The Minnesota Twins lost Johan Santana and Torii Hunter last winter and are in first place this summer.
“No question we felt the losses,” Bill Smith, the Twins first-year general manager, said. “You can’t lose Hunter and Santana and not feel the loss. At the same time our scouting staff and minor league staff got a few guys ready over the last few years.”
Glen Perkins, Nick Blackburn, Kevin Slowey, Scott Baker, Francisco Liriano. They are some of the players the Twins staff got ready for the major leagues. They happen to be the pitchers who make up the team’s starting rotation. Combined, they have pitched in the majors for four and a half years. Except for Liriano, who had a sensational start to his major league career with a 12-3 record in 2006 but then missed all of last season following elbow surgery, normal fans are most likely unfamiliar with the Twins starters.
The four who aren’t named Liriano all came to the Twins in the amateur June draft. They didn’t get the attention the Yankees created for Phil Hughes and Ian Kennedy in New York, but they are a large part of the reason the Twins supplanted the Chicago White Sox atop the American League Central last Friday night.
“Their pitching has been giving them a chance,” Mark Shapiro, general manager of the rival Cleveland Indians, said. “Their pitching has been exceptional, their young pitching in particular.”
Perkins, a 25-year-old left-hander, who didn’t join the starting rotation until May 10, pitched the Twins into first place by shutting out the Angels of Anaheim for eight innings and raising his team-best record to 11-3.
The fifth member of the rotation, Liriano, is like a trading-deadline acquisition, specifically a CC Sabathia-type addition. Banished to the minor leagues after losing all three starts in April with an 11.32 earned run average, Liriano returned this month and has won all four starts with a 1.14 e.r.a. That is the Liriano the Twins knew and loved in 2006.
“We had Livan Hernandez at the start of the season,” Smith said, referring to the free agent the Twins signed who had a 10-8 record with a 5.48 e.r.a. “It worked perfectly that Liriano was ready to go and we found a home for Hernandez with the Rockies.”
In the genre of low-revenue teams that supposedly can’t compete with the New Yorks and the Chicagos and the Bostons, the Oakland Athletics are usually cited as the team that practices a different system that enables them to compete with the rich guys. But they get the attention because a book glorified them.
No one has written a book about the Twins and their system, but the Twins have outdone the Athletics and deserve as much, if not more, credit for their operation. This season is a good example of the sort of thing they do.
Last season the Twins finished with a losing record (79-83) and 17 games out of first, then lost Hunter to free agency and traded Santana because they were going to lose him after this season.
Now they are scrapping for their fifth division title in seven seasons. They have looked vulnerable at times; last month they suffered three-game series sweeps to the Red Sox and the Yankees and a month earlier lost all four games of a series with the White Sox. But even with the Red Sox and Yankees sweeps, the Twins have the league’s best record (43-21) since June 11.
“After each of those series we bounced back,” Smith said. “Our guys are amazingly resilient. They turned the page and moved on. Since June 11 our team has played very, very well. I think Ron Gardenhire and his coaching staff have done a marvelous job this year.”
The Twins do not have an explosive offense, but Joe Mauer and Justin Morneau, the A.L. most valuable player in 2006, have produced impressive statistics. Entering the weekend games, Mauer was leading the league with a .323 batting average and Morneau’s 98 runs batted in were third.
Denard Span is a 24-year-old rookie outfielder, whose .258 batting average in April prompted the Twins to return him to the minors. Since coming back after a two-month stay, Span is hitting .337. Another rookie, third baseman Brian Buscher, has batted .315 in the last two months. Second baseman Alexi Casilla is hitting .303.
“We’ve had four huge contributions from the minor leagues,” Smith said, naming Perkins, Span, Casilla and Buscher. “They all started the season at Rochester. When we got hit with injuries we had those guys come up. Each one in a different way stepped in and did the job.”
Because of their low-revenue status, the Twins live by the annual amateur June draft. The four starting pitchers besides Liriano were drafted as were Mauer, Morneau, Span, Michael Cuddyer and Jason Kubel.
Smith said the decision to “go young” was made by his predecessor, Terry Ryan, and Jim Pohlad, a son of the owner and the team’s chief executive officer, around the start of the new century. The Twins were mired in a string of eight consecutive losing seasons and, Smith recalled, Ryan and Pohlad said, “We’re going to go young and develop our own players. If we suffer from it, we’ll take that.”
Carl Pohlad is the team’s enlightened owner. He is probably the wealthiest man in baseball, but he doesn’t tell his baseball people how to do their jobs.
“We were in a meeting once, talking about roster moves,” Smith related. “A few people started to make suggestions about who we should go after. Bob Pohlad raised his hand and said ‘who are we to make these decisions? That’s why we hired Terry Ryan.’ Everyone agreed.”
When Ryan was the general manager, he didn’t feel that the Twins had to take a back seat to the Athletics, and Smith feels the same way.
“Everybody has a different way of doing things,” he said. “There are multiple ways of being successful. Whatever Oakland does works. Our way works for us. It might not work for someone else, but it’s our way.”
And once again this season the Twins’ way is successful.
Baseball’s First Hyphen
With Rich Harden, Dan Haren and Joe Blanton gone, Greg Smith is considered the Athletics’ No. 1 starting pitcher, but that’s a relatively unheralded distinction compared with the one held by the pitcher Smith beat in a game with Seattle last week.
Ryan Rowland-Smith, according to Elias Sports Bureau research, is the first major leaguer with a hyphenated last name.
Rowland-Smith, a Seattle starter, is Australian, left-handed and 25 years old. Signed by the Mariners as a free agent in 2000, Rowland-Smith was selected by the Twins in the 2004 draft of unprotected minor league players, but the Twins returned him to the Mariners rather than keep him on their roster all season.
He spent the next two seasons in the Mariners’ minor league system, then had three different visits with them last season, making a total of 26 appearances in relief. He relieved in 32 more games this season before moving into the starting rotation at the beginning of last month.
Over-all Rowland-Smith has a 2-2 record and a 3.84 earned run average in 5 starts and 32 relief appearances.
Babe Zambrano Strikes Again
Carlos Zambrano, the talented Chicago Cubs pitcher, slugged his fourth home run of the season last Thursday, leaving him two homers from the career high he reached in 2006.
Zambrano is one of the best hitting pitchers in the majors, if not the best. He has a .361 batting average on 26 hits in 72 at-bats. In contrast, Ryan Theriot, his infield teammate, has hit one home run in 474 at-bats.
Then there are the players with the most times at bat and no home runs:
Chone Figgins, Angels, 362
Jason Bartlett, Rays, 349
Juan Pierre, Dodgers, 330
Jamey Carroll, Indians, 262
Joey Gathright, Royals 251
See CC Win and Win and Win, Hit and Field, Too
Nothing that CC Sabathia has done with Milwaukee – 8-0, 1.60 in 9 starts – has surprised the man who traded him to the Brewers. Mark Shapiro, the Cleveland general manager, said that despite his record with the Indians – 6-8, 3.83 in 18 starts – Sabathia had turned around his season by the time he left seven weeks ago.
“He made the adjustment and he was dominant, same as last year,” Shapiro said. “He went from being a good starting pitcher to a dominant starting pitcher. His one flaw is he can care too much and that manifests itself in his delivery. It affects his command, and he loses the ability to throw his slider.”
In his last five starts for the Indians Sabathia, who won the American League Cy Young award last year, compiled a 3-0 record with a 1.80 e.r.a. That means in his last 14 starts he has an 11-0 record and a 1.67 e.r.a.
“Everyone here is pulling for him,” Shapiro said. “We all watch him with interest. We’re excited and we’re pulling for him.”
The Indians traded Sabathia because he can be a free agent at the end of the season, and they were unsuccessful in their effort to sign him to a contract extension.
“We wouldn’t have made the move without exploring that,” Shapiro said. “We can sign him in the off-season, but that would be unlikely.”
Sabathia is expected to want to sign with a National League team on the West Coast. Money isn’t expected to be a holdup for any team that pursues the 28-year-old left-hander, but number of years in the contract may be.
As one general manager put it, “Are you willing to pay for six years for getting four years of pitching?” Sabathia, however, will very likely seek more than a six-year contract.
He might ask for additional money for his hitting and fielding. In his start last Monday Sabathia singled home two fourth-inning runs in a close game, then singled again in his next time at bat, setting up another run, and sacrificed a runner into scoring position in his next at-bat.
In the seventh inning, he induced Miguel Tejada to ground into a double play that he started by snaring Tejada’s hard bouncer.
A New Old Yogi-ism
The umpires’ acceptance of the use of replays to get home run calls correct reminded Steve Jacobson, the former Newsday columnist, of an incident from the days he was covering the Mets.
“Way back in the Original Mets time,” Jacobson wrote in an e-mail, “ playing at old Crosley Field, Johnny Lewis hit a ball off the wall in center field where the dividing line for in-play was a wooden planking on the wall: hit concrete and the ball is in play and off the wood, home run.
“Anyhow, the umpire said it was in play. Yogi–must have been a coach–came running out to argue. He explained: “Anybody who can’t hear the difference of a ball hitting wood or hitting concrete must be blind.”