See, sometimes the Twins do catch the breaks against the Yankees. Delmon Young bloops a Texas leaguer behind 1st base, Nick Swisher misplays it resulting in just enough time for three Twins to score, tie game. Couple innings later, Nishioka is forced to swing away after two awful looking bunt attempts and responds with a line drive single to right, which is promptly followed by a Mauer grounder through a drawn-in infield, and, modulo some excellent bullpen work and a “clutch” Jeter strikeout, the Twins are shaking hands across the Mississippi. It’s nice to be on the other side of one of these win probability graphs against New York [edit: it has been brought to my attention that the hyperlink in the previous paragraph is no longer working – the “livescoreboard” in the URL only works when it is linking to the current date’s games. By going here you can use the calendar to access the scores of any past date, or, from the fangraphs main page you can click the Scoreboard > Live Scoreboard headers]:
image via Fangraphs
As a Minnesota ex-pat with a rather meager income (being an international super spy does not pay as well as one might think – thanks Wall Street) I’m often unable to watch games live, but tonight was one of the exceptions. Maybe it’s because I assume that every local broadcast team is as bad as Hawk Harrelson of the White Sox, but the YES network was not as grating as I feared. Yes, there was an odd amount of dead air over the course of the game, more talk about the Red Sox than seemed necessary, and it appeared that the production team was not able to differentiate between a Twins batboy and Drew Butera (to be fair, they probably would have similar hitting numbers. Ha!), but overall, not as obnoxious as anticipated. Again, giving the compliment that one is a better announcer than Hawk Harrelson is the very epitome of “damning with faint praise”, but then again, I don’t often have occasion to say anything remotely positive about the Yankees, so this is probably the best they’ll get.
A few more quick thoughts:
- I missed the first three innings (again, spy stuff – you wouldn’t be interested), so I missed the Teixeira and Andruw Jones homers, but I thought Duensing looked pretty good. Got some ground balls, nothing that seemed too hard hit, and even some swinging strikes, which was a nice change from the playoffs last year.
- I think Delmon Young is now just taking weird routes to fly balls in order to make my life more stressful, as payback for all the negative things I say about his plate approach and running style.
- The first career meeting of future hall-of-famers Mariano Rivera and Matt Tolbert ended pretty much as anyone would have predicted. Consider this one salvo in a barrage of arguments in favor of carrying 14 position players, rather than 13, especially when one of those players is strictly a PH/DH.
- Very impressed by Mauer’s baserunning to score on Young’s double. He was running on the pitch and Swisher let the ball get behind him, but it was also a very shallow pop fly and Cano was able to recover for Swisher pretty quickly. Suffice to say that, in my opinion at least, not many catchers score in that situation.
Plexiglass Principles 