If you don’t get something done at work today because you’re replaying parts of last night’s loss, I’m sure your bosses and coworkers will understand. There’s a lot of stuff to go over. It felt to me like one of those nights that happens during a season when things are just enough out of synch that lurking disaster can’t be headed off. Say one thing about the Detroit Tigers, nobody will ever accuse them of “doing the little things right,” the faux mantra of Twins baseball, but they sure hit the ball.

That being said, I’m wrestling with last night’s bullpen management, which is much easier to do in hindsight and which I’m sure Gardy, Anderson and the others have been doing too. (Just because Gardy was ejected doesn’t mean he wasn’t making the calls.) Jesse Crain, the first-call reliever, had put just 10 runners on base in 13 1/3 innings during June — and he stumbled. Except for one ugly appearane during the White Sox blowouts, Matt Guerrier hadn’t yielded an earned run for six weeks.

The odds of both of them being unable to get the job done were slim — and probably figured into two decisions.

1) Pulling Glen Perkins with one out in the seventh after Curtis Granderson singled and the top of the order was coming up, even though he’d retired the previous 10 batters.

2) Keeping Guerrier in the game to face lefty pinch-hitter Matt Joyce and lefty Granderson during the winning rally instead of using the second bullpen lefty, Craig Breslow. There were two Tigers left on the bench when Joyce batted for Ryan Raburn, both with suspect bats, so Detroit probably would have gone with a Breslow-Joyce match-up. Granderson has been mashing against everyone lately.

To me, all of the calls are toss-ups. Breslow had a stiff back over the weekend. He seemed to be fine in his short ninth-inning stint, but there’s a reason he’s been an expendable major-leaguer throughout his career and I can hear myself muttering — “Isn’t Guerrier supposed to get those guys” — if the winning hits had come against Breslow.

What else? I’m not sure Gardy needed to get ejected to make his point about the pitches that Gallaraga threw at Mauer in response to the Perkins/Guillen thing in the first inning. It was nice to see Perkins not change his game plan after that happened, working both sides of the plate and pitching another good game against a team that likes to hit lefties.

Denard Span showed some good offensive chops and made a skidding catch to open that game Cuddyer probably wouldn’t have made, but he misplayed Joyce’s hit into a triple in the eighth and, maybe, could have taken third on Gomez’s bloop single in the ninth. I’m not sure on the latter, but there are those who wondered after the game about whether he should have risked it. (That would have put him in position to score on Casilla’s fly out to center.) With Casilla and Mauer coming up, and only watching the play unfold on TV, I’m not sure. Anyone who was there was to weigh in?

I still think the bigger issue on Span is how much more we all like him now than we did during spring training, when he was widely seen as a guy who’d never amount to much. I like the way he plays and the way he carries himself. If you want a sense of the latter, read Patrick’s column about the relationship Span forged with Ben Revere during spring training.

After a game rife with wouldas, coulda and shouldas, it’s a good time to find something else to chew on. With that mind, I was pondering the comment made yesterday that if Bill Smith hadn’t made any moves in the off-season, the Twins “might be up 10 games” on the competition.

Let’s look at some numbers:

*Johan Santana: 7-7 with fewer strikeouts than innings pitched for the first time since he became a starter. He’d either have signed a long extension or would be leaving at midseason or after the season. We’d be all over the .500 pitcher with the diminishing velocity. It wouldn’t matter if his ERA was 1.01, 3.01 or 5.01, we’d be expecting more from our ace. Anyway, wasn’t he supposed to be even more of a strikeout pitcher in the National League?

*Torii Hunter, signed to a fat contract: .272 average, .328 OBP, .446 alugging percantage. Is turning in his lowest slugging numbers since becoming a regular. Home run pace will leave him about 10 below last year. If this is one of the good years the Angels are getting from him at the front of his five-year contract, imagine what lies ahead.

*Carlos Silva, getting $12 million a year. He beat San Diego over the weekend to end a nine-game losing streak. His numbers are the worst of his career even though pitching at Safeco was supposed to help him. Can you imagine if, after losing Santana, the Twins had kept him around to anchor the pitching staff. With outings like this one against Detroit, he should be nicknamed Gravedigger.

*Jason Tyner, tearing up Triple-A with .229 average in the Cleveland system. Luis Rodriguez is hitting .308 at Portland, in the Pacific Coast League where everyone hits at least .300. Rondell White? Does keeping Juan Rincon around count, too?

Yes, I know I’m being selective with personnel here. Sure, it would be nice to have Kyle Lohse and his 10-2 record around (We all saw that one, right?) and Matt Garza in the rotation, while still figuring out how to improve the outfield. But the point is that baseball can be as much a chess game of personnel moves off the field as it is strategy and execution on the field.

I strongly suspect that if the 2007 players were putting up 2008 numbers, we’d be howling for the heads of everyone we’d hold responsible. As it is, we’re on a pretty interesting ride.

(Folks, this is the last post until the end of the weekend. Getting away from the Internet and all that for a few days. I’ll be turning off the comments tonight. Have a good holiday.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 at 8:59 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.