So just when people were lining up to talk smack about Francisco Liriano, he goes out and throws four hitless innings. Of course, those innings were against a Grade-Z Baltimore lineup that included the minimum complement of probable regulars (3) that teams are supposed to send to a road game. So I’m not going to be convinced that Liriano “answered the skeptics” with Sunday’s performance. What he did, effectively, was defer the decision about his status (25-man roster vs. more time to get ready) for another few days and remind us of some truths about how baseball teams communicate in less than forthcoming fashion about the status of players — within their own organizations as well as with the rest of us. (You are not alone, Bill Belichick. You just seem to enjoy being disingenuous more than most people.)

As Patrick Reusse pointed out on the radio Sunday morning, you really can’t take at face value much of anything that comes out of a team’s foreign postings, in this case the Twins’ operation in the Dominican Republic, where reports were being issued that Liriano was throwing 97 or 107 or 177 or whatever. Everyone — from Bill Smith to Joe Fan — wanted to believe that Liriano’s late arrival at spring training didn’t put him behind the others, but I suspect that Smith was as skeptical as many of us, and now is probably pretty frustrated and angry about how things have been playing out. Now, we’re hearing about the lack of honest communication between the Twins and their young pitcher, with management trying to spin blame onto Liriano in Sunday’s newspapers.

Some of us long ago learned not to believe stories about the health and other status issues involving players. We’re finding out now that Joe Mauer was more banged up last year than anyone was willing to acknowledge, complete with a mystery medical procedure in the off-season that’s helped make things better. I’m OK with not getting full disclosure from the team, as long as I’m not expected to accept team pronouncements at face value. It’s an endless silly circle that should remind us of the ongoing need to be skeptical. Get excited about what you see, not what you hear. Remember Carlos Silva’s bullpen “adjustments”?

So, like, was Liriano really sick when he didn’t make his TwinsFest appearances in January? Don’t know. Did he really need to fulfill some kind of alcohol screening before being allowed to come into the county in February? Don’t know. Did all of that extra weight comes from those workouts or Dos Equis? Don’t know.

What I do know is that the Twins don’t exactly have my sympathies on this one, either. Now we’re hearing that the Twins relied on Johan Santana (remember him?) as their intermediary to find out how Liriano was feeling in 2006 and they’re unhappy they didn’t get full disclosure until his arm fell off. At the same time, players who complain about being less than 100 percent for any extended period of time are typically looked at with suspicion by management and teammates. See Torii Hunter/Joe Mauer. See 2007 Clubhouse & Staff/Jeff Cirillo.

And, as commenter Ben astutely points out below, “Also remember that in that 2006 season Radke was worshipped for pitching while his arm was falling off.”

Players are expected to play through aches. In 2006, LaVelle wrote a story about Santana’s routine that spoke to the pain that he dealt with during and after every start, and the regimen he went through to prepare to do it again and again.

Not everyone has Mike Redmond’s insane pain threshold, you know.

Liriano was in the midst of a magical summer in 2006 and can he blamed for thinking (and hoping) he could pitch through anything to live up to being “the Franchise?” What was Santana supposed to do — make Liriano do range of motion exercises?

Now we know that he’s viewed by management as immature and flaky and uncommunicative … but there should really have been a better way to figure out what was happening than to rely on another player. That the Twins don’t have a coach whose first language in Spanish is something to put on the to-do list to be remedied.

I hope that Liriano’s next outing repeats what he did against the Orioles on Sunday and that the one after that is a wildly successful one against the Angels or Royals at the Metrodome during the first week of the season. I’m not going to get my hopes up, though, for anything except that everyone has learned something from this episode.

other people are here too.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 8:53 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.