Notes, quotes and comment

A brief break from the Prospect Handbook stuff ....

* Mike Berardino of the Pioneer Press had this interesting (to me, at least) off-the-field item about Twins relief pitcher Casey Fien's involvement in the creation and business of a polling app called QVO. I know nothing about the app or the business beyond what's in the story, and that Carly Fiornia's campaign uses it doesn't appear to be much of an endorsement, but it seems fairly unique for a major leaguer to be so intimately involved in a high-tech endeavor.

* Baseball America's college preview issue included this story on Kyle Funkhouser of Louisville and Kyle Cody of Kentucky, two high-round draft picks who spurned the pro offers and returned to college for their senior seasons. Cody, you may recall, was selected by the Twins with the No. 73 overall pick. It didn't help their draft at all that he didn't sign.

* Jordan Schafer, the Twins opening day center fielder last year, will be in Dodgers camp this spring as a non-roster invitee. What's unusual is that he's apparently there as a combo pitcher-outfielder, with the emphasis on the pitching. There have been a few combo players in major league history, most recently Brooks Kieschnick, who spent two years with Brewers as a pitcher-outfielder. It's the kind of thing that's fun to think about -- two jobs with one roster spot! -- but really tough to pull off.

Notes, quotes and comment

Eduardo Nunez got his
10th double of the season
Friday night and is now
hitting .306.

Eduardo Nunez has now started four straight games at shortstop. The Twins have won three of those games, which should not be inferred as cause-and-effect.

Nunez long ago convinced almost everybody that he lacks the skills to play shortstop in the major leagues. I presume that Paul Molitor's sudden reliance on him speaks to the continuing offensive struggles of Eduardo Escobar.

And I further expect that soon enough Nunez will play his way off the shortstop job. At which point the Twins will either bring back Danny Santana or give Jorge Polanco a trial.

Nunez has his uses as a reserve player. Molitor has been adept at finding at-bats that play to his perceived strength of hitting velocity. I doubt Nunez is going to emerge as a regular at any position, much less one as defensively demanding as shortstop.

---

The Twins released Jordan Schafer, which shouldn't be a surprise. As I said earlier this week, the Twins have too many outfielders with more worthy demands for playing time.

Schafer did a good job for the Twins last year, but even this his .707 OPS merely made him a league average hitter, and it was vastly out of step with his previous major league record. He was miscast at the start of this season as the primary center fielder. That he was hampered by injury didn't help matters.

His release opens a spot on the 40-man roster, which will presumably be filled in a few weeks by Ervin Santana.

---

The Twins announced Friday that they have signed 20 of their 40 draft picks. Three of their picks in the first 10 rounds are still unsigned, but that's not alarming. Yet.

Ranking the Twins outfield priorities

Byron Buxton was 0-for-4 in his debut Sunday with a
pair of strikeouts and a failed sac bunt attempt.

Other than his highly anticipated and greatly heralded presence, Byron Buxton didn't have a great impact on Sunday's game in Arlington, Texas. Yes, he scored the winning run, but scoring from first on a two-out gapper would be routine for most baserunners. He ran down a potential gapper in the field, but I suspect Aaron Hicks would have made that play also, if not as easily.

Hicks, of course, wasn't available Sunday; the Twins put him on the disabled list as the move to get Buxton on the active roster. With Torii Hunter serving Game Two of his suspension, Paul Molitor deployed an outfield of Shane Robinson in left, Buxton in center and Eddie Rosario in right, and that is a pretty close to optimal defensive alignment.

The Twins have a bunch of outfielders now -- on the active roster, on the disabled list, and in the minors but still seen as significant pieces. Let's sort through the priorities.

1) Buxton. Yes, he has all of one game in the majors. He's still the single most important piece of this team's puzzle, the cornerstone player for the anticipated success ahead. He's here; he's playing.

2) Hunter. He's 39, but the team didn't commit $12 million to him to sit on the bench. I'd prefer to see him DHing than playing right.

3) Rosario. Debuted May 6 and has played in all but a handful of games since. Has so far lived up to his minor league billing, with arguably more power (three homers in his first 100 at-bats) than should be expected. Between his youth/developmental needs, his bat and his defensive skills, he should be in the outfield on a near-daily basis. Despite being in the running in training camp for the center field job, he has been strictly in the corners since his call-up, which is proper.

4) Oswaldo Arcia. Spluttering with a .167/.189/.229 slash line in Triple A, he appears to have been eclipsed by Rosario in the corner outfield plans. He's a better hitter than that .418 Rochester OPS suggests, but so what? His fielding woes negate the hitting, and between Hunter and Kennys Vargas, there's not much room available at DH. He's still only 24, but he's out of options after this season. A trade seems inevitable, and right now his value is probably as low as it's ever been.

5) Hicks. Buxton pushes him out of the center field job. His bat pushes him out of a regular corner outfield role. That makes him a fourth outfielder, which is not what he was drafted in the first round to be. Is the organization willing to accept that, or will they dump him? He's also out of options after this season.

6) Shane Robinson. Too flawed to be an outfield regular, but he does enough things well to use him. A prototype reserve outfielder.

7) Jordan Schafer. Rosario has already garnered 40 more plate appearances than the Opening Day center fielder. Schafer wasn't anywhere near the player this year that he was in August-September last year, and I don't see a role for him after he comes off the disabled list. Hicks and Robinson rank ahead of him as reserve outfielders, and nobody needs four center fielders on the roster.

8) Eduardo Escobar. I'll list him here because Baseball Reference has him as the regular left fielder so far. If he's still so listed after the All-Star break, Molitor is doing it wrong. Even if the Twins decide to turn to Jorge Polanco or Danny Santana at short, Escobar shouldn't get outfield time ahead of the first five on this list. He's an infielder. Use him as such.

Many losses in one

James McCann, Detroit's backup catcher, launches his
slide to conclude his inside-the-park homer Wednesday.

The Twins lost one game Wednesday. Also as many as three players to injury and their dignity.

Really, an inside-the-park home run to a catcher?

Michael Tonkin was reported on Twitter last night to be en route to the Twin Cities from Triple A Rochester. Who the right-hander will be replacing is unknown. I would expect it to be Casey Fien, the Twins second-best reliever, who departed Wednesday's game with shoulder issues. Another possibility is that the Twins will pull the plug on Tim Stauffer, who gave up three runs in two-thirds of an inning Wednesday.

But it's still (barely) April, and the Twins seldom admit a roster mistake until mid-May. Stauffer always looked like a dubious signing from here, and there's reason to suspect he's hiding an injury. I don't believe he's going to last long, but I also don't believe he'll get the ax for another couple of weeks.

We'll see what the medical reports on Fien, Phil Hughes and Jordan Schafter look like later today. I expect that the Twins will opt against letting Hughes pitch with a hip flexor strain; putting him on the DL would, for a time, resolve the how-do-we-get-Ricky-Nolasco-back-into-the-rotation issue.  

Schafer, who fell after beating out a bunt hit and left with some sort of knee issue, was reportedly moving around well in the clubhouse after the game. My guess is that nothing will happen there.

So that's my prediction: Hughes and Fien to the DL, Schafer and Stauffer remain.

Jordan Schafer and the Opening Day lineup

Jordan Schafer hit
.143 against left-handers
last season.

The day after I dissected the difference between platooning and playing matchups, Paul Molitor revealed his planned lineup for today's season opener against David Price, one of the best lefties in the game. That lineup included three players with a history of struggling against lefties: Oswaldo Arcia, Jordan Schafer and Kennys Vargas. And Schafer, of course, is supposed to be in a center field platoon.

Arcia and Vargas, I get. They're young guys, they're supposed to be regulars, and the first game of the season isn't a time for a manager to say: This guy needs a day off anyway, let's get so-and-so in the lineup.

Schafer is another matter. His career OPS against southpaws is almost 200 points lower than against right-handers. (Which is not to say that he's been all that good against righties either over the years.) So why is he in the lineup against Price while purported platoon mate Shane Robinson sits?

Molitor suggests that Opening Day is a day to play your regulars. Which I would accept -- see the second paragraph -- but for the fact that Molitor has avoided anointing Schafer as the regular center fielder.

So what other, unstated, rationale might the manager have for playing Schafer against Price?

The change-up

Price is one of the many pitchers who came up through the Tampa Bay system, which (as we've learned since Neil Allen became Minnesota's pitching coach) emphasizes the change -p. Last year, according to Baseball Info Systems, Price threw his change on 20 percent of his pitches.

While I don't know how his change-up use breaks down by platoons, it's a good bet that Price uses the change more against right-handed hitters than against lefties. This is something of a pitching staple: fastball-breaking ball against same side hitters, fastball-change against opposite side hitters. You're looking for a pitch that moves away from the hitter.

So the idea might be to take the change away from Price.

Is Price backwards?

Not really. For his career, Price enters 2015 with a career OPS allowed against righties of .676, against lefties of .561.

However, last year lefties were slightly better than righties against Price: .644 OPS for right handers, .657 for lefties. That's obviously in a smaller sample than the career figures, but it's more recent.

Defense

Schafer is presumably perceived as a better defensive player than Robinson, who mostly played right field in the exhibitions. Molitor may figure that neither is all that likely to hit Price, so go with the better glove.

Schafer really is the regular, for now

It's usually best to follow the John Mitchell Rule with managers. (Mitchell was Richard Nixon's first attorney general who famously told opponents of school integration "Watch what we do, not what we say.")

Molitor says he's platooning Robinson and Schafer. We'll see. He may wind up playing Schafer more than that for a time, until Schafer convinces him that the team would do better with someone else.

"Playing matchups" versus platooning

The demotion earlier this week of Aaron Hicks and Eddie Rosario signaled that the Twins will open 2015 with a center field platoon of two mediocre veterans, Jordan Schafer and Shane Robinson. Schafer hits left, Robinson right. It's an obvious platoon.

But we are being constantly "assured" by the broadcasters that it won't be a hard platoon. They're going to play matchups.

Well, that's what platooning IS: Matchups on a rudimentary level. Earl Weaver at his mad-dougout-scientist peak in the late '70s and early '80s ran very complex platoons, all of them starting with lefty-righty and then branching out into breaking ball-fast ball and other variables, but he had as many as nine outfielders. Paul Molitor has four true outfielders, two of whom aren't going to play center field unless Moli wishes to embarrass a pitcher. He hasn't a roster built to accommodate complex lineup shuffling.

The broadcasters are saying this because that's what they're being told, and I presume they're being told that because players generally hate being platooned and so why rub it in? Of course, at this point in their careers, Schafer and Robinson ought to embrace the role. It's better to platoon in the majors than play every day in the minors -- or to find a job in the real world.

'Clarity,' indeed

Tommy Milone
gets the fifth
slot in the rotation.

I suppose I could have waited a couple hours to post.

The Twins this morning optioned out Aaron Hicks, Eddie Rosario and Trevor May and reassigned Mark Hamburger. They also announced that Tommy Milone will be the fifth starter.

This sets up a center field platoon of Jordan Schafer and Shane Robinson, which I saw coming a few days ago. I'm fine with this. After the last two springs, nothing Hicks did in Florida was going to sway my view of him, and while I have high hopes for Rosario, I don't think center field in April 2015 is the right job at the right time for him. Schafer and Robinson aren't much of a much, but that just makes it easier to decide that it's Byron Buxton's time in June or July.

Ron Gardenhire would have made a different decision. Gardy never ran a true left-right platoon for more than a month or so. He'd have picked one center fielder to open the season, probably Hicks, and changed to somebody else in late May when Hicks didn't hit, and we've seen this movie before.

Hamburger's departure was also foreseeable. He opened eyes early in camp but faded late; he didn't make either of my bullpen projections this week. He's got a real good chance of coming up at some point this season, though.

I'm glad Milone is in the rotation, even more pleased that Mike Pelfrey isn't, and a bit discouraged that May is not. As I said earlier this morning, May probably needed some veteran injuries to get a rotation spot. The front office stacked too many contracts in front of him. Milone is a good starter with a better track record than Pelfrey or Ricky Nolasco. We didn't see him pitch that way last year.

So what decisions still await? The backup catcher has yet to be determined. One or two or even three bullpen jobs are still in question. We know Glen Perkins, Casey Fien and Brian Duensing are safe, and it would be a shocker if J.R. Graham didn't come north. That leaves three jobs for Tim Stauffer, Caleb Thielbar, Pelfrey, Blaine Boyer and maybe somebody not currently in the Twins organization.

Center field revisited

Aaron Hicks' stat line
is less impressive than
it was a week ago.

When I wrote here last week about the center field competition, Aaron Hicks was sporting a .330 spring training average. He had maybe one hit since then and dropped to .207 -- which, really only illustrates the silliness of relying on spring training stats to evaluate players. The sample sizes are small, the competition is uneven, the numbers are essentially meaningless.

Even if he were still hitting three-something, so what? He did that in spring trainings 2013 and and 2014, and it didn't prove indicative of anything. Hicks has 150 regular season games, 538 regular season plate appearances, in which he's hit .201. Letting a couple dozen spring training at-bats outweigh that would be silly.

Meanwhile, Eddie Rosario's spring training stats display a red-flag glitch: 40 plate appearances, no walks. He still has a batting average (.256 per Baseball Reference) higher than his on-base percentage (.250). His minor league stat line hardly reveals a Kevin Youkilis-type base-on-balls machine, but it's not that bizarre.

My take on this is that he's trying too hard to impress. There used to be a cliche about Dominican players and their hacking tendencies: You can't walk off the island. The idea was that these players were encouraged to swing at everything because they had to hit the ball to get the scouts' attention. Rosario is from Puerto Rico, not the Dominican, but the concept holds.

Hicks and Rosario are the two young guys in camp who can be seen as full-time center fielders. Veteran fringe players Jordan Schafer and Shane Robinson are more likely to be platoon mates, and that increasingly looks like the direction the Twins will take. Terry Ryan doesn't sound very enthused by that prospect, while Paul Molitor this week expressed openness to platoons and invoked the success Earl Weaver had with platoons back when Molitor was a young player.

One difference, of course, is that Weaver platooned aggressively. His Orioles collected players like John Lowenstein and Benny Ayala specifically to use in such roles. A Schafer-Robinson platoon would be more a passive platoon, chosen out of a lack of better options not for a strategic advantage. Robinson's career splits actually suggest he's a bit "backwards," meaning better against right-handed pitchers, although I don't think 200 or so plate appearances over five seasons each way proves a whole lot. He's probably not the right-handed outfielder you'd pursue if you wanted to build a center field platoon.

Still, Schafer-Robinson is more palatable to me this spring than either Hicks or, I'm sorry to say, Rosario. (If Rosario does come north, I will not complain, but I won'be have high expectations; if it's Hicks, I will complain.) Schafer-Robinson are acceptable until Bryon Buxton arrives, and I hope that's sooner rather than later.

The center field competition

Shane Robinson was
a popular player among
Cardinals fans.

First there were three genuine candidates for the Twins center field job. Now there are four. The winnowing process, it would appear, is going in the wrong direction.

There remains more than two weeks of spring training, but the indications are that Paul Molitor wants to use the last week of camp to "practice manage" game situations, not evaluate talent. Remember, he's never run a game on any level. So the expectation is that that Twins will look to essentially set their Opening Day roster in 10 days or so.

Let's look at the candidates in alphabetical order:

Aaron Hicks is, for the third spring in a row, putting up good spring training numbers (slash line .330/.400/.500). Call him Mr. March.

Twenty at-bat sample sizes are meaningless to begin with, and particularly so in spring training, and even more so with Hicks. This kind of thing has fooled the decision makers each of the past two springs. I've said this before: I don't know what Hicks can do this spring to convince people that he's better than he's been. He certainly didn't help himself with his wool gathering early on.

He's 25, so growth is possible if  unlikely. Molitor says in this story that Hicks is too young to be a bench guy, that he should play everyday. My take is that Hicks is never going to be more than a fourth outfielder/platoon candidate.

Roster status: 40-man roster, has an option left.

Shane Robinson, 30, split the past four seasons between St. Louis and its minor league affiliates. He's a right-handed hitter, no power, with some speed -- classic fourth- or fifth-outfielder tools. I may be wrong, but he seems to have mainly played corner outfield this spring.

Roster status: Non-roster invitee, but he has, as many non-roster veterans do, an opt-out clause -- if he's not on the 40 by a specific date (in his case, apparently, April 2) he can declare free agency and walk away.

Eddie Rosario, 23, is the guy who wedged his way into the conversation. He has an odd set of splits, .276/.267/.586; he has an on-base percentage lower than his batting average because he has literally never walked but has picked up a sac fly. Patrick Reusse's kind of hitter line, I guess.

Rosario is the only one of the four without major league experience; in fact, he's not played above Double A, and he didn't do much at that level. He is also, presumably, the weakest defensively of the four.

Jordan Schafer is
a .229 lifetime hitter
in  more than 1,300
plate appearances.

Rosario is definitely what Molitor says Hicks is: A young guy with a high ceiling who needs to play every day at some level. He only makes the big league roster as the regular center fielder.

Roster status: 40 man roster, has all three options left.

Jordan Schafer, 28, is the one guy most certain to make the roster, either as the backup behind Hicks or Rosario or in a platoon with Hicks or Robinson. Left-handed hitter who fared better in his 41 games with the Twins late last season than he did in any previous stretch in the majors. Another guy with reserve outfielder tools.

Roster status: On the 40, presumably out of options, has a $1.55 million contract for 2015.

These are the realistic choices for the Molitor and general manager Terry Ryan:

• Hicks as the regular, Schafer as the backup, Rosario to the minors, Robinson gets to make his choice.
• Rosario as the regular, Schafer as the backup, Hicks to Triple A, Robinson gets to make his choice.
• Schafer platoons with Robinson, Hicks and Rosario to the minors.
• Schafer platoons with Hicks, Rosario to the minors, Robinson gets to make his choice.

My impulse is to vote for the second option, Rosario as the regular. It's consistent with my wish for the organization to push the talent and find reasons to play them. But ... I am also a firm believer that the outfield defense is a bigger problem than the Twins acknowledge, and Rosario as a center fielder doesn't figure to be a defensive asset.

I want him up, but the positions that fit him best aren't available. My guess is that the Twins will opt to follow the same logic that they are following with Byron Buxton and Miguel Sano and send him down.

In which case, I'd say go with option 3, a Schafer-Robinson platoon. There can be no illusion there: These are two low-ceiling players whose purpose is to fill the position until somebody better is ready. Having them in center will give the front office incentive to decide that somebody better -- be it Buxton or Rosario -- is ready.

What's most likely, I fear, is option 1, Hicks as the regular. The definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result.

The Twins by position: Center field

Jordan Schafer hit .285 for the Twins
in the last two months of 2014.

If we ignore Danny Santana, who enters spring training a presumed shortstop, the Twins will open camp with three center fielders with multiple seasons of major league experience: Aaron Hicks, Shane Robinson and Jordan Schafer.

Hicks is 25 and a .201 career hitter in 538 plate appearances spread over two years.

Robinson, a non-roster invitee signed after the Cardinals let him go, is 30 and a .231 career hitter (five seasons, less that 500 plate appearances)

Schafer is 28 and a .229 hitter (five years and nearly 1,400 plate appearances).

You can draw up various platoon possibilities out of these three. Schafer is left-handed, Robinson right-handed, Hicks a switch hitter. You might still envision Hicks as a regular, although that notion is increasingly dubious. No matter how you deploy this group, you get inadequacy. These are, at best, bench guys,

The best center field talent in camp (and this is true even if we count Santana as a center fielder) are two prospects coming off disappointing 2014s and ticketed for Double A: Byron Buxton, who had repeated injuries, and Eddie Rosario, who served a 50-game drug suspension.

Despite his 2014 stall, I still believe that if the Twins simply handed the center field job to Buxton this spring and let him play all year, his floor is something like .260 with 10 homers, 30 steals and Gold Glove caliber defense (assuming, of course, that he stayed intact). Rosario would probably put up a better batting average but with fewer steals and lesser defense.

You know to a dead certainty that the three "major leaguers" aren't going to come near those numbers. Not a dead certainty, but close to it, is that the Twins front office won't let Buxton sniff the majors until the second half of the year at the earliest, and Rosario isn't going to be fast tracked either.

The Twins have reasons to slow play Buxton and Rosario. They would do better to look for reasons to play the kids, not to look for reasons to keep them in the minors. Let the kids play.

Looking for meaning in a minor signing

OK, it's a minor transaction -- specifically, a minor league transaction. But it still says something about a particular problem in the upper levels of the Twins farm system.

The Twins on Thursday signed outfielder Shane Robinson to a minor-league contract with an invitation to spring training.

Robinson has been with the St. Louis Cardinals since he was drafted in 2006 and has been a reserve outfielder for the big-league club for most of the past three years. He's a little (5-foot-9) guy who can run well enough to be used in center field, and he has a career MLB average of .231.

The Cardinals cut him loose rather than risk going to arbitration with him. The Twins got him to sign in a hurry, probably because there's a fairly obvious chance to be on the major league team. While the corner outfield starters are set (Torii Hunter and Oswaldo Arcia), center field is open.

Aaron Hicks? Jordan Schafer? Robinson? As matters stand, at least one, probably two, of these guys are going to be on the 25-man roster. Somebody has to play center field, at least until Byron Buxton establishes that he can stay in one piece for a month.

The Twins had the opportunity to do unto Schafer as the Cardinals did to Robinson, but they lack any sort of depth in center field-competent outfielders. So Schafer, a .229 lifetime hitter, figures to pull in well over $1 million next year, while Robinson will do well to get half that.

At the very least the Twins have now the option of platooning in center. Schafer hits left; Robinson hits right. Robinson has actually shown a backwards platoon split in his limited major league playing time, but if Paul Molitor has any inclination to platoon, this might be a reasonable pair to do it with.

Hicks, a switch hitter who is stronger from the right side, also offers a platoon option, but I doubt the Twins would do that with Hicks, who is considerably younger than Schafer and Robinson and is still seen as having a higher ceiling.

The arbitration tender deadline

Almost lost in the Torii Hunter news Tuesday evening was the deadline for tendering contracts to the arbitration eligible.

As should have been expected after the Twins outrighted Anthony Swarzak -- one of seven arbitration-eligible players on the roster at season's end -- they tendered all six of the remainders: Brian Duensing, Casey Fien, Tommy Milone, Eduardo Nunez, Trevor Plouffe and Jordan Schafer.

One can question the decision to tender Nunez, a utility man who doesn't play any position particularly well and has a career OPS (in 956 a-bats) of just .684. If the Twins are serious about going with Danny Santana at short rather than in the outfield, that relegates Eduardo Escobar to a utility role, and there is nothing Nunez does better than Escobar.

But Nunez is at the least an insurance policy. There are teams looking for a shortstop; maybe the Twins will try to flip Escobar for a pitcher or center fielder. Or maybe they aren't all that sure about Santana as a shortstop and wary of counting on Aaron Hicks and Schafer for center field. If they keep Santana in the outfield, Escobar stays at short and Nunez can be the utility infielder.

As for the other five, I don't see any real question about retaining them. Milone didn't pitch well in his few starts for the Twins before going on the disabled list, but he has a good track record. I'll guarantee this: A team willing to pay the likes of Kevin Correia and Mike Pelfrey $5 million really can't find $2.8 million for Milone to be excessive.

A night at Target Field

Jordan Schafer turned the wrong way
on this first-inning double over his head
Monday night. 

Monday night's game provided a strong reminder of one of my favorite precepts about baseball: The easiest way to improve the pitching is to improve the outfield defense.

Anthony Swarzak, making a spot start, wasn't really as bad as his line -- 11 hits in 4.1 innings -- indicates. My scoresheet was dotted with notations of outfield plays unmade and resulting runs .

Jordan Schafer, playing centerfield, got turned around on a ball hit by Victor Martinez in the first inning. If Schafer makes the play the Tigers get nothing; in reality, V-Mart's double scored one run and set up his own on J.D. Martinez' subsequent hit.

The latter Martinez opened the three-run fourth inning with a double that Oswaldo Arcia misjudged in right field. That could, should, have been caught.

I didn't mark any poor plays by left fielder Chris Parmelee, but Dan Gladden suggested on the postgame show that there was a play (or more) that the first-base transplant should have made. Presumably Gladden was talking about Bryan Holaday's RBI double in the fourth and/or Victor Martinez' double in the fifth.

I will give Parmelee credit for a good throw to the plate to cut down V-Mart to end that fifth inning. Martinez isn't fast by any means, but Parmelee had to make an accurate throw to get him on Holaday's fly ball, and he made the play.

Other notes from what I expect will be my final in-person game of 2014:

* Danny Santana started at shortstop, as he did in my previous trip to Target Field 10 days earlier. On Sept. 5 he missed on what I thought was a double play opportunity; on Sept. 15 he had a similar chance (second inning off the bat of Ian Kinsler) and started the twin killing. He also had a well-turned pivot on a flashy DP started by Brian Dozier's diving play and flip with glove hand; that flip was a little behind Santana, but he handled the exchange fluidly.

I've been, and remain, skeptical of Santana's ability to handle shortstop, but those were nicely done plays.

* Swarzak, as implied by the previous paragraph, was helped by his infielders, perhaps as much as he was hurt by his outfielders. Give him credit for this: He threw strikes -- 14 first-pitch strikes to his 23 hitters faced, 47 strikes in 70 pitches, just one walk and that intentional.

* A.J. Achter, on the other hand, got through his 2.1 innings without being charged with a run, but threw almost as many balls (17) as strikes (19). He walked home one of Swarzak's inherited runners, a run set up by the intentional walk to J.D. Martinez.. Achter and Ryan Pressly kept the Tigers off the board in the sixth-through-eighth innings, but it wasn't pretty, at least on Achter's part.

* Miguel Cabrera is a beast. The man's leg is clearly killing him, but he had three hits for seven total bases and three runs scored. The way he stared out at the outfield after his first-inning double off the limestone overhang suggested that he couldn't believe that didn't get out of the park.

Contemplating Jordan Schafer

Jordan Schafer steals second base Tuesday. He is
six-for-six as a base stealer in seven games with the Twins.

Jordan Schafer has been a fixture in the Twins lineup since they landed him on waivers Aug. 3. Part of it, of course, was injury (Oswaldo Arcia missed a few games). Part of it is wanting to see what he's got.

And part of it is defense. It's worth remembering that Sam Fuld was playing a lot of corner outfield before the Twins traded him to Oakland. Almost every outstanding Twins team of the Metrodome era had two outfield regulars (and sometimes three) with center field range. Kirby Puckett and Dan Gladden (1987), followed a few years later by Puckett-Gladden-Shane Mack (1991). Torii Hunter and Jacque Jones, at times with Lew Ford. Carlos Gomez and Denard Span.

Danny Santana isn't a true center fielder, but Santana and Schafer (or Fuld) do offer the speed to help the strikeout-adverse pitchers. That's not a small thing at all.

As for the rest of his game: Schafer appears to rely on his wheels a lot. He's a good, aggressive basestealer, and he is certainly willing to bunt (just not very effective at it). I get the impression that even he doesn't think he can get a hit off a left-hander (.163 career batting average against southpaws), which probably had something to do with the bad on-his-own squeeze attempt on Sunday that wound up getting Eduardo Nunez trapped off third base.

We may well continue to see a lot of Schafer in these final weeks of the season, and certainly in August. He's second-year arbitration eligible, and the Twins will want to decide if he's worth the price as a reserve outfielder for 2015. They went through a lot of them this year.

Jordan Schafer, reserve outfielder

Jordan Schafer makes a catch last month
for the Atlanta Braves.

The Twins have had quite the parade of "fourth outfielders" this year. They waived Alex Presley coming out of spring training; he was grabbed by Houston. They had the brief Jason Bartlett delusion; that ended with his retirement. They brought up Darin Mastroianni for 11 at-bats and then waived him; Toronto grabbed him. They claimed Sam Fuld off waivers from Oakland, and that settled things until Oakland decided they needed him after all, and the Twins traded him back for a starting pitcher.

Which left the Twins without the traditional fourth outfielder, defined as a bench guy, often left-handed or a switch hitter, who can play center field. Fourth outfielders are generally legs and a glove; if they were truly quality hitters, they'd be regulars. That's a good description of Fuld; while he had a strong stat line with the Twins (on base percentage .370), his career OPS+ is 85, meaning that he's 15 percent below league as a hitter.

On Sunday the Twins announced that they had landed Jordan Schafer on waivers from Atlanta. Schafer is a former third-round draft pick who has split his five-year major league career between Atlanta and Houston. He's five years younger than Fuld (27) and an even weaker hitter (OPS+ for his career 68). He's fast (88 career steals and just 22 caught stealings), but the defensive metrics aren't particularly high on his defense.

Schafer is not as good a fourth outfielder as Fuld, but the move down in the role for the Twins makes sense to get the rotation upgrade -- assuming, of course, that they take advantage of the rotation upgrade by actually activating Tommy Milone, something they have yet to do.

The Twins haven't announced a move to get him on the 25-man roster (they had an opening on the 40 man roster created when they DFA'd Matt Guerrier). With today's off day, they can wait until Tuesday to make their move.

My guess: Chris Colabello goes back to Rochester. I assume the Twins want to take a sincere look at Kennys Vargas, and Colabello hasn't done much since coming back up.