(Update: The Twins have called up Bobby keppel, according to a report on the Rochester newspaper’s web site. Click here for some details, with more to come later.)

Last Thursday, Nick Blackburn pitched a complete game. One of the many good things about his work was that it gave the bullpen a complete day of rest, the better to freshen them for the weekend series against the Astros. Given the fact that it was the only complete game of the season, it was a pretty good bet that the bullpen would come into play.

It did — and here’s where the second-guessing begins. The Twins’ bullpen clearly has evolved into A-listers and B-listers, with Guerrier and Mijares the A-list set-up men and Henn and Ayala the B-listers. As closer, Joe  Nathan is in a separate class (A+) and we’ll talked about the currently reliable R.A. Dickey in a bit.

On Saturday, the Twins had a great chance to grab the Houston series by the throat. Ahead 3-1 in the seventh, Scott Baker reached his 100-pitch pumpkin mark and had to be replaced. Gardy chose to try the B-listers. Eight pitches later, Sean Henn had turned a two-run lead into a two-run deficit. Replacing him, Luis Ayala yielded a home run in the eighth for a 6-3 deficit, which became key when Jason Kubel boomed a long home run (off LaTroy Hawkins) to pull the Twins within 6-5 in the bottom of the inning.

They didn’t get closer.

Last year, Gardy managed to overuse Matt Guerrier to the point of ineffectiveness. I wrote at one point last season that Guerrier may have simply lost his mojo, but his work this season (2.84 ERA, excellent 0.88 walks/hits per inning pitched) shows that I was wrong. He was overused. The overuse line is a tricky one to walk for a manager and pitching coach, but Guerrier had not pitched at all in the Pittsburgh series and had thrown 18 pitches in helping to protect Kevin Slowey’s lead on Friday.

So it seems like he should have been available on Saturday, along with Mijares, who has been frustrating and maddening at times but still has been the most effective of the bullpen lefties. Mijares had thrown 13 pitches on Friday after being off since Tuesday (13 pitches). Before that, his last game was a 6-pitch appearance at Wrigley Field the previous Friday.

Here’s the deal. If Gardy uses the A-listers (and Nathan) to lock down the game on Saturday, I’m going to understand if he doesn’t want to trot them out again on Sunday.  Sometimes, you do have to entrust a game to the B-listers and hope for the best. That’s also why B-listers are typically the relievers of first call when a team is trailing by a couple of runs, like Wednesday when Henn/Ayala combined to turn a 4-2 deficit into an 8-2 bulge — frustrating but that’s the difference between protecting a two-run lead and hoping for the best with a two-run deficit. (The best case, of course, would be to have a deeper bullpen. But that stain can’t be removed right now with warm water and paper towels.)

I suspect that handling an inconsistent bullpen is among the hardest parts of managing. Gardy had used Guerrier in four straight games the previous week — Wednesday/Thursday at Oakland and Friday/Saturday at Wrigley. He threw only 30 pitches combined in those games, but I started thinking about his slide of ‘08 when I saw him being used on Day 3 and (especially) Day 4. I’m guessing I wasn’t the only one.

As for Dickey, whose ERA has dropped from 5.93 to 2.56 in his last 10 games (25 innings, 20 baserunners, 2 earned runs), he needs to become the third A-lister among the set-up men. Dickey is deserving based on that work and the failures of Ayala and Henn. If the Twins aren’t going to make a move right away, let Ayala be the guy who goes 2 or 3 innings when needed, and bring in Dickey to get through the seventh or eighth in concert with Guerrier and Mijares.

Twins catchers have so far shown the ability to handle his knuckleball and I’d rather take the risk of passed balls than what seems to be the bigger risk of protecting leads with Henn and Ayala — at least until better options are brought into the bullpen.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 9:57 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.