GameChat – Twins @ Red Sox, 6:10pm

Now we begin a nice long stretch of early games due to East Coast baseball!

Let’s cover a little bit of pitching injury update/news:

1. Pitching prospect, Alex Wimmers, unfortunately has to undergo Tommy John surgery. Is anyone ever surprised by one of these announcements anymore? Whatever it is in the current training of young pitchers, it seems as though severe damage to elbow ligaments is now de rigueur. Or the surgery itself is being over-prescribed. Or both. I’m not sure how many careers it’s actually doing a service to but it must keep enough players in the game to be worth the investment of money and time.
2. Pavano was scratched from his scheduled start in GCL today but he did throw a bull pen session. If all goes well with the recovery from that, he’ll make a start for the Miracle next week. At least that sounds a little bit like progress.

After a difficult series against the White Sox, all of which were 1 run games, I would love to see the offense come out a little bit. Yes, our games always seem to rise and fall with the pitching but the last few would have benefited greatly from some additional run support. No, I am not talking about one of those monster hit games that are ridiculously exciting – I just mean get a few more guys across home plate if we get them on base. Ok??

*giggles uncontrollably*

so, shutting out the BoSox at home.. yeah that doesn’t happen every day – especially to the Twins. In fact, it hasn’t happened in almost exactly 16 years (tomorrow).  I had asked for some offense to give the pitching some run support and look what happened! Just a little bit in the way of early runs and the pitching just took over!

It’s interesting that the most commonly discussed facet of the pitching was the odd ability for Samuel Deduno to be “effective wild” – in other words, no one knows how the hell he does it but he gets outs. He pitched 6 full innings with the support of Drew Butera with only 2 hits. Yes, there were 4 walks which is distinctly un-Twins-like but it was all part & parcel to keeping the batters off their step. I liked it. Then the bullpen came in and finished it off in similar fashion! Fien and Perkins nailed it down. In response, we here at Knuckleballs would like to thank them from the deepest place within us – no not our hearts, our STOMACHS! For being stellar tonight, we give the entire pitching staff access to the Knuckleballs ice cream buffet! And Deduno gets all the cherries he wants..

As you can see, we are classy folk here at Knuckleballs so it’s a prize worth of such a great performance.

However, our loftiest of prizes went to Brian Dozier for all around great offense & defense and basically cementing the game for our pitchers to claim. For that, he was awarded our BOD! Congrats Brian!