What About The Pennant?

With just 11 games left in the regular season for the Minnesota Twins, they needed a win last night against Cleveland to stay 1 1/2 games out of first place with Chicago beating the Yankees by a score of 6-2.  

Things started out not looking so good for the Twins at the end of the 3rd inning last night.  The Twins had scored just one run while Twins starter Francisco Liriano gave up eight.  Things started to look up when the they scored eight runs in four innings to take a 9-8 lead over the Cleveland Indians.  Unfortunately, in the bottom of the 8th Twins reliever Eddie Guardado gave up Grady Sizemore's 32nd homerun of the season, a foul pole homerun to right field, to tie it 9-9.  

The game stayed that way until the bottom of the 11th inning.  The inning started with Joe Nathan coming on to pitch. He immediately gave up a single to Franklin Gutierrez to open the inning.  This was followed by a sacrafice bunt to first base and a walk by Johnny Peralta which put runners at first and second. Up comes catcher Victor Martinez to the plate. "Joe Nathan delievers......and IT's GONE!  A walk-off 3-run homerun by Victor Martinez and this ball game is history! Oh wow!" That was something like what was heard on the radio by thousands of fans as they turned off the radio.

To make a long story short the Twins lost 12-9 and it was partially their fault.  They had 5 chances with at least one runner in scoring position and only converted three of them.  The biggest missed chance came in the seventh when the inning opened with a walk, a flyout, a flyout turned catchers interference, which put runners at 1st and 2nd, and then a second walk. Go-Go Gomez helped the Indians get out of that one by lining into a double play at 3rd to end the inning. If we really needed a double play in that situation we could've called the Angels and borrowed Torii Hunter back, he could've done it for Gomez. In addition they made two errors that should've been easy outs and a hit that should've been called error on Carlos Gomez, boy, it wasn't his night.

On the other hand, there were multiple places where the Twins did pretty well.  Carlos Gomez, who was mentioned earlier, went 2-6 with three RBI and a run scored. They also managed to score more runs than they have in a long time with a total of nine, and they also had a total of 13 hits. There is still room for improvement in other aspects of the game but there were still some highlights.

I am a die hard Twins fan and will stay with them through anything but this was an unacceptable performance while they are trying to catch the White Sox in the division with just 11 games left in the season.  In addition they have another series against Chicago next week and cannot afford to leave it up to that to decide the division. I also think that they don't want to leave it up to that.

They have another game against Cleveland tonight to close out the series at 6:05 CDT. With pitchers Scott Baker on the mound for the Twins and MLB wins leader Cliff Lee on the mound for the Indians, hopefully they can avoid getting swept...again.

They also need this win tonight to stay at most 2 1/2 games out of first.  Just to put it in perspective, we need to win the division because in the event of a tie for first place, we play at Chicago, not at the Dome.  We have no shot at the wild card because that means we must win 8 of our last 11 games with the Boston Red Sox/Tampa Bay Devil Rays losing that many.  

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