I wasn’t the first person, or the 100th, to sign on with the Brendan Harris-for-shortstop campaign. At this point, however, it’s even more obvious that he needs to be the Twins shortstop unless the Twins can find someone better in a trade. He had two hits last night — batting fifth and with the Beastly Boys behind him in the batting order — and made that full-sprawl diving stop in the same inning when Carlos Gomez channeled Torii Hunter at the wall.

Beastly Boys? That’s Delmon Young and his 19-for-37 streak of strikeouts (with three singles and one RBI) dating back to May 9) and Brian Buscher, who has 1 hit in his last 20 at-bats. Yes, I know Gomez (who was batting eighth last night) isn’t carrying weight at the plate, but he does pretty well at the part of the game called catching the ball, which kind of helps in center field. Now, he needs to do something about mistaking Section 133 for third base when throwing in that direction.

Speaking of Delmon, an argument was made recently that he improves as the season goes along, so pointing out his 32.2 percent strikeout rate over his first 121 plate appearances constitutes an unfair sample size. Last year, in his first 121 PAs, Delmon’s strikeout rate was only 17.3 percent (compared to 18.2 percent for the entire season). In 2007, it was 19.8 percent at the same point (compared to a season-long 18.6). Strikeouts aren’t the only way to judge offensive offense, but a leap of that size is disconcerting.

When Arizona’s Mark Reynolds set a single-season strikeout record last year with 204, he whiffed in 33.3 percent of his times to bat–and also hit 28 home runs.

Whatever the case, with Michael Cuddyer looking to be out of the lineup for a few days and Jason Kubel using Tony Oliva’s knees, Delmon is likely to get some more playing time. Let’s hope that the playing time-brings-benefits argument will mean something.

On a team that ranks in the top half of the American League in every offensive category, I’m not putting the blame for Delmon on Joe Vavra. That’s silly.

I won’t dwell on Buscher. He simply looks overmatched this season and there’s little going on at Rochester, which is in the bottom half of every International League offensive category, that demands a look.

***

If you get a chance today, I recommend reading some of yesterday’s comments about how people became baseball fans. Lots of good reading that spans the three generations since the Twins came to Minnesota.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 at 9:19 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.