Minnesota Twins Rant

I’m pissed off. I don’t care if his name is Joe Mauer and I don’t care if he’s making $23 million a year and I don’t care that he’s won three batting titles. Baseball is a game of statistics and when you have a guy hitting .257/.335/.328 on the season and .250/.333/.313 in the last week, it shouldn’t matter what name is stitched across the back of his jersey, there’s no reason to continue putting that guy in the #3 spot in the lineup, and there’s even less of a reason to not pinch hit for that guy when necessary. Necessary like yesterday afternoon in the top of the 7th inning when you’re in the middle of an amazing comback from an 11-1 deficit against the division leader and a team sitting only thee games ahead of you. The Detroit Tigers aren’t a dominating team and they can be beaten and head-to-head matchups are the best place to make up ground so each game against a division leader, whether it’s in April or September, is important. Outside of starting pitching the Tigers have nothing and the Twins could (should?) have won that game yesterday afternoon and I believe they would have (yes, I know I have a tendency toward naive optimism at times) if they had a manager who knew how to manage instead of a manager who relied on managing skills 85% of the time and superstitious nonsense and hunches the other 15% of the time.