Verlander Gem Blown as Minnesota Twins Sweep Detroit Tigers

It isn’t fair, but it is baseball. Justin Verlander pitched a gem for the Tigers this afternoon, but he didn’t get the win. He threw a career-high 13 strikeouts, and he sent the Twins down in weary rows, but he didn’t get the win.

Now, that’s largely because pitchers can only create conditions in which a win is possible; they can’t secure it. Wins make a crisp, intense stat, but they don’t illuminate a pitcher’s skill. A team wins or loses.

Verlander didn’t get a win, but neither did Scott Baker, who had yet another outing with one bad inning in it. This one was grievous, but let’s pause for a moment to consider the other five he pitched.

The game was scoreless until the sixth. I don’t mean scoreless like no one has gotten around to it, but scoreless as in this is an impossible goal. Both pitchers faced close to the minimum batters. Verlander tended to mow his down with Ks, while Baker courted fly outs, to foul or fair territory, but in both cases, the hitters were stone silent.

I had only the radio to guide me through the game this afternoon, so I’m limited to the cerebral, aerial view. That means I can gloss over Baker’s troubled sixth. The Tigers batted around, and between Brandon Inge’s lead off single to his strikeout to end the inning, five runs were scored.

Baker has the stuff but he seems to write singles and not albums. A full game, in which the pitcher must balance highs and lows, just seems out of reach. He kept the Mariners quiet for his first win last Friday, but that’s the only time a bad inning hasn’t bollixed Baker.

There’s every reason to hope he’ll overcome this, but the pattern is getting hard to ignore.

Down 5-0, the Twins could have let the game go. After all, they had just finished a marathon about 12 hours before. Instead, they let Verlander slice and dice them for sixth innings and then start the seventh with his pitch count showing. Thirteen strikeouts will cost you in the pitch department.

Verlander fanned Joe Crede to start the seventh, but then allowed a single and a walk. It’s not as if he’s crumbling to the ground, but he’s well past the typical pitch allowance so Jim Leyland brought in Bobby Seay to handle Denard Span.

Span singled to load the bases. If you’re a Detroit fan, you can still see rays of light. They need eight more outs with a five-run cushion. Maybe they could part with a run or two here and just tidy up later.

Seay did the single ugliest thing he can do: he walked in a run as Matt Tolbert refused to nibble on stuff out of the strike zone. Joe Mauer hit into a fielder’s choice, scoring one run, and the Twins created a pretty throbbing nightmare for Seay.

Justin Morneau rapped out a single, and batter by batter we’re tapping in runs. When Jason Kubel launched one to the center field fence, the Twins radio announcer was saddened to see it classified a ground-rule double. Only one run can score on it, but the Twins are now down by a single run, 4-5.

Leyland switched pitchers, but the spell isn’t broken. Zach Miner walked Michael Cuddyer and Joe Crede, last night’s walkoff grand slam hero, was up.

The time all he had to produce is a single, but it scores two and the Twins, of all things, have the lead 6-5.

And that’s the game. Six good innings by Verlander, and one horrific one he starts and the bullpen finishes. Five good innings by Baker, and one disastrous one. No other scoring, very little other hitting.

The radio is sometimes a great window into a game, but it can be hard to put a pitcher’s duel into words. The majority of the game was pitching excellence, which takes the form of hitting silence. How do you describe a void?

But what did feel clear all along was that the Tigers had Verlander at his peak on the mound. A sweep of the Tigers would be asking too much, particularly after last night’s comeback.

Winning wasn’t possible, and then it was. The Twins are starting to show the grit and game-long concentration it takes to win a series, sweep a series, and perhaps win a division. That’s a long way off, since this victory brings the team a mere whisker above .500, but the ingredients of winning baseball are starting to show.

This is the first series sweep of the year, and it’s against a division heavy. Since we’ve spent the whole season so far below or near .500, we can’t start reading turnaround in our tea leaves, but these three wins have all shown some new strengths in the bullpen and the power game.

We get to test them over the weekend against the Yankees, and in that new ballpark, the one that seems to make the homers bloom to right. Well, of all things, we may have a lineup ready to capitalize.