Day: July 31, 2011

Down On The Farm: Snappers Photos

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The Beloit Snappers, Midwest League (low Class A) affiliate of the Twins, are making their last appearance of the season in Cedar Rapids this week with games Saturday night, Sunday afternoon and Monday afternoon, and as I’m prone to doing, I’ve been out at the ballpark getting a look-see at the young future Twins.

Snappers in the field in Cedar Rapids

I saw plenty of offense out of some of the Snappers on Saturday night and Iowan BJ Hermsen survived some early struggles to squeak out a “Quality Start” in front of a packed house that included a fair number of Hermsen fans. Beloit won the game 10-5.

Sunday, the results were less favorable for the Snappers, as they gave up three runs in the first inning to the Kernels en route to a 6-1 loss.

But enough about the games. The purpose of this post is simply to give Twins fans a glance at the names and faces of a few of the young players who are toiling in the farm system as they work toward their dreams of playing Major League baseball. They work hard and know they face long odds… and they deserve some recognition. – JC

Jhonatan Arias donned the catchers gear on Sunday
DH Michael Gonzales was the picture of intensity at the plate
SS Andy Leer takes his lead off 1B
LF Derek McCallum gets his cuts
RF Daniel Ortiz went deep with this swing... but foul
3B Jairo Perez rips a line drive
OF/1B Lance Ray checks signs before getting in the batters box
Starting pitcher Adrian Salcedo strides toward home
CF Daniel Santana watches a pitch sail wide of the plate
Relief pitcher Sam Spangler delivers to the plate
2B Reggie Williams readies on defense

 

GameChat – Twins @ A’s #3, 3:05pm

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As Span-watch continues, the Twins send an interesting line up out to finish off the series with Oakland this afternoon. Cuddy’s at 2B and Mauer is at 1B.

Gardy also shifted his line up up a spot, so we have Joe batting 2nd. At least he figured out that Nishioka has no business hitting up near the top of his order. (I still think “Nishioka” is Japanese for “weak ground ball”.)

I’m off to see some of today’s Snappers v Kernels game again, so I’ll be joining the GameChat later.

TWINS

@

 A’s
Revere, CF   Weeks, 2B
Mauer, 1B   Crisp, CF
Cuddyer, 2B   Matsui, DH
Kubel, RF   Willingham, LF
Thome, DH   Jackson, C, 1B
Valencia, 3B   Sweeney, RF
Nishioka, SS   Pennington, SS
Plouffe, RF   Suzuki, K, C
Butera, C   Sizemore, S, 3B
  _Pavano, P     _McCarthy, P
  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 R H E
Minnesota 2 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 11 0
Oakland 0 0 6 1 0 0 0 0 x 7 11 0

The Twins not only lost 2 of 3 to the friggin A’s but they are now 7 games behind the Tigers. Carl Pavano sucked again and the bottom of the Twins batting order sucked just as bad, if not worse.

The good news is that Denard Span is not a Washington National and will be rejoining the Twins in Anaheim. The bad news is that he isn’t a shortstop so he won’t be replacing the worst ballplayer in the line up. The other bad news is that Bill Smith apparently can’t multi-task and since he didn’t get a deal done with the Nationals, he didn’t get anything done at all before the trade deadline.

[EDIT] It’s official: Denard Span has been activated from the DL and Luke Hughes has been optioned back down to Rochester. Am I the only one who thinks there might have been better selections for a stint in AAA? – CB

Things are looking pretty bleak as the calendar turns to August.