Saturday, May 05, 2007

The Punches Don't Land Again

If I was a little more like my co-blogger, I'd make a big rant here based on the performance last night's 2-0 loss to te Red Sox. However, it isn't worth landing when the symptoms simply haven't changed. The Twins problems last night are no different then they were Thursday, Wednesday, or in other recent follies.

Following that line, the Twins promptly scored no runs yesterday, had four hits, and did nothing to support a very good pitching performance from Carlos Silva. Up against Boston's tough offense, Silva went seven innings, gave up only five hits, walked two, and struck out one. The only run he gave up was a solo home run to David Ortiz, but it's awful hard to hold that against him. After all, through six starts, Silva is 2-2 with a 2.75 ERA.

As for the "offense," not surprisingly, Torii Hunter basically provided the only offense of the night, going 2-for-3 to bring his hitting streak to 19 games and his average to .340, while stealing his seventh base (and getting caught his second time as well). Hunter has a .650 slugging percentage, which puts his current OPS as 1.023. While Hunter continued to slug away in the midst of what could be a huge season, the only other hits came from Joe Mauer and Jason Bartlett.

Justin Morneau struggled again, as he did Thursday night, going 0-3 while drawing a walk to bring his season line to .263/.341/.482. Morneau certainly hasn't been terrible and he hasn't looked as bad as he did at the start of last season, but he also doesn't look as comfortable in the batter's box as he did in the second half of last year. He's going to have to pick it up here in May, as the pressure begins to mount on the middle of the lineup to get it done. Also, as much as I want to have Jason Tyner's at-bats kept to a minimum, he certainly as a better option than the pathetic Josh Rabe. Rabe should not be getting any starts in important games, like ones against Boston.

The good news for Twins fans is that the Twins have their best chance to break out of their offensive funk and get some scoring done today, as Boston's awful fifth starter Julian Tarvarez takes the mound against Johan Santana. This should be a win for the Twins, but considering how good they made Jae Seo look recently, I'm not hedging my bets just yet.

1 comment:

CoreyEttinger said...

I didn't even read the whole article yet (I will) but I just want to make sure that I say I was so happy for Carlos Silva last night, he pitched his ass off against a very good offensive team with a lot of firepower and made only one real bad pitch. Granted, they did make about 5 or 6-350 foot outs, but they weren't 360 foot homeruns and he certainly did more than enough to win (again).