longstrangetrip wrote:Good to see Gibby pitch such a nice game against a very hot Mariners team. I thought Gibby would be the big beneficiary of adding a superior-framing catcher like Castro, but it hasn't panned out the way I thought it would...at least not yet.
Speaking of Castro, what a nice surprise his pop at the plate has been....412 slugging average on the season with 6 HRs. Raise your hand if you predicted his slugging average would be better than Dozier's and Rosario's, and almost equal to Mauer's!
Still a game and a half up on the Indians, with as series against SF and a long home stand coming up.
You bring up something that hasn't been mentioned much anywhere I have seen/read...offense from the catchers. So it's pretty easy to say Castro and Gimenez have been upgrades over Kurt and JRM and Centeno but the surprise is they have not lost anything offensively. I haven't looked at the numbers for around a week but you can probably make an arguement the offensive production from Castro is equal and maybe even bette than what Kirt gave us last year and Gimenez has been better with the bat then the other guys. Honestly I'm not completely shocked (both guys had some encouraging stats and the bar isn't high for catchers) but that's not a small thing and certainly part of why the Twins are a better team this year.
Q12543 wrote:Wait....did Ervin Santana just hit a 3 run double!?
Yes he did and the outfield was playing him like he was girl up to bat in co-ed softball lol shouldn't you be watching the NBA Finals game? ;) lol
I'm looking forward to watching that in the morning. I remember back in high school playing co-ed softball and everyone on my team was playing this female like she couldn't hit it out of the outfield. She was not happy about it. She had a twin sister and both were very competitive and were actually pretty good basketball players. I told my team they should play farther back but they didn't listen. I think she may have gotten a double on what would have been an easy shallow fly ball. Lol
Our new favorite pitcher Nik Turley will be making his major league debut starting Sunday. I'm curious what the move is to get him on the roster. Honestly it gets hard to keep track at times with all these moves.
monsterpile wrote:91 pitch complete game for Santana.
Our new favorite pitcher Nik Turley will be making his major league debut starting Sunday. I'm curious what the move is to get him on the roster. Honestly it gets hard to keep track at times with all these moves.
Santana is our best pitcher and we need to not overwork him. He should have been shut down at 70 pitches.
We are 57 game in that's over a 3rd of the season and a winning team first place in the division and 8th best winning percentage in baseball. All of this with a flawed rotation including AAA shuttle working overtime, and bringing in guys from wherever to pitch.
Looking back at the 2015 schedule where the Twins won 83-79 at this point they actually had 2 more wins. The good news is this year the Twins are up a game instead of just tied for the lead of the division.
The Twins have avoided prolonged losing streaks. They have a 4 game losing streak and two 3 game losing streaks. They have four 4 game winning streaks.
Good luck bad luck:
Good:
-Santana has been terrific.
-Plenty of position players have been good hitting the ball and they have been relatively healthy.
-Breslow has been decent and Kitnzler has been about as good as you can hope for.
-Defense has been significantly improved. Sano has been pretty good at 3b.
Bad:
-Plenty of injuries to pitchers.
-Pitchers have struggled some of which were expected to be at least serviceable.
-Buxton is hitting .200
So there has been some good stuff but it hasn't all gone their way.
I've been encouraged by Mejia his last 4 starts. If he could be solid most times out that would be a huge development. He seems to actually have some legit stuff and is young enough to buy into the idea of him having upside.
I just finished watching the condensed game from today. Another nice win. I swear there were at least 2 balls I think Buxton would have gotten to in CF and it's not like Rosario is terrible out there. Berrios was plenty good and the pen did their job. Vargas had a HR so that's nice to see.
Why isn't Vargas a regular player? I would think having that kind of power in the lineup along with Sano would have an impact, including how the other batters are pitched to.
jester1534 wrote:Also with Vargas going down today who do you think should get called up? Park has been horrible since coming back from injury. My Pick would be Palka his last 15 games he's batting .321 with OPS of .907
They might bring a bat up at some point but after all the pitchers they have had to use the last 2 games it makes sense to bring up 2 pitchers for at least a couple days.
I should've said after the Houston series who should they bring up? Because I'm not a Vargas fan, he can't hit a big league CurveBall and I don't think it will ever will be able to.
They got some nice production out of him for part of the stretch he was up at least. I just looked at his left vs Right splits and he really hit well against righthanded pitchinng and did next to nothing against left handed pitching. Any thoughts?
Well I know on the telecast the other day Morris said that Twins haven't seen a lefty in like Two weeks but looking at Vargas splits from last he bated like .170 against lefties last year in 107 ABs maybe he should give up the switch hitting cause you can't get much worse.
Q this was our discussion on Vargas a while ago. I think Smalley said a while back Vargas probably won't be able to hit high fastball either and he should just not swing at them.
