

Gardy mentioned his concern about getting Justin Morneau some rest during the middle of this stretch of 17 games in 17 days.

As for how Alexi Casilla has looked in his first two games back from the DL, Gardy said, “He’s swinging at balls that might have hit him. He’s a little hack-happy right now, but he’s playing the heck out of defense.”

On the overslide at third base by Carlos Gomez on Friday, Gardy said, “You can call it bad, but here’s a guy busting his butt. He slides in and people do fall off the base. He’s making it happen.

“That’s the kind of stuff that you make an out but it still fires everybody up in the dugout. Yeah, we’re all like, ‘Darn, he made it an out.’ But it’s not for a lack of effort.”

The Twins actually will send seven prospects to the Arizona Fall League. Class AA third baseman Danny Valencia was omitted from the list the team announced Friday. He’ll join pitchers Jeff Manship, Rob Delaney, Tim Lahey and Anthony Slama, infielder Steve Tolleson and outfielder Dustin Martin.

More on the above topics in my Twins notebook.

Enjoy the game. It’s 79 degrees. Just gorgeous here.

Twins (74-54)

1. Denard Span, RF

2. Alexi Casilla, 2B

3. Joe Mauer, C

4. Justin Morneau, 1B

5. Jason Kubel, DH

6. Delmon Young, LF

7. Brian Buscher, 3B

8. Nick Punto, SS

9. Carlos Gomez, CF

Starting pitcher: RH Nick Blackburn

Angels (77-50)

1. Chone Figgins, 3B

2. Erick Aybar, SS

3. Mark Teixeira, 1B

4. Vladimir Guerrero, RF

5. Torii Hunter, CF

6. Garret Anderson, DH

7. Juan Rivera, LF

8. Howie Kendrick, 2B

9. Mike Napoli, C

Starting pitcher: RH Jon Garland

Angel Stadium. First pitch: 8:05 p.m.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 23rd, 2008 at 5:03 pm and is filed under Twins thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.