Can We Get Interleague Play to Last All Year?
Wow, the National League blows. Again. Over the last 5 years, the AL's gone like .600 against the NL. The Twins are 12-3 right now. If we were in the NL West we'd be 15 games over .500.
Regardless of the competition, it's nice to win 8 in a row. I mentioned earlier in the year I just didn't see this team having that sort of ability. But the rotation's come on really strong lately. It's the end of June and we're just out of first (and the Cubbies get to go pwn the Sox again this weekend so if we can take two of three from the Brews again we might take the division lead into July).
All that said, I still maintain this is total smoke and mirrors. This squad's got a +7 run differential. That screams .500 team.
LH, I think all this talk of going to Twins open tryouts is misguided. You should be trying out for the Dodgers or Rockies or Nats or Reds or Pirates or Brewers or Padres or Giants, my god, the list is endless. I'm going to start mentally discounting the stats of guys who've played in the National League in recent years. Definitely discounting Chipper Jones and Lance Berkman's numbers this year - they're hitting AAA pitching half the time.
Is it too early to man crush on Brian Buscher? Dude's hitting like .500 and appears to have cleared up the old 3B problem for the time being. How is he defensively?
5 Comments:
Ageed on the NL's suckiness. With the exception of when the Cubs swept the CWS, we haven't realy gained a whole lot of ground. All the AL teams have thumped the NL.
I am not willing to call it smoke and mirrors, but they have to play better against the AL central or they will end up right at .500.
June 27, 2008 at 1:57 PM
Let's just be happy with what we have for now. The 9 game winning streak and taking 11 of your last 12 is pretty damn exciting (if memory serves we took 2 of 3 from the Brew Crew then aced the Nats, D-Bags, and Padres.)
What is exciting is that our young pitching has held up, no doubt this could implode in the second half but we essentially need to hang around or make a run of our own. Think about it again - Slowey, Perkins, Blackburn, Liriano, Baker. Nice young talent.
The +7 is brutal especially when you look at CWS who are like +70 (granted 30 of those came against the us over one weekend.)
Love it how we are always counted out.
June 27, 2008 at 2:22 PM
I think it's the East and West that are hurting us. If I'm not mistaken, we've taken care of bidness against the rest of the Central with the exception of the Sox. We're probably 3-18 against the Angels, Orioles and Blue Jays.
Fair enough, jan. I don't want to be a wet blanket, and it's certainly good news that we're where we are right now.
Always counted out, except by Ozzie Guillen, of course. He was going on again today in the paper about how "I told you in Spring Training to watch out for them. Maybe I do know something about baseball, hunh? Wanna fight?"
June 27, 2008 at 3:16 PM
Well, regardless of what happens the remainder of this season, we've got a good candidate for Impressive High Point of The Year as Interleague play (unfortunately) winds up: In the span of about a week, the Twins beat Brandon Webb, Jake Peavy and Ben Sheets (and Randy Johnson and Greg Maddux). Hello.
I'm off to Alaska on Tuesday A.M., so I'll be incommunicado for awhile. I'm sure you'll all miss me immensely. Just thought you'd want to know so you don't spend a week mockingly calling me out for my aloof silence.
June 29, 2008 at 3:53 PM
I'm just glad we can talk about this...I was intentionally silent for as long as the winning streak was happening. In fact, the first time I wanted to post something was after we'd beaten Webb, Unit, Maddux and Peavy on consecutive nights. Niiiiice...
Now, let's take care of bidness vs. the Tigers so we can convince them to dump some of their expensive players over to the NL (before they inevitably heat up again).
June 30, 2008 at 9:05 PM
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