Note to Twins: It's not getting on base that counts. You have to make it all the way home.
Come on, guys. We need to do better. Hard to say what the problem is or who's to blame, and I wouldn't care if it was just a glitch a great lineup was having through the first third of a season. But this isn't a new problem. I haven't looked up the stats on this, and I don't intend to because i'm confident they will depress me, but I think we all know this has been a recurring problem for several years with us. More importantly, it's a problem that seems to follow us when it matters, like for instance in the playoffs, when we have absolutely humped the dog with runners in scoring position. Last year's Yankees series was an embarrassment. And it's not Nick Punto striking out against Sabathia. It's our god hitters.
This is a great team. It's a great group of players. They can play so excited and so clutch and as much as any team in the league, they never quit. When they come to play they can light it up as good as any team we've had. But they blow chances like they get a bonus for it. This shit hurts your pitching, it forces you to stretch your lineup and it means you have to make hard comebacks against teams you shouldn't. We just need to do better. Fix it. That's all I'm saying. I'm looking at you, Gardy.
4 Comments:
I was watching Saturday's game on MLBTV. The quote of the game had to be "This is Jason Kubel's third chance to win the game."
May 24, 2010 at 9:56 AM
Great point RTS
May 24, 2010 at 12:27 PM
Wow...I didn't realize it was quite this bad. Most runners left in scoring position in the league? WOW. Terrible. If our "clutch" hitting even regresses part of the way back to the mean, we should be in great shape, considering we're in first place despite the repeated debacles. I seem to remember that we actually were the opposite in '06 or '07, when our run differential was terrible, but we had the best BA with RISP in the American League. Someone will need to confirm this, though, as I can't remember for sure.
I'm happy that we took 2-of-3 from the Brew Crew, but it would have been awfully nice to sweep them.
May 24, 2010 at 4:17 PM
BG's right. Our batting with runners in scoring position was way out of whack in '06 and '08, I think. To the point where people like Rob Neyer were having to figure out why it continued for so long because it just didn't mesh with any probability analysis; we were beating the odds somehow.
Not quite true about run-differential, though. If you just look at runs scored vs. runs allowed, we haven't veered from predictible W-L results. Our best year, '06, we were like +135 or something. In '07, when we finished under .500, we were a -. That said, we probably scored more runs than we should have in some of those year, juicing the differentials so they're not an accurate picture of the total offense.
None of that erases the frustration of the flailing right now, though. It's hard to watch putting guys on base every single inning and coming out of the game with 2 or 3 runs instead of 6 or 7. I think dropping Cuddy in the lineup would help. Delmon's not producing the last week, but he doesn't ground out as much by rolling over on outside corner fastballs the way Cuddy does every. single. fucking. time. Young will push that to right field sometimes and lessen the number of times Morneau walks only to get erased by a GIDP.
May 26, 2010 at 10:15 AM
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