246?

It's taken me awhile to get everything together since coming back to New York and catching up on all the work that didn't go away while I was gone (sadly ... it never does). Unfortunately while I was too busy getting my life straightened away to focus on blogging, some very meaty topics have arisen:

1. Joe Mauer apparently turned down an initial offer from the Twins and the two sides are still far apart. I don't want to speculate on this too much, there's always a lot of back-and-forth in contracts and we'll see what happens, I don't think Smith and Pohlad are going to just throw in the towel and trade him away in exasperation. A deal will happen, I have to believe that.

2. Nick Blackburn just got guaranteed about $14 million dollars over 4 years. Good for him. Not necessarily the smartest move by the team, IMHO but I don't think it's awful. Just doesn't make a whole lot of business sense. I don't think that through arbitration he would make more than that, so we're basically just guaranteeing his price for the next four years (even if an injury were to occur). Still $14 million for four years of a reliable everyday type of pitcher is nothing to groan about.

3. And this is the real meat of the post: Joe Nathan's "significant" UCL tear. I knew in my gut that something bad happened when I was at City of Palms watching him pitch, he couldn't get the ball over the plate and eventually was pulled. I still kept hoping for the best, but alas, barring a miracle he will be out for this year and more than likely next year as well.

Besides losing our best reliever (and, arguably the best reliever in the American League), this has to be a horrible personal loss to Nathan himself and to the franchise for what this year would have meant for him. Nathan's career saves as a Twin stands at 246 -- a meager 8 saves shy of the team record set by Rick Aguilera. Which means if this hadn't happened, we probably would have been crowning a new Twins record holder by the end of April or beginning of May.

I'll make no secret that Aguilera is hands down my favorite baseball player ever, I grew up as a pitcher, fancied myself a closer, and so Aguilera was my hero. More than anything I want him to be enshrined forever in the Twins record books, but by this point I had come to terms with the fact that Nathan was going to be the face of Twins closers from here on out. It was inconceivable that he wouldn't be. Now, in my mind Aguilera's record will still stand for many more years.

I just don't see Nathan coming back from this if he has Tommy John surgery. Nathan is 35 years old and has already more than likely been on the decline of his career (though that decline would have been slow and steady and likely taken him through the end of his 4 year deal). We will be eating salary for 2010 and more than likely 2011 as well, and there's no telling what he'll be like pitching in 2012 when he starts the season at 37 years old coming off two years away from the game recovering from an arm injury.

The Twins will need to find an answer for the closer's role if they hope to compete, and these next three years would have been spent looking for Nathan's successor even if he hadn't had this injury; it's only speeding up the process for the team. When Nathan gets back in 2012 most likely, chances are we will have a new established closer and he will at best be a set-up man if he's still on the team and can pitch to some form resembling his old self.

Barring some team nostalgia to let him close out just enough 3-run lead games to get him in the Twins record books, I don't see how he's going to make up those 9 saves in a Twins uniform that he'd need in order to supplant Aguilera.

I don't mean to be all doom and gloom. And I'm horribly sad both for Nathan and for the dilemma the team finds itself in. Nathan is a great teammate and is an amazing closer so I would have been perfectly fine with him being the Twins' all time saves leader, but I'm skeptical it's going to ever happen. We'll find a good young player in their prime in these next two years who will lock down the closer's role ... and I don't want to imagine what will happen in these next two years if we don't.

A Return To Dominance?

As Twins fans, we've come to realize a painful tendency these past couple of years that previously we had been blissfully unaware of. In baseball, I would argue that there's nothing more deflating or devastating than a blown save; to take that a step further, losing a game because of a shoddy pitching job in the bullpen is just flat out unacceptable.

Under the guidance of Rick Stelmaszek and Rick Anderson, the Twins bullpen was dominant since our team's resurgence from obscurity in the early part of this past decade. Thanks in large part to name like Eddie Guardado, Juan Rincon, JC Romero, Grant Balfour, and several other since-departed Twins.

One of the things I think we all took for granted was being able to see our name consistently up there with the Los Angeles Angeles as having one of the best records in baseball when ahead after 7 innings.

Several other bloggers have pointed out that the Twins pitching woes this past year are perhaps mistakenly put on the shoulders of our rotation. I'm not quite sure that's the case -- they weren't particularly worse than they've been in the past (with the notable exception of not having Santana of course), but our bullpen offered absolutely no relief -- no pun intended -- and our starters were naturally forced to go longer and perhaps face more trouble than previously accustomed.

That changes this year.

Beginning in August and September we saw the bullpen begin to turn a corner, and we have every reason to expect that this trend should continue, which in itself will be a huge boon to our rotation and to our collective heartbeats as the game gets into later innings.

Obviously there's our star:

Joe Nathan is about as good as they come. At the end of the season I think everyone was cringing when they saw him come in, but we can't put all the failure on his shoulders. Those were some heartbreaking losses, but for every blown save he had at least 10 times where he was a rockstar. First off, late inning save situations are naturally tense. And Nathan's tweaks and quirks and twitches are a little scary to watch too. But for 95% of the games he's put in, he'll dominate. He deserves the benefit of the doubt as a model of consistency.

Mijares & Guerrier are at the very least league-average relievers, and when they're on point they're much better. Mijares is a power arm from the leftside with the ability to make batters look silly. He has a bad tendency of pitching off the plate and letting batters coax favorable counts against him before either ultimately walking them or coming back with a piece of cheese that gets lifted into the seats. But those bad moments are the ones that stick out, and numbers don't lie: 2.34 ERA and 1.056 WHIP and a 60-23 K-BB ratio in 2009 is not something to scoff at. Guerrier is almost the opposite of Mijares. Guerrier relies less on power than control and guile. This past year his numbers look a little flukey, and so I was an advocate for trading him (and still am because I think his value will never be higher), but he's also been a model of consistency, as shown by the fact that he is always one of the league leaders in appearances out of the bullpen. That's actually one of the biggest fears: that he's so consistent that he'll be overused. No complaints from me if that's the worst thing I can say about him.

Jon Rauch is the kind of pitcher that I'm sure has batters quivering at the plate. He looks like he's either going to hit you in the face with a baseball or a beer bottle, and neither would be pleasant. Down the stretch he was one of the most clutch performers out of our 'pen, and if he has a good supporting cast around him he'll be able to keep slinging at full strength right into October. A big guy like that is a good asset on the mound (and he's not even the biggest guy in our system...)

Pat Neshek is unbelievably awesome. Not only is his delivery one of the coolest things to watch, but the fact that no one can seem to touch him makes it even better. The biggest question mark here is how effective he'll be coming back from injury. We should know this pretty quickly in spring training, but the thought is that sometime during the season he'll be able to step in and provide that electric spark that made him so nasty in his debut. I think we all know he can do that, the only question is how soon.

Clay Condrey makes Bobby Keppel look like the career minor leaguer we know he should be. One of the biggest concerns last year for me is how long we stuck with him when his sinker stopped sinking -- it seemed like he was holding blackmail over Gardy and Smith that allowed him a permanent place on the active roster. This year, that's changed. (What is a Ham Fighter?) Condrey was a key piece of the Phillies bullpen during the regular season, and I can't explain why he didn't see the light of day during the postseason, but it speaks more to the Phillies' depth than anything bad about Condrey. The one thing here is that we shouldn't expect him to come in and be the next Joe Nathan, but he's at least league average and should be a much better mop-up guy and able to keep the games from getting out of hand, which is more than I could say for Keppel.

Jesse Crain is a guy that everyone loves to hate this offseason. I think that's more in part for the fact that he struggled at the beginning of the season and kept getting trotted out there. Thankfully the Twins wised up and let him fix things in the minors, and in the second half of the season he was amazing. He had a 2.91 ERA, 1.206 WHIP, and a 30-15 K-BB ratio and he generally seemed a lot more confident. The biggest problem is that we're paying through the nose for him, but that's more the fact that we signed him to a stupid contract than that he's a bad pitcher. If he's the weakest link in our pen, it's a pretty strong pen.

Other options? We have plenty. The Duensing/Perkins/Liriano/Manship/Swarzak 5-headed monster will undoubtedly see some time in the 'pen, and it's not because they can't cut it in a rotation but just because we have too many people logjamming! This in fact makes it hard for some of our best prospects, who are currently idling away in Rochester and will sadly probably start the year back there. The one that I'd like to see break camp with the Twins but fully expect to be a fresh, lights-out, sparkplug down the stretch: Anthony Slama.

He was named the Twins minor league pitcher of the year in '08 when he dominated the FSL with Fort Meyers. He had a 1.01 ERA with a 0.944 WHIP and a 110-24 K-BB ratio. He's calmed down a little bit since then but still continues to be the best option out of the pen in each stop that he makes in our system.

In summary? Despite getting rid of Boof Bonser and not retaining Keppel or Mahay, the Twins will have a plethora of serviceable arms to stock our pen. And if anyone is ineffective or gets injured, there should be plenty of options to remedy the situation with. Not only will this shore up what's been an Achilles heel for the Twins the past couple of years, but it will undoubtedly make our rotation better as they'll be able to hand off the ball with more confidence.

This is our bullpen's return to dominance. And it's been much needed.

Preaching Patience

"Beware the fury of a patient man!"

-John Dryden

If you had told me a few weeks ago, when I started this blog, that I would still be eagerly cheering for the Twins to reach the postseason, I never would have believed it.

If you had told me that the Twins rotation of Baker, Pavano, Blackburn, Manship and Duensing would be looking this solid I'd have rolled my eyes at you.

If you had told me a week ago that Joe Nathan and Matt Guerrier would implode today while the rest of our pitchers combined for a shutout, I'd scoff.

This was a horrible game, and I was so smug in the 9th. Even after the first home run I said that at least we knew he'd never give up two in an inning. I really hope no CSN cameras caught me because I probably looked like the most disillusioned and disheartened Twins fan they could find. Watching that second ball escape Span's reach I could hear Hawk Harrelson screaming in my head, "You can put it on the BOOOOOARRD!" and I wanted to hide.

I think the loss is primarily compounded by the fact that (A) we were one strike away from winning it, (B) our pitching was dominating them the entire game, and (C) we wanted to usher the White Sox out with a stiff boot instead of letting the parting image be something like this:

 You know what? Joe Nathan is still the best closer in baseball. Have we been spoiled to have someone so lock-down that we start harping on him because instead of matching his 1.33 ERA and 0.901 WHIP from last year he's spiked all the way up to a 1.71 ERA and 0.911 WHIP? How about how he's actually averaging several more K/9 innings and is 5 saves shy of breaking his total from last year?

Everyone goes through rough patches. Maybe he signed too many autographs pregame and his hand cramped -- if so, partially my fault and everyone else's along the line today. Ok, so because of this we're only 7-2 against the Sox at the Dome this year instead of 8-1. That is disappointing I know. And the fact that they're pretty much throwing in the towel on the season makes no difference? Trading away their biggest power threat for a minor league infielder in the middle of a "pennant race"? Oh, and I'm sorry, but if they lose 3 games to Boston at the Cell, how do they expect to fare at Fenway in a four game set coming up?

Listen, the Twins bullpen is stronger than it has been since Neshek left us. Crain seems to have found his form (or at least more so), Rauch has been delightful to watch, Mijares has matured into Rich Garces of the new era, and I think any team would be happy to have Nathan and Guerrier on it. We need to take our lumps and keep going, leave it to the White Sox fans to whine and cry, that's their job.

As Tertullian said, "To put it in a nutshell, every sin is traced back to impatience." This was one game. One which we seemed to have wrapped up, and that's what makes it hard. How about noticing how Kubel seems to have forgotten how he can't hit lefties and hit the ball with some authority off Buehrle today? Or how about how Mr. Olympiad Brian Duensing delivered again. Do you remember when people kept trying to talk about sending he and Humber off with Delmon for some super player to save the day? Those ideas were ridiculous. But, don't you think there are some teams salivating over Duensing now? Oh ye of little faith. Patience. Things will work out.

(The above is me preaching to myself essentially, maybe you weren't as disheartened as I, but I needed to reassure myself.)

I was trying to figure out what to write about this game all day and there's not much more to be said. Cuddyer made a beautiful catch that for some odd reason was overturned, and I still have no idea why. Maybe it's because Tim Tschida was on the field again? Who knows.

What I do know, is that Jay and I enjoyed some beautiful seats, literally right next to the Twins bullpen. Neither of us had the foresight to bring a camera, but thanks to Jay's iPhone we have some pictures and video:

TC High-Fiving the fans

TC stopping on his bike to wave.

Mijares signing autographs.

Some random kid displaying his Mijares signed ball.

The boys warming up.

Justin Morneau standing in during Duensing's warm-ups.

Nathan warming up.

Nathan warming up again.

Some fine footage of Jon Rauch, yes, he's HUGE.

As you can see, these seats were awesome. That, and Jose Mijares signing a ball to add to my collection somewhat counterbalanced the sad ending to the game. (Also the Leinenkugel's helped.)

Oh, and as I mentioned in my post yesterday, Betsy at For the Love of the Game took a ton of pictures from yesterday, so check them out! In the meantime, try to enjoy a day away from baseball as best you can. I'm going to spend mine at the State Fair with cheese curds and "beer on a stick".