You think it was coincidence when the Menards ad right after Seattle’s 10-run inning was pitching toilets?

As Bert understated after the carnage: “Lack of concentration could be some of it.”

He was talking about Glen Perkins’ pitching meltdown, but could very well have been talking about the entire Twins operation, which flushed away a game last night with a performance that polluted the beautiful stadium next to Puget Sound.

After getting ahead 6-0 in the fourth, the Twins took up flailing away at the plate in the same way that the Tigers did back in May when they took a 6-0 lead at the Dome and managed to spit it up by the end of that Sunday afternoon. It felt like the tied-for-first-place Twins were more intent on getting on and off and on the field than in getting another hit or two that could have further broken open the game in their favor.

“It looked like we could have scored 8 or 10 runs ourselves if we had kept executing. We didn’t put the ball in play when they were giving us runs and that always comes back to bite you in the end,” Gardy said afterward.

On the bench, it seemed like Gardy and Andy simply thought things would settle down and fly in the right direction. How else do you explain sticking with a pitcher who had allowed 8 of the previous 13 runners to reach base — before Raul Ibanez banged the grand slam that brought Seattle from 6-1 to 6-5? Then, as if wasted at-bats and putrid pitching weren’t enough, the Twins started throwing the ball around randomly. Errors by Span and Harris contributed to the fiasco and the final out came after a Gomez overthrow from center field fooled a Seattle runner into trying to score.

“He’s probably a little frustrated with himself for leaving Perkins in there,” Ron Coomer said of Gardenhire afterward, adding: “It was obvious Perkins was getting a little tired.”

Gardy, for his part, offered up one of those colorful inside-baseball phrases for the early-morning postgame audience.

“That first ptch to Ibanez was a cock shot,” he explained.

Back in my baseball-covering days, when the phrase “cock shot” was uttered as part of a quote, it would end up in parenthesis as [right down the middle]. A light-hitting Twins shortstop of many years ago once lost his job with the team after complaining to me that he wasn’t allowed to swing one afternoon in Baltimore when the Orioles kept throwing him [right down the middle].

For an encore, Gardy explained that when the Mariners pinch hit Jeff Clement, owner of a .185 average, in the seventh with the score 6-6: “We knew the guy is a fastball hitter and we throw him a fastball right down the cock with the bases loaded.”

Brutal, dreadful, enough blame for everyone to share. And, as a bonus, Seattle’s slew of runs was shown to the nation on ESPN, which was offering up “bonus coverage” because of the rain that kept delaying the Astros-Cubs game in Chicago.

It was a weird night throughout baseball. Joba Chamberlain walked off the mound with a sore shoulder and the Yankees lost on a Texas grand slam in the bottom of the ninth. Kansas City beat Boston. The Cubs lost at home. Prince Fielder went after one of his teammates in the Milwaukee dugout. The Angels and K-Rod blew a 4-run lead in the top of the ninth and then rallied to win in the bottom of the ninth.

Overall, a sum total of strange and unexpected events, with the tied-for-first-place Twins topping them all by letting an overmatched opponent rise up and run off with a game that never should have been lost. In the future, let’s all try not to be so cocksure about things.

Sometimes it comes back to bite you in the [end].

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 1:05 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.