It’s time to get the people who need to be there on the same page, sooner rather than later. A game between the first- and second-place teams in the AL Central is not the time for a manager to be risking games to prove a point — or for a general manager to hamstring his manager with a lame roster alignment.

On a 13-pitcher staff, there was little reason for Gardy to bring in Juan Rincon with the Twins down by 2 and two runners on in the fifth inning. One pitch later, they were down by five. A game that started with a 3-0 lead became a 10-6 loss to the first-place White Sox. There were terrible sequences by the offense on a night when the bats could have accounted for 10 runs with a couple of timely hits and Mike Lamb threw gasoline on the six-run Chicago rally with poor reaction to a sacrifice bunt (the kind of play we’ve been seeing from the Tigers), but Gardy apparently decided to display Rincon one more time (one last time?) even though he’s got 13 pitchers.

(Stat break: Rincon’s last nine games — 10 innings, 16 hits, 10 walks, 9 earned runs. Opponents have an on-base percentage against him of .491. (Milton Bradley of Texas leads the AL in on-base percentage at .450, Joe Mauer is third at .413. In 1949, Ted Williams’ on-base percentage was .490.)

Gardy’s feelings seem pretty clear, based on the resignation in his voice after the game Thursday and his quote in LaVelle’s story after this one: “My goal is to get (to 12 pitchers) as quick as I can. I just have to wait for a few things to happen with the general manager and go from there.”

That’s about as honest as Gardy can be.

On Thursday, remember, Gardy lost his DH and was forced to use Kevin Slowey as a pinch runner because of the roster — and he said the latter might happen again with 13 pitchers. It would be great for a pitcher to pull a muscle or hurt himself in a collision at the plate or something, huh? And the other gem Thursday was Lamb (2 for 24 vs. lefties and 0 for his last 15 against anyone) having to hit against Orioles lefty ace George Sherrill (4 for 29 with 15 strikeouts against lefties) to lead off the ninth on Thursday. He struck out, badly.

It’s time for Bill Smith and Gardy to end this silliness before more games are thrown away and this 10-game road trip gets remembered as the one that tossed the Twins into the lower reaches of the division, something that doesn’t have to happen this way.

other people are here too

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 7th, 2008 at 10:18 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.