Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Finding New Ways to Suckerpunch the Fanbase

The Twins, no content with the traditional methods of losing games (though they've certainly tried their hand at most of them lately), have decided upon much more colorful ways to break the hearts of their fans.

Take last night, for instance. After 3 innings, the Twins were losing 8-1. I'm not even sure why I kept the game on, but suddenly in the 5th inning, the offense started to come to life. Four runs in the 5th inning, two more in the 6th, and finally another two in the 8th to take the lead. They left a LOT of runners on base in those four innings, but they had rallied back from 7 down to take an improbable lead.

In the bottom of the 8th, Eddie Guardado gave up a long, foul-pole hitting homerun to Grady Sizemore, and the game went into extra innings. All in all, the Twins had used 6 relief pitchers over the course of 7+ innings by the time Joe Nathan came in, and had only given up the one run. Joe Nathan (the best closer in baseball) gave up a 3-run home run to lose the game.

The Twins scored 8 unanswered runs to take the lead, but in the process, they left 13 runners on base (that's more than one per inning) including once were they left the bases loaded, and once where they hit into a double play with the bases loaded to end an inning.

I haven't written much about the Twins lately because they've been fairly depressing, and it doesn't seem like they'll pull out of it in time. They're only 2.5 games back of the White Sox, but time is quickly running out. The White Sox have been doing their best to hand us the title, and we've been doing our best to hand it right back. The coming series against the Rays will be huge. The Twins NEED to at least split, and a series win would go a long way. It's been noted in blogs much better than this one that the expectations for this season were extremely low. I was thinking 80 wins would be just fine, and the Twins have 82 as of today, so they've done better than I thought they would, but to get this far and this close and not make the playoffs because of a September collapse would be maddening.

At least the Vikings are doing awesome.........oh wait...

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