Knuckleballs

Of course, the big news in baseball today is about the trade that’s gone down between the Red Sox and Dodgers, with Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford, Josh Beckett and former Twin Nick Punto all headed straight in to a pennant race. while the Sox get James Loney and a number of minor leaguers in return. The amazing part of this deal, tome, is that the Red Sox were able to not only shed over a quarter of a billion dollars of future payroll (they are only sending $12 million to the Dodgers), but also get several supposedly quality players on top of the salary relief. Are the Dodgers becoming the “new” Yankees?

The LA Times story on the trade also mentioned that the Red Sox went after Gonzalez after efforts to acquire Justin Morneau from the Twins last week were unsuccessful. I haven’t seen any confirmation concerning exactly how those discussions played out. I suspect the Dodgers weren’t offering a whole lot for Morneau over and above taking on his salary. Then again, they had to take on a lot more salary in the Red Sox deal and still gave up some good young pitchers. Then again, perhaps the Twins simply don’t want to part with their first baseman. That would certainly say something about their confidence level in Chris Parmelee, wouldn’t it?

The other possibility would be that the Twins hadn’t yet sent Morneau through waivers when the Dodgers approached them and someone else claimed Morneau ahead of the Dodgers, nixing a potential deal.

In any event, I have to admit I find it amusing that Nicky Punto finds himself once again in a position to make a deep playoff run. Talk about a guy who just seems to find himself in the right place at the right time.

Anyway… on to the Twins. Scott Diamond has been suspended for six games for throwing a ball near the head of Josh Hamilton. Seems a little harsh and he’ll appeal, but in the end he’s going to end up missing a start at some point.

The Twins face Ryan Dempster this afternoon. Dempster hasn’t been terrific since being traded to the Rangers, but he did pretty much shut the Twins down earlier in the season when he was still wearing a Cubs uniform.

Josh Willingham is back in the Twins lineup, as is Denard Span, so I guess that’s something.

I’m going to be honest, I stopped listening to the Twins game when it was 9-0 after three innings. I have no idea what happened after that, but looking at the boxscore, it’s clear that nothing good happened. Though I suppose the fact that the Rangers ended up with just those nine runs would indicate the bullpen did a job, so there’s that. Way to go bullpen.

However, I did see the Beloit Snappers beat the Cedar Rapids Kernels 13-2 and it didn’t start raining until about the 6th inning. It was a good time, even though the game wasn’t terribly exciting. – JC

So apparently I’m the only one who is around to post gamechats on Friday nights..  we’ll see if there is any one there to do the chatting! LOL

So there was more roster change activity today.. Matt Carson was sent back down and we brought Kyle Waldrop is up. Yes, that means we are back to 13 pitchers and down a person on the bench. At least Span is playing again???

Let’s see how Deduno does tonight and if he plunks anyone…

Yeah, THAT was ugly. Funny, Deduno hit two batters tonight and he didn’t get ejected or suspended for 6 games like Diamond.. anyone else think there’s something a little goofy in baseball sometimes?

So KL and I are headed out to Park Tavern to gather with a few of the other local Twin Cities Twins bloggers and associated hangers on.. but of course I’ll be attempting to live blog from the event with the chat window. It should be a fun evening and if you are a twitter follower, keep your eyes open for various pics for the geek with the laptop on the bar table.. yeah, that will be me.

Tonight should be about as good a matchup as it will get for the Twins against the Rangers – Scott is our best guy and Oswalt kind of sucks lately. Let’s cross our fingers.

I guess you could say that game was at least entertaining in a depressing sorta way.

Roy Oswalt intentionally drills Joe Mauer in the back. Scott Diamond throws a ball over Josh Hamilton’s head and gets ejected, along with Gardy.

The Twins somehow manage a 4-4 tie heading to the bottom of the 8th inning… and give up six runs… only one of them earned. Yeah, ugly inning.

Our guys push two runs across in the top of the 9th, but Joe Nathan enters and retires Ben Revere to end the game. By the way, if you ever needed an example of how stupid the “save” stat is, consider this… Nathan entered the game with a 4-run lead, pitched to one hitter and gets credit for a save.

Let’s see what tomorrow brings. – JC

MLB finally has today’s lineups posted – odd that it took so long today but I can finally put up the nice little lineup grid when they do that.

Hard to be confident going in to today’s game – there are just so many things that seem to work against the Twins all together:

1. It’s a day game with your typical ‘not quite our A game’ getaway day lineup.
2. Liam Hendriks is making his return to the Big League mound – and the last time he was here was a rough experience for the guy.
3. Still no Span and still no one sitting on the bench in his place. That tends to make me crabby.

To quote Lecroy24fan: “Different day, same old story.”

So you’ve probably already heard today’s big news but just in case, here you go: Carl Pavano has been shut down for the rest of the season with a bruised humorous – yes, he has been misdiagnosed for the last three months and he’s frustrated even if he didn’t take the step of blaming the Twins med staff, he didn’t find this out until he visited the specialist in NY.

How many times does this happen until the management takes it seriously and investigates/changes the situation in the training room? I don’t know the cause but I see the symptoms and say, “Houston, we have a problem.” And before you ask, no, Span isn’t in the lineup yet. *raises eyebrow*

[edit] Span did NOT get the MRI today as planned… turns out that he’s claustrophobic.. something about not enough valium??

Well that certainly didn’t go the way I would like it to but wow, it was weird.

1. The Twins never left any runners on base.. I can’t personally ever remember that happening (of course I sure it must have at some point, I just don’t think I saw it).
2. The A’s turned a triple play and that’s pretty darn rare. I hate being on the receiving end of it but still, you don’t see that every day.
3. Twins got an odd double play call in our favor at one point because a base runner left the base path and then got hit with the throw to 1B from home plate. I think. Not really sure how that works out. Announcers didn’t seem to be any clearer.

Not a great game for all that. Kind of glad a lot of Twins fans didn’t stay up for it.