I’m flying back to the Twin Cities today while Joe C. takes over in Texas. It’s too bad the Twins couldn’t finish off the sweep yesterday, but Ramon Ortiz and Dennys Reyes had their issues.

As for Reyes, the Twins should know more about his sore shoulder by this evening. As you’ve read today, Gardy wasn’t happy to learn after the fact that Reyes has been pitching with a sore shoulder. Gardy wanted the sweep badly to put them in a position to have a winning road trip.

Gardy spoke about how urgent the situation is before Sunday’s game.

“It’s all about winning series from here on out,” he said. “We can’t afford, in this division, to get too far behind. This stretch of baseball…we have played the teams with the best records in the game. We have not fared as well as we wanted to. We are capable of playing better baseball.”

We also talked about Jason Kubel not getting playing time during the series. Gardy said he’s liked the way the lineup has looked with Ford in it. It looks like Kubel will DH a lot, with Ford in left. 

“I still want Kubel to play some outfield,” Gardy said. “but my original plan was for Kubel to do more DH-ing and platoon with Cirillo. I’d like to use Kubel like that to keep his legs fresh.”

My concern is that Kubel is not a good player off the bench and especially as a pinch hitter. He’s hit a bunch line drives that have found leather and should be in there every day.

So Kubel now needs to show some fire and bang his way into more playing time.  Just think what happens when (if?) Rondell White gets healthy… 

My next podcast should be up soon. I may blog during the Texas series, so keep checking back….

This entry was posted on Monday, May 21st, 2007 at 11:38 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.