Sometimes, Ms. Baseball seems amazed at my ability to react stoically to bad baseball.

I’m comfortable with pointing out that even the worst of games is only 1 of 162 and that, sometimes, maybe it’s good to get all the stinking out in a short period of time. I can watch when a certain outfielder acquired for Jason Bartlett falls behind 0-and-2 and matter-of-factly say: “…and now the slider in the dirt for strike three…” right before the batter makes his U-turn to the dugout. Or when a  diminutive infielder comes to bat in a key situation and I can deadpan, “…another clutch situation ripe for taking a called third strike.” In a sport where failing 65 percent of the time (on offense) constitutes success, expecting the worst helps pad the landing, I guess.

I’m just not the “I CAN’T BELIEVE HE’S BRINGING IN THAT SO-AND-SO IN THIS SITUATION!” kind of fan. Not with baseball, anyway. (Can’t say that applies to watching the Bears or this season’s Gophers basketball team, though. Consider yourself warned, Jay Cutler and Royce White.) Maybe it’s the permanent byproduct of the years when I’d see 200 games a year from spring training through the end of the postseason. Maybe it was going to a college that lost 50 football games in a row back in my day and just went through a victory-free men’s basketball season. Whatever, that calm serves me well.

Every now and again, though, a game will make me irrationally, look-for-a-small-object-to-throw, crazy. Monday night’s loss to Toronto was one of them, a game with enough breakdowns to remind me of the Chevy Citation I once drove.

It was distressing to watch Kevin Slowey giving up 2,471 hits over 5 1/3 innings. After lauding him for making adjustments in his first start, it looked Monday like Slowey was content with playing catch. Luis Ayala doesn’t get a lot of strikeouts, so when he’s pitching without location he’s a better bet to hurt the Twins than help them. Seven batters faced, four hits. Or was it 400? Game-tying single on his first pitch followed by a double and game-losing home run a few minutes later.

My frustration with Ayala may well be tied into the fact that I was happy about the Twins signing him.

Wait, there’s more! Delmon Young flailing at strike three twice with a man on third and nobody out. (Even weak contact likely scores a run.) Nick Punto whiffing twice with the bases loaded and two out. (Anguish tempered by his two-RBI single in the second and another fine defensive day.) Michael Cuddyer’s bad-call juju that got him called out at second when he was clearly safe on a steal attempt and at first on a double-play grounder he appeared to beat out. (Umpires can make me cranky too.) Alexi Casilla jumping at the ball on every swing from the right side of the plate (0 for 11 so far), Joe Crede’s eighth-inning strikeout, Gardy pulling Matt Guerrier (who’s looking pretty good to me now) after he gave up that single in the seventh when the Twins still led 6-5.

And that’s not counting how Toronto tried to give away the game with its base-running and bad defensive choices. A team playing solid baseball would have won that game 10-2 instead of losing it 8-6.

Really, it was only a cheap pen that got launched. Didn’t touch the Easter basket.

For his own mental health, Gardy preferred to isolate the pitching in his postgame comments.  Even if it wasn’t 110 percent accurate, he could stand solidly on the point that six runs should be enough to win. I could feel Gardy battling (his tail off) to keep from saying how he really felt about some of what he’d watched. He did well at keeping it together, which is good thing with 154 games left to play.

If the Twins had kept it together during the game as well as Gardy did after the game, no doubt they would have won.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 at 8:40 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.