I wanted to think that things looked pretty good last night. A quick lead and the prospect of a fresh bullpen to finish off whatever Glen Perkins couldn’t get through. In reality, though, Perkins was scaring me from the beginning and it hasn’t much mattered lately about the bullpen’s freshness. He was getting hit hard even when the Jays weren’t scoring, and got two of his outs on a double play and an outfield assist from Denard Span. Plus, it looked like every call that could have gone either way (a couple of out calls on the bases and several checked swings) was being judged in favor of the Twins.

Too good to last — and it was. Another game given away on the road trip.

The next step in the development of the young Twins starters is to learn how to lock down a lead. All too often, leads of several runs have vanished in the middle innings.The Twins have lost five games in which Perkins was staked to a lead of at least three runs and four games in which Blackburn has been given a lead of three or more. Baker and Slowey have only spit up leads like that once apiece.

You know how it is with a true ace: Get him a lead and he becomes a bulldog about keeping it.  Johan Santana squandered leads of three or more runs only five times in his final four seasons in Minnesota, and only once in his final 2 1/2 years.

That’s the next step in the journey. (And, no, you don’t have to remind me that Perkins is 12-3. We’re talking about the next step in the development of an already-good pitcher.)

***I wonder if last night’s lineup marked the “official” transition of Carlos Gomez to a role playter for the final weeks of the season. Keeping him on the bench on turf against a second-rate lefty starter seems an indication of that. The Twins have reason to be just as confident of Span in center. However, if that decision has been made, I’d feel better if Young or Ruiz were batting fifth against lefties instead of Kubel.

***Given the bullpen struggles, when will Gardy be tempted to try one of the right-handed reinforcements — Humber or Korecky — in the Crain or Boof roles? Just when we wanted to start believing in Boof again (and I don’t think we should give up hope), he looked flat when he replaced Perkins.

***Now that the third-base depth chart is almost as long as the bullpen’s (Buscher, Macri, Tolbert, Punto, Harris), how many AB’s do you think Harris will get for the rest of the season? I suspect Gardy thinks Harris should have caught Nathan’s throw in the ninth on Saturday night, and I doubly-suspect he was troubled by the give-up demeanor Harris showed at the plate in that game during his last two at-bats.

***Having said all that, the Twins are no worse off than they were at this time yesterday thanks to Cleveland’s throttling of the White Sox. Be nice if that could happen again this afternoon and give the Twins another chance to take over the top tonight.

***When the Twins leave town, I’m wondering if they could borrow Toronto’s bullpen for the rest of the month. Its statistics are in line with the way the relievers performed in the series opener, and it must be really frustrating for Jays fans to look back on their team’s dismal start while watching them play pretty good baseball right now.

***As a former official scorer, I need to weigh in on the CC Sabathia thing in Milwaukee from over the weekend, when an infield single was the only thing that stood between the very big guy and a no-hitter. Afterward, there was all kinds of carping from Milwaukee’s manager and general manager about how the official scorer blew the call, and an appeal to the league is apparently under way.

First of all, it was a good call, from what I could tell. And the official scorer was able to back up his reason for the call. Second, managers and team officials are notoriously subjective when it comes to decisions involving their players. Lobbying for hits and errors sometimes is painfully and laughably situational. It isn’t uncommon — despite league policy against it — for scorers to be challenged by team officials (and even broadcasters) about a call. It happened to me more than once, which I considered nothing more than an occupational hazard of the gig. Having John Gordon stop by to express indignation between innings wasn’t exactly going to ruin my day and some of the nonsense I hear during broadcasts from around the league shows only ignorance about rules and situations. (Whatever, it was certainly no worse than what I heard from parents of some of the basketball players I coached during AAU and traveling hoops days.)

But the most ridiculous thing I’ve read came from Milwaukee’s general manager,  Doug Melvin, who said: “You’ve got to get the writers involved, obviously, and see what their thoughts are on it. There’s a lot for one person to make that call and he’s got people on his left and on his right yelling at him. It’s not easy.”

Huh? Get the writers involved? Folks who are writing stories about the game they’re watching, sending each other text messages, surfing the web for stuff they need and doing whatever else? Back 30 years ago or more, writers who covered the game also served as the official scorer — meaning they were making calls that affected the people they were writing about and the stories they were writing. Newspapers had the good sense to make writers stop the double-dipping.

(Here’s a good story about official scoring from a newspaper in Florida.)

The answer is for “people on his left and on his right” to shut up and let the scorers do the job that major league baseball is paying them ($130/game)  to do. If MLB really wanted to upgrade the perception of official scorers, it would use five-person umpiring crews and have the fifth ump serve as that day’s scorer.

It’s pretty simple. If an official scorer can’t handle the heat, s/he shouldn’t be doing the job. In the meantime, it shouldn’t be hard for people to understand that everyone may think they could do it better, but their opinion really doesn’t matter. You know, the same mindset that managers and general managers need to have about the jobs they do.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 at 8:50 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.