Good baseball trumps bad result
Posted on July 8th, 2008 – 7:52 AMBy Howard
You can pick at some of what went wrong for the Twins, most notably Delmon Young’s two first-pitch ground outs with the bases loaded in the first and eighth innings and the choice of Brian Bass to take over in the eighth instead of Crain or Guerrier. But facts are that Delmon has been hitting the ball well lately and Bass had put only 10 runners on base (giving up one earned run) in his previous 12 innings.
The former makes me wonder how well Delmon be hitting if showed a bit more patience at the plate and the latter, to me, constitutes enough of a sample size to have considered Bass to be on top of his game. (You know, sometimes I wonder how we managed to cover baseball back in the day before we had “sample sizes” to dissect and statistical acronyms the length of surnames.)
Sometimes you just lose.
For all of his struggles with control, Dice-K didn’t get to be 10-1 by throwing poop. And he caught breaks when Buscher lined into an unassisted double play in the seventh — Delmon had no chance to get back — right before Punto crushed a triple that would have been a homer elsewhere.
Denard Span continued to make a solid case for his future with two excellent plays in right field and Scott Baker manned up when he needed to.
For me, it was one of those games where I was simply glad to be able to sit back and watch it — muttering and sputtering and talking back to Dick’n'Bert and hoping for hits that didn’t come. A good night to be a baseball fan.
The only thing that’s making me feel a bit weird right now is that I’m actually feeling bad for AJ Pierzynski, who got left off the All-Star team despite a solid first half in favor of the Red Sox catcher, Jason Varitek and his .215 average. I don’t think it would be a bad idea for Varitek to step aside and let the more deserving player have that spot — even if it is AJ.
other people are here too
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