Twins Fans Loving Miltie

A fun interleague game was played today between the Twins and the Cubs in Wrigley.  Twins won 7-4.

The highlights were Joe Mauer hitting his 13th HR of the young season, tying his career high in only his 141st AB of the season.  No one should be surprised that a hitter of Mauer’s caliber is starting to develop power at age 26.  The only surprise is that it has taken him this long.

If Mauer can stay healthy enough to play regularly through age 32 or 33, I’m fairly certain he will hit 30 HRs in a season (maybe this year).  He’s almost too big and too good of a hitter not to.

Meanwhile Cubs’ fans were having more fun with Miltie.  After coming through with a two-run double in the 6th inning that halved the Twins’ lead to 4-2, Miltie showed his defensive prowess and powers of concentration starting in the top of the 7th.

First, he lost Jason Kubel’s pop fly in the sun for a base hit.  Then he got a late jump on and failed to catch Michael Cuddyer’s bloop double, which scored a run.

In the 8th, with Nick Punto on third and Brendan Harris on first with one out, Miltie caught a routine flyball.  He thought it was the third out of the inning, so he posed for the fans after catching the ball and eventually tossed it into the rightfield bleachers.  Punto scored easily, and Harris was awarded third base.

Punto likely would have scored anyway, it being a fairly deep fly ball, and Harris did not score from third, so there was no real harm done, except in the minds of Cubs’ fans, who have already begun to tire of Miltie’s act and his big mouth.  Needless to say, the entire crowd rained down boos on Miltie, which will, I’m sure, only feed Miltie’s persecution complex.

Lou Piniella has never had a reputation as a patient manager when it comes to mental errors.  I wonder what he thought of Miltie’s brain-fart.  I’m sure it wasn’t good.

One of the reasons the Cubs haven’t won a pennant since 1945 is that they make a lot of dumb player moves.  Anyone with half a clue could see before the season started that a player like Milton Bradley really has no place on a pennant contending ballclub.  If you’re going to throw around $30M, there were plenty of better options out there than Miltie.

Could two players be more opposite than Joe Mauer and Milton Bradley?  Probably not.  You never hear anything bad about Mauer, except that he gets hurt a lot, and that’s really more the Twins’ fault than Mauer’s.  If the Twins are going to insist that a man Mauer’s size should play 130 games at catcher year in and year out, he’s going to have plenty of injuries before his career is over.

Cubs’ fans are by and large pretty sharp baseball fans.  Mauer today received chants of “M-V-P” and “Let’s Go, Mauer!”, which is mighty rare for a visiting player at Wrigley.  Granted, there were probably a good number of Twins’ fans at Wrigley today, but it also suggests that Chicago fans recognize Mauer as one of the game’s best and that he plays the game right.

Miltie, not so much.  If he could just shut up and play, he can do some things (mainly hit) to help a team win.  There is no evidence whatsoever that he can control his pop-off-itis even a little bit.