Good going, Gardenhire.

Since replacing Tom Kelly, Gardenhire is one of the five winningest managers in baseball. Like Tom Kelly, he'll have that job as long as he wants it.

Gardenhire, not only goosed the team to .786 winning percentage in games Morneau did not start this season, he understands that youth drives championships, so he installed rookie Matt Tolbert at third.

Since then, the team is 16-4.

Good for Casilla, avoiding one long winter.

Bill Smith gets the last laugh, picking up O-Cab and Rausch and Mahay rather than Garcia and Washburn, allowing Gardenhire to adeptly manipulate his bullpen down the stretch.

This season is one more nail in Jim Leyland's coffin, perhaps the most overrated manager of the past 20 years.

Too bad for the city of Detroit. They got nothing going for them there. Sorry, folks.

This will mark the second season since 1989 that the Twins will finish above the league average in walks

In the 12 games since Morneau went down the Twins have 48 walks, or 4 per game. That’s a 13 percent increase in walks from before Morny's stress fracture, or as some like to erroneously call it to dramatize the situation, "a broken back."

Observant followers have known throughout the season that this edition of the Twins has been more patient than any Twins’ team in recent memory. Those same fans have noted even more patience since Morneau went down.

Whipping boy Nick Punto has a .500-plus OBP in the past seven days and more than .420 for the past month.

What is the team now? 16-3 without Morneau in the starting lineup this year?

That’s a good lesson for the "trade Cuddyer," "trade Delmon," "trade Gomez," folks, although folks like that tend to forget real quick. With someone like Jason Tyner as a spare part, a team is screwed when a daily player goes down. But with the extra talent, no such problem. Big-league teams don’t win with Jason Tyners as spare parts.

There’s no such thing as a "crowded outfield" situation or "too many starting pitchers."

• Twins get their new "most important" win of the season with three rookies in the lineup (and a 23-year-old).
• Twins now 10-2 in games Morneau doesn’t start.
• Nick Punto in September: .351 BA, .875 OPS. More hits than Morneau in fewer PAs since the All-Star break.
• Gardenhire continues his masterful bullpen orchestration: on this streak: 14 innings from the bullpen, 2 earned runs.

Twins won-loss record in player starts so far this year.

Crede 48-39 +9

Mauer 62-55 +7

Kubel 61-56 +5

Young 45-40 +5

Twins 75-72 +3

Casilla 33-31 +2

Cuddyer 68-67 +1

Span 65-64 +1

Punto 51-50 +1

Harris 47-47 --

Gomez 41-42 -1

Morneau 65-70 -5

Wow, this makes three consecutive seasons of crippling second-half slides for Justin Morneau.

Batting about .170 for the past month. Hit the All-Star mark with 70 RBI and has yet to crack 100 for the season.

It hasn't been as bad as 2007, when his second-half OPS was about .240 below his first half, but it's hard to match a dip that deep.

You could argue the inner ear problem affected him, but this isn't an isolated half-season, it's a  habit.

With September call-ups and Crede going on the DL, Gardenhire will have a full bench to work with, rather than  a 23-man roster when Crede couldn't answer the bell and a 24-man roster and two bullpen catchers when Crede could high-pants it onto the field.

Nice career for an underdog who was never supposed to make it to The Show, Redmond, but one look in April and it was clear the skills were gone. It's not just the Brett Favres of the sports world who don't want to step aside.

It must have been interesting in the Twins' front office this August as they felt hogtied on what to do with Redmond as the pages fell form the calendar at a glacial pace.

Matt Garza haunts the Twins again, turning in probably his worst start of the season and falling to 7-9 this season as Los Tigres win.

Sure, you can talk about run support.

You can talk about bad luck.

Certainly, he has pitched better than this record, but the bottom line is the Rays aren't winning when he's starting, and that's not the idea.

The Rays are 13-13 in his starts this year. For a .590 baseball club.

This will continue to be a trade people speak about for a long time, but in two seasons with the Rays Matt Garza is 18-18, and Tampa Bay is 27-29 when Garza starts.

Being this came from a pay site I won't include too much, in order to keep barristers from sweeping down,  but if you're industrious maybe you can find the whole thing in print or online.


From the Wall Street Journal Europe:

BERLIN -- Kathy Kepler, once a star ballerina at the Berlin ballet, has a saying: "Three days away, out of the ballet."

That training motto also serves her son Max, baseball's most unusual prospect. Max Kepler-Rozycki, 16, has just received an $800,000 bonus to sign with the Minnesota Twins, a stunning sum for a teenager out of Europe and a record for an amateur position player outside the U.S. and Latin America.

Officials from a dozen U.S. Major League teams, including the New York Yankees and Chicago Cubs, came to Berlin this year to check out the 1.9-meter, 86-kilogram outfielder.

NOTE: For those not familiar with the metric system, that translates into 9 foot, 720-pound outfielder. Well, maybe I'm a little off on my conversion.

...his average 30 points this month. It's a wonderful thing to miss that first month. He's still has a small enough amount of ABs that a tear like this can have an impact.

If he were to miraculously hit .400, he would do it having raised his average nearly 50 points in the final two months of the season.

As it is, he already has more hits than he had last month in 106 PAs (he's in his 70s now) and he should also pass up his June hit total.

His OBP for the month is about.525.

The Red Sox most certainly are seeing this and searching for more items of commerce - such as wall board, tire gauges and lint traps - to put their logo on to sell to the rabid Nor'easters in order to raise the ching to sign this guy in 2012.

And he's done it with Morneau in a funk.

So bad that it is August 15 and they have played only four games in which Joe Nathan would have been considered an option. The Twins have either won by so much or lost by so much that their All-Star closer has pitched twice in August and is on pace for a career low in games and innings.

The Twins really have 4-and-a-half "championship" players, with Nathan as the only pitcher. Then you have Mauer, Morneau, Span and Crede - when he can answer the bell.

You can't really win much of anything at the big-league level with so few championship players, and the way this club has played this month, it has managed to marginalize one of them.

Keep it up, boys. Since the advent of the "closer," it's not likely anyone's healthy closer appeared only four times in a month. The Twins have Nathan on such a pace.

The Twins' record this season in day games after night games is pretty awful. About 10 more losses than wins, depending on your definition of day game after night game (Does a 3 p.m. start qualify? Well, technically yes. In real life ballplayer time, maybe.)

I have come to expect a loss from the team in these games this season.

This record tells me the boys ain't been ready to play often enough this year.

...and one should always do their mind-numbing math first, but I live in the fast lane: I would have to say the Twins are 6-10 games above .500 with Crede in the lineup, and that they score at least .8 of a run per game more with him in the lineup. Maybe it's .5, but I'd have to think it's closer to a run.

Too bad he shows up about as often as Johnny Carson did in his later Tonight Show years.

Crede and Dye were the two pre-Thome White Sox players who I thought would be nice to have in Twins' uniforms. Dye's been productive longer than seems to be reasonable, but he had a couple of years in Oakland and one in Chicago where he took some time off. He missed more than half a season one of those years. So maybe he kept off some mileage there.

I doubt Crede will be so fortunate as to be producing at Dye's age, but maybe he'll get lucky. He sure as hell is a talented player. The forecast for a win always seems a little more accurate when he's in the lineup

Runs scored following groundballs that shoot past the third baseman down the line.

I would bet those batter-runners score well more than half the time.

For a pitcher, a double down the line past a third baseman is like a kick in the nuts. When I see that happen I just put a run up on the board.

If it happens with none or one out, the chances of that guy scoring must be astronomical. Higher than any other double in an identical game situation.

Dick Such never got it. Joe Vavra never got it. But Minnesota Twins' pitching coach Rick Anderson has been given a pass.

He's become "the Teflon pitching coach" as much as Ronald Reagan was "the Teflon president," because the blame slid off him onto someone else no matter what happened under his watch.

We know that big-league coaching staffs comprise pals of the manager. Art Fowler epitomized the cronyism of coaches by essentially being little more than Billy Martin's bar-rail partner.

And we know that the some or much of the success attributed to managers and coaches is directly correlated to the talent - and brains - of their players. Casey Stengel is the ideal example. He managed for 25 years, 12 with the stream-of-talent Yankees, and that was the only franchise for which he ever managed a winning season, save for one, when his team went 77-75 - and finished fifth.

But if you're going to endlessly credit a coach, if everytime some medicore journeyman shows up in the Twins' clubhouse some blogger writes, "If anyone can fix him, Andy can," (for my money, if anyone can fix him, Dave Duncan can), then there has to be a flip side of the coin. And that flip side is this season.

Neither Francisco Liriano nor Scott Baker strikes me as someone who could compute the hypotenuse of a triangle - and considering the frequency at which Baker surrenders home runs, it would make a good hobby for him - so maybe Andy doesn't isn't exactly working with Jim Palmer-like minds here, but Twins' fans and management should be sick of watching Baker fail to follow through and Liriano continue to pirouette after each pitch.

The stats don't help much here: In the past four years, hits keep rising, ERA keeps rising, strikeouts keep falling. But you can attribute the numbers to the talent, and you can even attribute the same mechanical flaws to stubborn talent, I suppose.

But when we have to watch the same crap from Baker and Liriano twice every seven days and they’re not helping the team by getting out of innings fast, keeping pitch counts down, or holding leads, it’s impossible to avoid wondering what the hell is going on. If you've been giving Rick Anderson credit for years, it's time to review your position. 

Granted there are plenty of Minnesota fans who aren't too upset by this news, but it's a damned shame about Mark Prior.

Likely done, Prior ends up with a hundred more whiffs than innings pitched, nearly a .600 winning precentage for a franchise that played .480 ball when he was in Chicago.

He could have been as special as Mauer.

(Imagine the screeds had Prior's father not hated the Twins while being obsessed about his kid playing on WGN and the Twins had decided to draft Prior rather than Mauer. The outcry would have easily eclipsed the 2002 griping about how Prior would have meant the difference for the Twins had they chosen him over Mauer.)

The consolation prize, of course, is that Prior did make well over $10 million bucks by age 28, including $1 million this year.

So his dad did get something out of the deal.

For the 10th time in their last 30 games. It's starting to look like this isn't a very good ballclub. Taking solace in an allegedly weak division doesn't change that.

This team hasn't got much personality, and working the robotic Delmon into the lineup isn't going to change it. I'm starting to think that Gardy was right last year when he said playing Gomez gave this bunch some spark.

Aside from fans in KC, Oakland and Pittsburgh, there's one phrase that is more bitter than sweet, and it's been uttered too often by Dick Bremer after a Twins' win this season: "And the Twins are back at .500."

Thanks to the parity that almost no one predicted at any time since free agency, baseball teams are more even than ever. That means the Twins would be fighting for first place with this record if they got their mail in any division in baseball - other than the National League West.

There have been only two teams to win 100 games since 2005 in the NL and AL combined, and last season 19 teams won at least 75 games and three others missed that mark by one. Basically, all that spending by the Mets and the Yankees hasn't mattered much. It's like the Minnesota State High School League - everyone has a chance.

Thanks to baseball achieving what Pete Rozelle envisioned for the NFL decades ago,parity the Twinks have been able to overcome an outfield that has been potholed bi-monthly (Cuddyer's finger, Span's inner ear problem, the death of Delmon Young's mother, plus his inability to understand he's supposed to be a big-league hitter).

Despite that and

• Alex Casilla's two dozen mental errors in about three dozen games,
• an infield that now has a spring-training spare part at starting shortstop,
• an infield that has the starting shortstop at second base,
• Joe Crede's nicks and twitches,
• a bullpen that struggled so badly the Twins were forced to dumb it down by sending baseball's smartest player to Oakland,
• a delivery from Francisco Liriano that finishes in the technically challenging pirouette,
• Scott Baker's BertBlylevenitis,
• and playing without its all-World catcher for a month,

the Twinkers are still in it.

Now it's time for this horse to quit drafting the leaders of this derby, sprint to the outside, take the lead and get Bremer to shut up about the Twins reaching sea level once again.

Casilla had to go. Too many mental mistakes, too lousy at the plate.

Now to move Skates Young out of there. He has as many errors (2) as extra base hits, and in 700 PAs with the Twins the guy who is supposed to provide right-handed punch has about the same SA as Matt Tolbert.

And Skates is an absolute clown in the field. Gomez to center, Span to left. Cuddyer to lose 5-8 pounds.

Click image for career stats

Uhlaender, big-league outfielder and scout, dies

On any other day, Karen Uhlaender would have been overjoyed to meet daughter Katie, who had just finished second in a World Cup skeleton race at Park City, Utah.

But Thursday she carried a message that their husband and father, Ted Uhlaender, had died suddenly at the family ranch near Atwood, Kan. He was 68.

Read THE ENTIRE story from the Denver Post.

Someone will naturally complain about the members of the BBWAA who did not vote for Rickey Henderson on first ballot. I see no problem with that, and it's quite likely those who did not just feel there is no reason to vote in anyone on the first ballot.

There are many excellent players who failed to get in on first ballot. Harmon Killebrew waited four turns, while Reggie Jackson waltzed in on the first ballot. Jackson was not a better player than Killebrew, and if you want to make an attempt to argue otherwise you still can't justify such a discrepency.

It all comes down to East Coast bias.

Henderson is certainly a Hall of Famer, but it's pretty easy to argue that based on statistics alone there are a number of inductees in the past 50 years who gained access to the Hall based on where they played.

By my count, since 1959, the BBWAA have inducted 72 players. (People like to bitch about the BBWAA in connection with the Hall of Fame, but that august body is responsible for just 108 of the 289 elected HOF members.)

Of those 72 who were voted in since 1959, 23 have strong Boston or New York connections.(I use 1959 because by then the "generals," the Ruths and Cobbs and Mathewsons who were piling up when voting started in 1936 - and players like Sisler, Gehrig and Collins who were part of the subsequent logjam -  were all accounted for.)

It's interesting to me that such a large percentage of inductees in the past 50 years have strong Boston-New York ties. If you decide that Dennis Eckersley, Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax had East Coast ties, that raises the number to 26 of 72. That's an awfully high number considering New York-Boston teams don't constitute anywhere near close to one-third of the teams in baseball.

It's a certainty that some voters who cast ballots for Koufax, Drysdale and Eckersley were influenced by those players' days in Brooklyn and Boston, and of the three Drysdale is a  very borderline choice.

There are eight others in this Boston-New York group who could be argued over: Jim Rice, Goose Gossage, Gary Carter, Carlton Fisk, Catfish Hunter, Roy Campanella, Red Ruffing, Jackie Robinson.

Robinson would never have made it on stats alone, but there is special consideration here despite the fact he barely meets the minimum 10 years of playing time. Campanella's career was equally brief, but unlike Robinson, Campy would have had a bumpy road to induction if he had played in, say, St. Louis.

But rather than get into it over the list of eight or so players who may have been inducted because of the knickers they wore, I'd be willing to concede their worthiness if this list of inductees was larger, say, 90 players, with the other 18 having no Boston-New York ties.

If the BBWAA wants to induct players who drank many post-game beers in Boston and New York, OK. Fine by me. But if that's going to be the case, it's time for the writers to loosen their attitude and adopt the mindset that it's OK to have three or four inductees annually - with one or two of them having played their careers in uniforms that didn't read "Boston" or "New York."

85-Minute Strikeout Latest Oddity in Cuban League Action

Near as research in English has allowed, this does appear to be "our" Juan Castro.

This glimpse into warm weather and baseball unfortunately becomes an ideal argument for those who think baseball games are too slow, but one could also argue that the whole scenario borders on performance art.

I hope more details of the actual delay tactics make their way into the popular media regarding what was apparently baseball's equivalent of a filibuster.

With Ft. Myers agreeing to build an estimated $70-80 million dollar Fenway Park replica for the Red Sox, it's evident that at least the city commisioners in Lee County aren't fretting about the current economy.

Debut of that new park - capable of holding about a third more fans than the Twins' Florida facility, Hammond Stadium, will leave the city of Ft. Myers holding the bag on the downtown City of Palms, which the Sox will vacate. (This puts the Orioles in a great situation because both Sarasota and Ft. Myers will be pursuing the O's.)

With the Twins' lease for Lee County Sports Complex ready to expire in 2011, I believe, Ft. Myers might really need to pursue the O's. The Twins would like some upgrades on Hammond Stadium - which is already a jewel - and they will be in great position to have their demands met, even if I'm wrong about the lease expiring in 2011. The Twins are in good shape for demands because of some particulars of the lease.

The Twins only train in Florida because the Senators trained there and Calvin Griffith continued the tradition after the team moved to Minnesota. But Arizona seems at least as logical a spring site, and that state has been pursuing big-league teams left and right in recent seasons.There must be as many of more Minnesotans living or wintering in Arizona and Palm Springs as there are in Florida.

So from a standpoint of facilities the Twins are sitting pretty along with the O's and the Sox, although the location of the new Sox park is going to hurt the Twins at the gate.

Even if the novelty wears off - and there are always enough Red Sox fans in Florida to practically ensure that novelty isn't the main attraction - fans from south of Ft. Myers will flock to the new stadium because of its location. Little Fenway will stand between places such as Naples and Hammond Stadium. People will have to be Twins' fans to want to travel the extra distance to see a spring training game.

By the way, spring training games start damn near on Valentine's Day this year, because of the World Baseball Classic.

The season just keeps getting longer.

Although like so much of this stuff that goes through a committee of attorneys, the below is so poorly written that it could mean something else, but it seems to suggest that this isn't eBay and people should take their baseball card sets and other junk from their closet and sell it elsewhere.

10. No Commercial Use.

You may not resell, distribute, make any commercial use of (other than to keep and share information for your own business purposes), use on a timeshare or service bureau basis, or use to operate a Web site or otherwise generate income from the SBNation Network.

I see the fatman who always trashed the Twins in the media - and sometimes on the field - has solidified his reputation as a guy who is no big-game pitcher.

CC. Sabathia just sucks in the post-season. If you don't give him 5 runs in the first two innings, and then keep piling it on, he can not pitch in these big games.

As a guy who ran one of the biggest mouths about the Twins back when he was in the A.L., it certainly has been a laugh riot to watch most of his post-season starts the past two years.

The nearly three-season long transformation of Justin Morneau into the mold of Joe Mauer as a hitter has reached a new level as 2008 concludes.

Whiffs
Morneau, first-half:1/7.5 PA

Morneau second-half whiffs: 1/12.7 PA

Mauer for the season: 1/12.2. PA

Walks
Morneau, first-half:  1/10.3 PA

Morneau, second -half: 1/8.2 PA.

Mauer: 1/7.2 PA

Posts need to be 75 words long, so here are some more words.

The season has gone almost exactly as I thought. I expected the team to stink early, and after the All-Star break figured the young starting pitching would come around and maybe the team would finish with 81 wins.

And if you ignore a detail or two there, that is essentially what has happened, right down to that Livan Hernandez no-hitter I forecast back in May.

But enough about me.

Well, one more thing.

You are reading this fact here first: The Twins have a helluva shot at five pitchers each with at least 10 wins, and if memory serves me right this has never happened in Twinker history. There's been a lot of close, but there have been no cigars as far as I know. (I suspect it's just plain rare for all teams, but I'm not about to do the work to find out.)

The '65 team - still the winningest entry in franchise history - came really close to having six guys in double-digit wins, but finished at four with double-digits and two with 9 each.

So, what's that got to do with the bullpen, you ask?

I'm still hopeful about the Bert Blyleven Vision for a Better World, with starters stretching it out and going 7. Slowey and Perkins are at the bottom of that list - Slowman has made it into the 7th only 4 times in 19 starts, but probably would have done it today if everyone had not stopped to watch Oprah! mid-game.

Perkins has gone into the 7th only four times in 18 starts, but he's made it at least that far in 2 of the past 8, and he's made it to at least six in all of those past 8.

Baker has made it to the 7th 7 times in 19 starts, and 4 of his past 8. And Blackburn has made it there 5 of his last 10, and 10 times in all, which is 24 starts.

These starters have a ridiculously low number of innings worked. Each of the five starters has at least 8 starts left, but only Blackburn should threaten 200 innings at that rate. If Scott Baker started 9 more times and averaged 7 per start, he would top 180 innings only if you counted his 5 minor league innings this year.

These guys are really fresh. Even if you count minor league innings for men such as Liriano and Perkins, it's going to be close as to whether any of them pitch 200 innings.

Because Livan Hernandez actually did what he was hired to do - consume innings as a starting pitcher - the Twins are in the situation where the starters have pitched so little that many of them currently have worked barely twice the number of innings as some relievers.

Baker, Perkins and Slowey are all at 114 or fewer innings. Guerrier and Bass have pitched more than half that many, and Crain and Nathan are close to half that many.

It's an unusual situation, and we can also thank Boof Bonser for eating some innings before he went on that diet and left a lot of his innings on the plate.

In another era, we wouldn't be talking about the bullpen, we'd just be expecting more out of the starters than 6 innings. So, I'm going to be hoping for that, for five guys with at least 10 wins, and some rest for the bullpen, because even though Goose Gossage cleared waivers after his Hall of Fame induction, the Yankees are asking for Morneau in return and there is no relief in sight.

The probable starters for the KC series omit Perkins, whose turn should be Sunday.

He was awful in Seattle, but they aren't skipping him, just pushing him back a day. He's been beaten twice this year by the Yankees, so I'd like to hear the logic there.

It's almost as if they figure they really need to beat KC and view the Yankees as a tough-go, so they want to send Baker against KC Sunday and hope it's a mismatch and then sacrifice Perkins and his deceptive 8-3 won-loss record against the favored Yankees.

A win against New York would go a long ways toward proving Perkins isn't able to handle the pressure of a pennant race.

When Juan Castro was a Twin, he was ripped constantly for many things, most of all his lack of offense.

This season in Tampa, we hear nothing but accolades about Jason Bartlett.

The below chart shows how awful Bartlett has been offensively. He has provided far, far less punch than Juan Castro gave the Twins. Even if Bartlett is fielding well it's all not enough to explain the polar opposite approaches that fans took to these two players.

Bartlett has gone to Tampa and become a virtual zero on offense. He's terrible so far. As he approaches the AB totals Castro had during seasons in which he was a Twin, here is what we see. Top two lines are Castro's. Bottom is Bartlett in 2008.

The strikeout totals of Carlos Gomez have been front and center most of the season, but down in AAA, one of the players who was thought to be in the Twins' CF sweepstakes this year is screwing himself into the ground at an alarming rate. Against AAA pitching. And he's not trading the whiffs for power.

Gomez was at 58 strikeouts in 223 big-league ABs before last night, but at least was slugging .404 with 4 home runs and 23 RBI. And doing it all in the big leagues.

In Rochester, Jason Pridie was at 60 strikeouts in 227 ABs, hitting .225 with no power. Slugging .348. And only 15 walks.  Awful K/BB ratio, and you can't trade a .348 SA for 60 strikeouts in AAA at his age, which is 24. 

Pridie never walked much, and it can be a career killer when you strike out 113 and 114 times in consecutive seasons in A ball. But sometimes a little experience quells that free-swinging. Unfortunately, Pridie has already obliterated his '07 AAA strikeout totals, and if If he's given the 530 ABs he had in '03, he will bury his career minor-league high in strikeouts as well.

In fact, I've seen a lot of parkas all spring dotting the corporate seats, the ones behind home plate that are predominately on display during MLB games.

No domes in Detroit? Colorado? Boston? Ooooo. Boston. I think that was one of the coldest games I've witnessed this spring. So how is it that:

1. Fans in other states can attend games when it's so cold?

2. Everytime it's nice in Minnesota, as it was for this past week's day game, I never hear anyone say, "Man, that outdoor stadium is going to be great. Blow off work just before Memorial Day, sit in the sun and contribute to an actual attendance of 22,000, rather than a reported one."?

Last fall during the playoffs there was rain and cold at most of the venues, yet on those same nights last fall a baseball game could have been played comfortably outdoors in Minnesota because WE were having better weather than places such as Cleveland and Colorado. It's true, because I was keeping track.

Instead of hearing people gripe about no cover on the new stadium, it would be nice for them to recognize you can't control the weather anywhere, yet domes are a thing of the past in most states, and with no optional lid you won't have people making stupid decisions, like the one that was made for this past Super Bowl. With a THREAT of rain in Arizona, they closed the damned roof. It was a nice night in Phoenix, yet some moron, given a choice, closed the roof. For football. A game that was played in minus-1,000,000 temperatures a few weeks earlier in Green Bay.

Good riddance to the Dome. Now if we can just get those soft upper Midwesterners to see the upside of outdoor baseball, rather than the downside.