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That was a good sign for the Twins. It shows that maybe they haven’t completely lost their fans after four (plus one week) really crummy seasons. But it is a less good sign for the people at the top of that organization who might be facing a crisis in confidence that I never thought I’d see.
This offseason, General Manager Terry Ryan and the Twins doled out three guaranteed contracts and raised expectations with talk of being competitive. But their biggest free agent signing, pitcher Ervin Santana, was caught taking performance-enhancing drugs. The reliever Ryan signed, Tim Stauffer, has a 8.10 ERA despite being limited to mop-up duties. And the beloved veteran leader Torii Hunter, who was brought back to shepherd immature talent, is hitting .130 and keeps being burned defensively.
It gets worse. Ryan faces all these challenges with a rookie – not just at the big league level but at any level - manager whose team looks inept defensively and, anemic offensively, but at least they have a disastrous bullpen. Today the Twins lost their home opener by more runs than they had ever lost any other home opener. They are already six games back of the Royals in the AL Central - and they’ve only played seven games.
But that general stuff isn’t why the fans booed. They booed because the infield failed to turn double plays to get Trevor May out of an inning. The booed because long fly balls to the gap kept falling just out of the reach of the outfielders and because relay throws dribbled untouched through the infield. And they booed watching reliever after reliever be thrown like so much dry oak onto a pyre.
In case you’re wondering if it’s time to panic, it certainly is in regard to the Twins bullpen. They don’t have a single right-hander that rookie Manager Paul Molitor can (or should) trust right now, with the possible exception of Casey Fien who says his shoulder is healthy. Even he is not a sure thing, given last season’s late fade, underwhelming spring training and recent missed games. We’ll see. If he’s injured, we’ll also see just how much damage he does before the Twins shut him down.
If Fien is healthy, one of the other three right-handers needs to be a sacrificial lamb for Michael Tonkin or Mark Hamburger or Ryan Pressly or Lester Oliveros or whoever. My best guess now would be Pressly, but far more interesting is which reliever (or two) they demote. The correct answer is “Blain Boyer” who offers little in terms of future impact or historical success. Tim Stauffer offers the latter and JR Graham the former, but both in limited doses, so I’m not sure there is a wrong answer here.
The tougher problem (and probably less urgent) is what to do about the outfield defense. Oswaldo Arcia and Hunter are not strong defenders as Monday’s game showed, but the Twins had to know what they were getting with both of them, even if they didn’t want to publicly acknowledge it about Hunter. But the corner outfielders’ limitations are exacerbated by center-fielders who are too mediocre to help in the gaps. They’re further inflamed by substitutes who aren’t outfielders and might actually be worse defensively.
If Arcia and Hunter can’t be moved around (and doing so would require pressing the panic button) then maybe this team needs to search for an elite defensive center fielder. Perhaps they can work out a way to get Peter Bourjos from the Cardinals. He can’t hit, but neither can Shane Robinson, and Bourjos can at least reach those bouncing balls in the gap before Hunter or Arcia, which didn’t happen today.
And finally, there is the lineup. There are several guys who look lost in the tall weeds right now, but the biggest culprit is Hunter. Hunter has been batting cleanup and entered today’s game 0-11 with runners on base, partly because pitchers seem to recognize they don’t need to throw him strikes. Or maybe the culprit is whoever keeps writing Hunter into the lineup right behind Joe Mauer, who entered today with a .417 on-base percentage.
There are several more areas that could be dissected; there are certainly several more that were obvious to the vocal fans at Target Field at Monday. It was also obvious that one inning after the boos rained down, the stadium was only one-third filled with an inning left to play. Beyond the twitter snark and blogger treatises and talk radio rants lies a barren, quiet place called Apathy. This Twins season seems to be hurtling toward that arid wasteland. The best news yesterday was that the Twins haven’t reached that destination. Yet.
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