On Friday, I watched the whole thing.

On Saturday, I went to pick up friends at the airport when A-Rod went deep. Didn’t hear it.

On Sunday, I missed most of the game to attend a banquet. The food made me queasy. It was the better alternative.

On Monday, I opted for errands after watching the first two innings and listened off and on (to the Yankees announcers) until getting home for the ninth, when ESPN’s wonderfully soft-spoken Orel Hersheiser — speaking about Yankees reliever Phil Coke — said that if a pitcher doesn’t adjust after four or five bad pitches, “it makes you wonder if anyone’s home between the ears.” Smoothest takedown ever, maybe.

Lord only knows what Hersheiser was thinking about Glen Perkins, who showed all the fight of Peter McNeeley in that Mike Tyson comeback bout. For those of you who like your numbers raw, Perkins has now given up 24 earned runs in 23 innings since those three early starts that gave people hope about his readiness to be a solid major league pitcher. The mystery, of course, is why a pitcher who has shown the ability to move batters off the plate stops doing it. Was he hurting that badly the whole time?

Perkins can ponder that mystery from the disabled list, where he was placed after the game because of tingling in his fingers that he didn’t tell the training staff about until after his first-inning departure. Perkins, who was hurt for almost the entire 2007 season, was likely caught in that ugly place between playing through pain and wondering whether he should tell someone about it. Easy for us to tell him what to do.

Sidelining Perkins, though, doesn’t really address the big issue, which is that the Twins played four close games with the Yankees while putting up a wretched victory-defying number (3 for 35 with runners in scoring position) and continuing to do the little things (and some big ones) wrong. In other words, they were chasing their tails off instead of battling them off. I’m not going to infer that the Twins were a few hits away from victories in New York, though, because you never know how many more big hits the bullpen could have coughed up if given the opportunity.

Part of that 3 for 35 can be attributed to chasing bad pitches (Carlos Gomez swinging at the first pitch in the seventh last night after a bases-loading walk was the latest example, unless I missed one.) Young220 was listening to that at-bat and said the Yankees announcers weren’t worried about Gomez coming to the plate because they noted that he tends to swing at everything. And there were base-running flubs and, of course, that continuing run of horrendous late-game pitching.

Meanwhile, every home run the Twins hit during the series came with the bases empty. More numbers? Gardy is now 3-23 at Yankee Stadium; Jesse Crain and Craig Breslow’s scoreless work Monday lowered their ERAs to 8.25 and 6.75 respectively. When Breslow came in last night, Yankees radio commentator Suzyn Waldman deadpanned: “Breslow’s not exactly getting it done.” By the way (given the tendency we all have to criticize announcers for their gaffes), Waldman and John Sterling were almost totally on top of Joe Mauer’s incredible play at the plate Sunday afternoon — the non-throw and dive-bomb tag of Brett Gardner. They pretty much nailed it in real time and then broke it down further while watching replays. It was enough to make up for Sterling’s obnoxious and forced home run calls: “It’s a Tex message! You’re on the Mark, Teixeira!” (I suspect, though, he’s no longer shouting “Jorgie juiced one”  for a Jorge Posada home run.)

I have no laundry list of suggestions for you right now. I mean, how many times can I say that this Luis Ayala nightmare has to stop and the Twins need to attack their bullpen issues sooner rather than later? It is a blessing they are only 3 1/2 games out of first place, and the teams ahead of them are the teams that conventional wisdom had finishing fourth and fifth in the division. Alexi Casilla’s recall shouldn’t be far off if he continues to keep his OBP at Rochester in the .400 range. But there’s not much else to get excited about on the Red Wings’ roster. Outfielder Dustin Martin, whom some people want called up, has one home run and 29 strikeouts in 136 at-bats. Garrett Jones without power? Jason Pridie is among a batch of players — more than half the team’s position players — who have OBPs below .300. Anthony Swarzak (4-3, 2.25) could be the winner of the Perkins replacement starts (Saturday against Milwaukee and next Thursday against Boston), if Gardy doesn’t go with R.A. Dickey.

It’s probably time to end this stream of consciousness. But one more thing: The Waldman/Sterling team rubbed dirt on the wound toward the end of last night’s game by bringing up Mauer’s contract status. Signed through 2010 … will command an armored truckload of money … how would the Twins replace him? … all of our fears in a 60-second aside, during which Waldman said something like: “What if the Twins decided they couldn’t afford him?”

To which Sterling replied, “I don’t think the Twins could let that happen.”

Thanks, buddy.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 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.