Twins Notes: Indians Win 7-3

The Twins have so far this year made a lot of mediocre pitchers look like Cy Young award winners.  Today Jeremy Sowers was lights out the first 6 innings and he needed just 70 pitches to get there.  But in the 7th he got the first out, gave up a home run to Torii Hunter but then the bats started working and the the Twins scored two more to tie the game.  Sowers finished the 7th inning.

Sowers is a lifetime 3.81 ERA but has struggled so far this year with an ERA over 5 in his last 3 games.

Carlos Silva continues to look strong, he made one mistake today and gave up a 3 run homer in the 5th.  He had been getting squeezed the entire game and he was looking realy good th entire game.  It was a great outing considering the size of the strikezone was without exagerration about the size of a shoebox.

One of the things I noticed about 1 of Carlos Silva's pitches is that it looked like it had the rotation of a spitball.  Twins broadcaster and former Major League pitcher Bert Blyleven also noticed the strange rotation and made a joke about Gaylord Perry.  I don't know if it was, but it makes an interesting theory as to the dramatic change in Carlos Silva's numbers from last year to this year.

I don't believe Silva is throwing spitters as you didn't see the strange rotation on any other pitches he threw today or this year for that matter.  But if any type of pitcher can get away with the occasional vaseline ball it is a sinkerballer like Silva.

Joe Mauer continues to hit well as he pushes his batting average near the .400 mark.

Offensively the Twins are still fluctuating wildly and it would be nice to just see some consistency.

Glenn Perkins pitched well today.  He had 2.1 scoreless innings in relief today.  The young lefty had been struggling at the Major League level but is starting to find his spots.

Juan Rincon took over after Perkins and Rincon continued his excellence performance out of the bullpen.  Things looked a little tight in the 9th inning when with 2 outs the Cleveland Indians got two men on and Dennys Reyes proceeded to walk the only batter he faced but Pat Neshek was brought in and finished off Ryan Garko by striking him out to end the threat.

Twins bullpen looked great until the 12th when Jesse Crain gave up a walk and a pair of hits to allow the Indians to go up 5-3.  Joe Nathan was unable to stop the bleeding as the Indians scored 2 more runs on the Twins closer.  Joe Nathan is not looking good at all this spring and has allowed opposing batters to hit over .350 against him his year.

The Twins went down in order in the 9th.

Indians win 7-3