What a baserunning blunder by Carl Crawford and Ben Zobrist last night….

Anyway, what’s lost in last night’s game was that Casey Fossum was too successful against the Twins. I know manager Ron Gardenhire feels his team has run into good pitchers, but Fossum?

This lineup should be at the point where it can hit good pitching. They did it on Opening night against Erik Bedard, but they should have done more against Javy Vazquez last week in Chicago, and I was less impressed with Carl Pavano on Tuesday than I was with Andy Pettitte on Wednesday. Sorry, I just expect more from this lineup now.

Maybe this team just needs time to click. Justin Morneau is an example. He’s batting under .300 but does have three homers. He acknowledged after Thursday’s walk-off homer that he still falls in the trap of trying to kill pitches when all he has to do is look to make contact.

“Once I got two strikes, all I was trying to do was put it in play and try to get on base somehow,” he said. “And (Stokes) kind of left it up and I wasn’t sure if I hit it too high or not and it kind of kept carrying. (Crawford) sort of drifted on the warning track, and then it went over. It was a pretty good feeling.”

Me: “When you try to hit home runs, you don’t. But when you try to put the ball in play, good things happen?”

“You can tell by my day. The two at-bats before that I swung at the first pitch and hit a weak ground ball to first base, then I got the two strikes (in the ninth) and tried to put it in play and I hit a home run, You would figure that I’ve learned something from that by now, but hopefully it will get the bats woken up and start swinging a little better.”

Now on to Scott Kazmir, who throws the you-know-what out of the ball….

This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 10:34 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.