Well, that was craptastic. Yes, I know that word is probably beneath the dignity of our slice of the Internet, but the only other ones I can think of are a little bit too vile, and I would regret seeing them attached to my name when looking back some day at my body of cyberwork.

The Twins gave away Game 2 in so many ways: Leaving 17 men on base… Gomez’ run-erasing baserunning gaffe… Leaving 17 men on base… Nathan’s pathetic ninth inning… Leaving 17 men on base… Young and Gomez swinging at first pitches in their bases-loaded at-bats in the 11th… Leaving 17 men on base… Nathan’s pick-off throw into center field in the 10th… Leaving 17 men on base… Kubel’s four strikeouts… Leaving 17 men on base.

So while Nathan’s performance will likely be the one that stands out over time, there were plenty of other people who contributed to the Game 2 demise.

As Joe Mauer said afterward, “We could have won the game earlier.”

Gotta like that for understatement.

Mauer made his comment when he was weighing in on the hubbub surrounding the blown call in the 11th by umpire Phil Cuzzi, who ruled Mauer’s fly ball foul when it clearly dropped about 10 inches inside fair territory. Called correctly, it would have been a ground-rule double. According to SI.com, Mauer went so far as to imply that Kubel’s at-bat could have ended differently if Mauer had been on second base instead of first (with the single he got after the blown call) because there wouldn’t have been the big hole between first and second that resulted from him being held on base. Kubel singled through that hole to right.

I also can’t help but think about the pitch that hit the muumuu that Brandon Inge wears for a baseball jersey during Tuesday’s Game 163. You know, the one that would have given the Tigers a lead in the 12th inning if it had been properly called. (Wearing a uniform top four sizes too big isn’t against the rules.) As Twins fans, we can be outraged by one call and whimsical about the other, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be called on our inconsistency.

This is probably petty, but the thing that seems to be bugging me most about these first two games is what the Twins have done to rehabilitate A-Rod’s reputation as a post-season puddle of ineptitude. He had two key hits in Game 1 and the game-tying homer off Nathan, which included that smarmy look-at-me fist pump toward the Yankees dugout — just so he could make sure they’d all been watching, I guess. Lame.

The Twins have proven beyond doubt that you can beat a favored team without playing excellent baseball.

It’s just that when you reach a critical mass of mental mistakes, individual meltdowns and game-long bouts of ineptitude, you’re not likely to beat the New York Yankees — or even the New Britain Rock Cats.

***

There’s been a lot of blog comment chatter about the Chip Caray/Ron Darling team that’s calling the games on TBS. Normally, I stay away from critiques of network announcers because, frankly, I don’t expect much from them. However, I can say without hesitation that listening to Caray and Darling is like hearing an audition tape from a couple of guys in Moose Jaw. The omissions and mistakes are painful. I’m still trying to figure out who the “Spanish players” are on the Twins’ roster, a conversation snippet from Game 1. Rafael Nadal and Pau Gasol? Darling often sounds like he’s trying to figure out what Caray just said.

Richard Sandomir, who writes about sports media for the New York Times, offered the other day: “Every announcer makes mistakes, but Caray’s lips form a pattern of an announcer out of his element.” For Sandomir’s entire takedown, go here.

It’s kind of sad to write this. I remember listening to Chip’s grandfather, Harry, do White Sox games (which was before he started the doing the Cubs). When I was in college, and cable was rare enough that you had to go to a dive bar in Bloomington to watch the Cubs on cable, Harry was there watching them (he was in town for a Twins-White Sox game) and he bought me a Budweiser.

At least on Sunday, I’ll be at the Dome so I won’t have to listen to Chip ‘n’ Ron The baseball in this series so far has generated enough pain. The broadcasters needn’t add to it.

***

Saturday morning update: There’s a query below asking if I’m “going to own up to my miscall” about the Twins starting Gomez in center field for Game 2.

No, I’m not.
As the questioner points out, Span made a catch early in the game that I don’t think Kubel makes. And I’m not sure if Span, who doesn’t have Gomez’ range in center, gets to Posada’s fly ball that led off the sixth. And Gomez’ two-out walk — yes, a Carlos Gomez walk — started the two-out, two-run Twins rally in the eighth.

So, yes, Gomez made an egregious error that went a long way toward costing the Twins the game. But  calling the decision to start him a “miscall” in short-sighted and revisionist.

(I’ll be on MPR with Gary Eichten talking Twins at noon today. We’re at 91.1 FM and www.mpr.org for the webcast.)

I’m glad that Nick Blackburn is pitching because, between his excellent tie-breaker pitching last season and his gems against the Tigers in Game 1 of last Tuesday’s doubleheader (which seems like a month ago) and against Zack Greinke on Saturday, he is my big-game choice. In his last four starts, he’s given up only 5 runs in 27 1/3 innings and let barely put than one man on base per inning (28 in that stretch). Whatever his mid-season struggles were, he seems to have dealt them and I’m glad he’s the choice.

This is such a crazy series in that the Twins basically were in no realistic position to compete well in Game 1 without an extraordinary effort, which didn’t happen. Now, against the team with the best record in baseball and a stranglehold over them during the past few years, the Twins have to win three out of four.

Twins chances: slim and some.

There are so many words in motion about this game, that I want to make one suggestion and then get out:

I want Carlos Gomez in center field tonight.

There’s lot of ground to cover in the Yankee Stadium outfield, especially from left-center to right-center, and we’ve seen several balls in recent games that may have been caught if Denard Span was in right field instead of center. (There’s less ground than the old Yankee Stadium, but still a lot.) During Gardy’s late-game defensive moves, Span has made two catches — one against Detroit and one against Kansas City — that were beyond what Kubel would have made. (Kubel is a workmanlike outfielder; Span is an excellent corner outfielder.)

And the Jose Morales of the last couple of weeks isn’t hitting like the Jose Morales whom many people wanted to see replace Mike Redmond earlier this season. Morales was so overmatched against Rick Porcello on Tuesday that Gardy lifted him after two at-bats, and I don’t think that bodes well for a prime-time appearance in Yankee Stadium. In addition his 4-for-29 in the last couple of weeks, Morales has only two extra-base hits (doubles) since being recalled in September and given significant DH time. (Both of those doubles came in one game against Cleveland.) This just isn’t his time.

I’ve been telling people who wondered about the Young-Span-Kubel outfield as a daily event that it’s been worth giving up the offense to get Morales or Harris in the lineup at DH.

Now, it’s different. Big outfield, big game … and the potential for a fly ball or a line drive that may call for one of the biggest defensive plays of the season.

Start Gomez.

(Note: I’ll be doing a baseball hour with Gary Eichten on Midday at noon Friday. You can listen at 91.1 FM or www.mpr.org.)

All of the talk about momentum and a fresh start and this and that was pretty much fueled by the same lack of sleep and focus that made the Game 1 outcome pretty much inevitable. Team gets to New York at 4 a.m. or so with a 6 p.m. game ahead of it after the tumultuous excitement of the previous day and you expect them to go out and beat the Yankees, of all teams?

In normal times, this would have been one of those games where you put out the “B” lineup and hope for the best.

Of course, that wasn’t going to happen in the postseason opener.

Instead, rather than try to bring Nick Blackburn back again on short rest, Gardy and Rick Anderson opted to throw rookie Brian Duensing at the Yankees — and got predictable results. Using Blackburn would have been like inviting the Cub Scout troop over for dinner and bringing out the good china, a waste of effort and quite possibly destructive in the long term. If Blackburn pitches well and the Twins lose 3-2, they’re still the same one game down as they are by losing 7-2 … or if they’d lost 17-2 and actually gotten more of the suits in the $1,506 seats behind home plate to cheer once in a while.

Now, if the Twins somehow force this series to a fifth game, Gardy can use Blackburn on Wednesday with regular rest. In the meantime, Duensing can be available if the Twins need to get through a left-leaning inning and Francisco Liriano can check out all the cool stuff in and around the Yankee Stadium bullpens. (Yes, it was weird to hear John Gordon introduce Liriano as “the Franchise” during Sunday’s Metrodome-closing ceremonies, but keep in mind that franchises come in all kinds — and I’m not going to be the one snarky enough to call him “Dollar Store.”)

The play that reinforced no how/no way/no win came in the bottom of the fourth when Nick Swisher doubled with two outs and Robinson Cano scored from first base when Delmon Young bounced his throw to Orlando Cabrera and Cabrera’s replay bounced and went wide of the plate. If those throws had been better, Cano is out at home. If one of them is better, Cano is probably out and the score stays tied at 2.

Then, in the next inning, Duensing found too much plate while facing A-Rod and Liriano grooved a pitch to Hideki Matsui and it was pretty much game over.

Again, in a game played on more equal footing, I don’t think Liriano is the one who comes in to face Matsui.

Don’t read this as complaint about the conditions under which the Twins were required to play. The Twins could have avoided this by winning the AL Central in 162 games instead of 163 and the Yankees were perfectly justified in choosing to start Wednesday instead of today. Those are the same advantages we would have expected the Twins to take if circumstances were in their favor.

What happened in Game 1 was that the Twins pretty much did what they could to survive and, yes, it’s improbable to imagine them winning three of the next four from the Yankees after all of the recent history between the teams.

But the current Twins are no strangers to the improbable, right?

I wouldn’t take it to the bank. But I’m cool with going into an alley and rolling the dice.

Where to begin?

Maybe at the end, with the unexpected exacta of Carlos Gomez scoring the winning run on a single by Alexi Casilla. If someone had asked you to name the game’s heroes and you picked those two,  I suspect you would have been hauled away for a drug test. And Bobby Keppel as winning pitcher? The same Bobby Keppel who had rung up embarrassing numbers in his previous tries to be a major league pitcher and again last season when his ERA banged up close to 6 in Class AAA. Little wonder he was at the head of the posse to greet Gomez when he scored the winning run.

But go through the box score of this incredible game and you will find pieces of heroics next to many, many names. There was the big stuff — the OC and Kubel home runs, the Cuddyer triple and the marvelous play that Punto made getting the force at home in the 12th. And there was the small stuff — Mauer nursing shaky pitchers through tough times, new hires Rauch and Mahay retiring key batters in brief stints, Gardy getting a clearly overmatched Jose Morales out of the game midway through the game, the Cuddyer walk that chased Tigers starter Rick Porcello. Everyone who batted for the Twins got a hit except for Morales anmd Brendan Harris, who got hit by a pitch instead.

Gardy and Rick Anderson pretty much co-managed their a$$e$ off over those 4 3/4 hours. They ran eight pitchers out to the mound, and worked their way through some unexpected situations. Most notable was Guerrier’s shrinking strike zone in the eighth, which forced Joe Nathan to come in early to get through that inning and the ninth. The trade-off for Gardy taking no chances early was that he was forced to take chances late — keeping Keppel on the mound and warming up Manship and Liriano at times in the late, late going.

Meanwhile, Jim Leyland was more of a minimalist, which meant that his closer, Fernando Rodney, was in his fourth inning of work when Gomez led off with a single and scored on Casilla’s one-out bouncer to right. Had the Twins lost, the “why pull Nathan?” chorus would have been a loud and lengthy one. You know that, right? Both managers had to choose their poisons and then hope they wouldn’t be lethal. Leyland got stung when he opted to keep Zach Miner in for the seventh, when Cabrera hit his home run that moved the Twins into a 4-3 lead that lasted until Magglio Ordonez homered off Guerrier to start the eighth

But enough about the game. For fans, both the buildup and the play itself did a pretty good job of replicating the World Series years while providing a new batch of memorable wrinkles. The Dome got that loud when Cabrera homered, and again at various times as the Twins and Tigers jabbed and danced while looking to deliver a knockout. There was an older man sitting next to me whose eyes were probably better in the ’80s and ’90s, as he often asked me for details so he could fill out his scorecard while we watched from halfway up the second deck. But he was as loud as anyone around us when it came to the cheering part. There was an infant smiling through much of the din whose parents came to the game separately, so when Junior had had enough, one could go and the other could stay. That boy will grow up well-parented.

Our friend Sooze, the Babes Love Baseball blogger, was thrilled that she saw nine innings after a crazed search for parking that caused her not to arrive until the third inning. She was the one with the Spantastic banner in the upper deck and the baseball tattoo on her shoulder. We shouted, we yelped, we took pictures. We called people so they could hear the noise when the winning run scored. We waited with atypical urban patience in the parking lot afterward and didn’t mind a bit.

Perhaps my best move was the TiVo TBS for 5 1/2 hours starting at 4 p.m. So I have the entire fabulous game to watch if I don’t get enough of a highlight fix from ESPN and KSTP over the next few hours. I hope you get a chance to hear Dan Gladden’s radio call of the winning hit. There are no memorable catchphrases — “And we’ll see you tomorrow night,” for example — but it is clean and it is minimal and the excitement is conveyed by tone of voice.

And now the Yankees. I’ll let Game 1 pass before I deal with that. You deal with it, Gardy!

The Twins are on a business trip.

Their fans are on a joy ride.

Not going very deep today. Win and the Twins are in and we have baseball at least through the weekend.

Lose and the Twins join 22 other teams on the sidelines.

I liked having a day to breathe between Games 162 and 163, even though it turns everything into a scurry on the other end for the winning team.

The thing I keep thinking about today is how much fun this has been. That was reinforced for me last night while I was watching the Vikings-Packers game and, more specifically, watching Brett Favre.

The guy has fun playing football, and that makes him fun to watch. And I say this as someone who has retained one hometown loyalty on the pro sports landscape — to the Bears. They may be fine and perfectly serviceable quarterbacks, but T-Jack and Rosenfels don’t give off the exuberance vibe that has set Favre apart during his Vikings months.

I can’t get inside the heads of those who reduce sports to ongoing curmudgeonly commentary. Yes, there are times when your team will make you crazy — and it’s perfectly OK to call them out for it. Because when that happens, the game isn’t as much fun for the players, and probably isn’t as much fun for you. Watching baseball is fun (almost) regardless. Watching Sean Henn, to name one earlier this season, wasn’t as much fun.

I don’t care right now that the AL Central is the weakest of the American league’s three divisions, which makes it the third best among baseball’s six divisions, right?  It’s October 6th and I’m going to a baseball game — which I also hope to be doing on October 11th, for that matter.

Back in my traveling basketball coaching days, I used to tell my players that I was all about having fun — but that we weren’t going to have fun by getting our brains beat out. You work hard in practice and we can have a lot of fun. Get a 20-point lead and the big kid can bring the ball upcourt and the point guard can post up.

Advice for today: Knock off work early, find a gathering place, prepare for so much tension that you won’t notice when it gets dark outside and get ready to celebrate. Have a “fired up/ready to go” afternoon and evening.

Figuring out how to survive the Yankees can wait for a day.