Young220 (no relation to Delmon Young) and I were watching the game last night and — after the Twins scored three on the unlikely trifecta of Delmon, Gomez and Tolbert all reaching base (including the bases-loaded walk to Gomez) — I said something like, “It would be nice if they didn’t spit up the lead right away.”

They didn’t. Anthony Swarzak did.

There are other people who can tell you with some authority about umpires and their strike zones. I’m not one of them. I mean, I know that Tim McClelland’s is small but very consistent and that Tim Tschida is always right (because he’s from St. Paul and affable). But I can’t go much further than that.

What I do know is that Wally Bell’s strike zone last night seemed to extend from batter’s box to batter’s box, and the most incredible part of this loss was that Swarzak managed to miss it for 10 pitches in a row. But when you combine that kind of wildness with inexperience, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that even a career .223 hitter could wait for a fastball and smack it for the game-tying double. Matt (.185) Tolbert had pretty much taken advantage of a similar situation in the top of the inning to bring home two runs.

The Twins apparently decided they had done their offense for the night and had no answer to the Jack Cust home run that gave Oakland the lead in the fifth and was the game’s final score.

Obviously, pronouncements that Swarzak was definitely major-league ready were premature. If he survives as the fifth starter when Glen Perkins returns, it will be because Gardy and Rick Anderson have judged him more reliable than Perkins or one of the others. In an all-healthy situation, though, his stock probably dropped to No. 6 on the list, with a chance to move up if he can recapture his first-two-start form at Wrigley Field on Saturday.

This is the same sort of thing we saw from Kevin Slowey and Nick Blackburn, who had their own survival issues as rookies before getting straightened out. The Twins will need to decide whether Swarzak’s best chance to improve would be by keeping him in the rotation, moving him to the bullpen or sending him back to Rochester. For Slowey and Blackburn, management decided there would be nothing to gain from sending them down and that all would be best served by keeping them in the rotation. That proved to be the wisest course.

Wildness is a different animal, however. You can’t bring in a guy who can’t throw strikes, whether he throws 88-90 like Swarzak or 98-100 like Juan Morillo. As Swarzak told Joe C. after the game, “Obviously, I’ve got to work on something. I mean, this ain’t going to cut it.”

Two other things from last night: How bad would that fourth-inning have been without the two diving plays by Brendan Harris,  d/b/a The Shortstop Without Much Range? Grimaces in the batter’s box notwithstanding, Harris is making it harder and harder for Gardy to pull him from the everyday lineup.

The other thing: Looking at where Swarzak melted down, was anyone else surprised that Gardy didn’t make Sean Henn his first reliever when three of the first four Oakland batters coming up were left-handers? You can argue that the fourth inning is too early to worry about that.

But, uhhhh, take a look at Ayala’s splits, including that 2.45 walks/hits per inning against lefties), and tell me what you think.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 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.