Remember when we wondered about Scott Baker, a young pitcher who looked like he was AAA+ at the best, someone with not quite enough stuff to be a part of the Twins rotation? He bounced back and forth between the Twins and Rochester in 2006 and ‘07 after showing some promise when called up toward the end of 2005. At the end of last season there was several excellent starts, including the night he took a perfect game into the ninth inning against Kansas City. He’s gone from someone who provoked skepticism to someone whose name is always mentioned when the team’s future rotation is put together.

That’s what experience can do.

Going into last night’s 1-0 loss, Baker had pitched 800 professional innings — about 60 percent of them in the minors. With rare exceptions (Bert Blyleven was one), the stuff that makes a young pitcher attractive enough to be drafted needs significant refinement before he can be considered a solid major-leaguer. That experience comes only one way: Innings.

Baker’s development can be seen as a road map for Kevin Slowey (477 professional innings) and Glen Perkins (442). That Nick Blackburn seems to be ahead of them right now should be less of a surprise when you consider that he’s thrown 793 innings — and that his struggles are so often centered on his tendency to yield big innings. That’s a mental thing he needs to conquer.

Yes, it’s hard to watch Slowey on the days when he doesn’t have enough to handle a lineup filled with good hitters. I raised the suspicion that his near-shutout in Kansas City a couple of weeks back was a “false positive,” and I’m afraid I was right. But if we are patient and Slowey throws another 130-140 innings in the majors this season, he could be the Baker of the 2009 rotation. He has enough stuff to handle Triple-A batters and now needs to figure out how to use that stuff in the majors. I look at the early years of Glavine and Maddux and see hope.

Today, I’d suggest Slowey watch an endless loop of CC Sabathia’s pitch to Gogomez in the third inning last night. If you saw it, you know what I’m talking about.

And Perkins? He looks pretty good for a guy with seven major-league starts.

In case you’re wondering, the Twins’ impatience with Boof Bonser, which has landed him in the bullpen for the foreseeable future, is a combination of his ineffectiveness and the fact that he’s pitched 50 percent more professional innings than any of these other pitchers — 1,230.

The Blylevens of the world, who can come in and pitch well from the start (age 19 in the majors in his case) are few and far between. That’s among the many, many reasons why Bert is a Hall of Fame worthy pitcher.

I know it’s hard to be patient, but would you rather be watching Carlos Silva every fifth day?

A postscript: The ninth-inning, double-play, base-running thing I brought up yesterday engendered more chatter than I thought. I ended up talking to some baseball types about what happened and (just like here) there was no consensus, aside from the fact that having Casilla steal second against Bobby Jenks/Toby Hall was a solid idea (sane’s suggestion). There were a couple of folks who said Gogomez should have taken off from third on Mauer’s one-hopper that Jenks reached to grab, no matter what — that he would likely have been ignored, but if he’d been caught in a rundown the Twins would have had two on and one out instead of one on and two outs. A couple of others said it’s too much to ask a young player to break the conventional wisdom of waiting for the ball to clear the pitcher before taking off. The other consensus was that being able to dissect a play a half-dozen ways from yesterday is one of the reasons baseball is better than most things.

Now, about those three two* base-running blunders in a 1-0 loss…

(*see comments below)

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 8:48 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.