A fine night for baseball with the Twins winning and taking over first place again in the AL Central. Delmon goes deep and then doesn’t take any garbage when Zack Greinke hit him during the five-run sixth. Greinke has a suspension pending for his role in last weekend’s White Sox dust-up and I’m willing to believe that he was just stupid enough to be throwing at Delmon in that situation. Delmon did a good job of riling things up and then the Twins did a nice job of keeping things from getting ugly — and making their ultimate answer with a bunch of runs that broke open the game.

But back to baseball in Kansas City.

*First off, they are very tolerant of beach balls here. They were floating all over the park Friday and Saturday night and the blind eye that gets turned was confirmed when a beachball came to rest in the lower-level walkway — and a “Fan Assist” employee lazily kicked it into the back of a fan’s wheelchair. Nobody ever got hurt by a beachball that I know of, and I find them rather low on the list of ballpark distractions.

*People don’t get all hyper about bobbleheads here, either. It was Larry Gura Bobblehead Night and the ’70s and ’80s era Royals pitcher was on hand to autograph the 20,000 that were being given away. From what we could tell, there were enough for everyone who wanted one and you didn’t have to sleep outside the gates to get one. Not hardly. I think people here, while they have a crummy baseball team to follow, have a healthy perspective on the ceramic doohickeys. We may leave our Guraheads along I-35 during the drive home. So if you want one, check a rest area or a drive-thru.

*The funniest thing the Royals do is show recap highlights late in the game that, if you used ‘em to figure out what was happening, the Royals would be undefeated at Kauffman Stadium. You could watch Greinke strike out and Olivo hit a home run, and a myriad of other small accomplishments by the home team. But the game recap offered nothing about anything that went against the Royals. Kind of like Chinese television, in a much more harmless way.

The day threatened rain but the night was a beautiful one and there were many more Twins fans on hand Saturday than Friday. It wasn’t like being in the Dome, but you didn’t have to look far to find your allies. There’s a lot of “Go Twins” stuff in the hotel lobby as I’m writing this.

One final baseball word. I know there’s a lot of Adam Everett skepticism out there, but seeing him in person gives you a sense of the range he has, even though it’s obvious that his arm still isn’t 100 percent. He made a diving stop with two outs in the eighth and almost turned a spectacular force play at second, and then made a very good rangy play to get the final out with a quick and off-balance flip to third.

Everett also smacked a nice hit-and-run single in the second and drew a walk from Greinke that was key to the five-run sixth. I don’t know what his status will be when/if Casilla returns, but I think he’s going to get nothing but better with more work in the field and more at-bats. I can see what the Twins were thinking when they signed him.

And finally: Nice to see the bullpen throw 3 1/3 shutout innings without having to use Nathan, Crain or Guerrier. Booooooooooooooooof!

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 9th, 2008 at 11:20 pm 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.