The Twins have a shot at an early season series sweep today against Kansas City.They’ve proven the last two games what their capable of if they get a bit of hitting AND some quality starting pitching in the same game.
Kyle Gibson and Ricky Nolasco both stepped up their games the past two games and today, it’s Kevin Correia’s turn to show what he’s capable of. The Royals send lefty Jason Vargas to the mound. Vargas is off to a hot start for KC, giving up just two earned runs in 15 innings over the course of his first two starts. Correia’s start has been somewhat less impressive.
FSN’s Tyler Mason pointed out that Twins sit at or near the top of three AL offensive stat categories two weeks in to the season. Brian Dozier is tied for the HR lead with four, Chris Colabello is tied for the RBI lead with 14 and Jason Kubel sits second in the AL in batting average with .405. Yeah, we all expected to see that, right?
Manager Ron Gardenhire is back with the club today. How much you wanna bet that if the Twins trail early, we’ll see “send Gardy away again” tweets before the 7th inning stretch?
| ROYALS |
@ |
TWINS |
| Aoki, RF | Dozier, 2B | |
| Infante, 2B | Mauer, 1B | |
| Hosmer, 1B | Plouffe, 3B | |
| Butler, B, DH | Colabello, RF | |
| Gordon, A, LF | Kubel, LF | |
| Perez, S, C | Pinto, DH | |
| Moustakas, 3B | Suzuki, K, C | |
| Cain, L, CF | Hicks, CF | |
| Escobar, A, SS | Florimon, SS | |
| _Vargas, P | _Correia, P |
It wasn’t the prettiest game, but what matters is that the Twins had more runs than the Royals when it was over. That means our guys are back up to .500 on the year AND it means a SWEEP of the Royals!
The Twins managed just five hits on the day and Joe Mauer was the only hitter with a pair of them. That might put him in contention for BOD honors, but we just can’t quite go there, given his strikeout in a clutch late-game situation.
Josmil Pinto’s two-run HR to open the scoring in the home half of the 7th certainly earns him consideration.
But, once again, if there’s one thing that stands out when you think about how the Twins managed to win all three games against the Landed Gentry of KC, it’s the starting pitching. Today it was Kevin Correia’s turn to step up his game. He was eventually tagged with all three Royals runs, but he put up seven innings of goose eggs before those runs came across in the 8th and let’s just say the Royals had a little help getting those runs across from a couple of Correia’s team mates.
We want to encourage this kind of work from our rotation and to that end, we are awarding our third straight BOD to the starting pitcher.
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