Friday, September 3, 2010

Late night: Tigers 10, Twins 9 (13 innings)

Thursday's 13-inning bullpen-killing fiasco ended too late for our press deadline, so here's the stuff we didn't have time to print.

Game story here.
The Twins weren't the only team unable to turn the double play

Box score here.

Another game, another set of infield errors and misplays, resulting in four runs in a game lost by one run in extra innings.

Commenters can cite UZR and plus-minus all they want as evidence that this is a good defensive team, and I will continue to insist that this team is doing a horrible job in the field.

Let's detail, with a running tally of the resulting runs in parenthesis:

First inning: Alexi Casilla bobbles Brendan Boesch's one-out grounder, gets just the one out at second. A run scores on the play; inning should have ended. (One run)

Fifth inning: J.J. Hardy decides to take Miguel Cabrera's one-out grounder to the bag himself rather than flip to Casilla. Wil Rhymes beats Hardy to the base. A run scores; inning should have ended. (Two runs)

Seventh inning: Casilla drops the DP feed from Danny Valencia, gets no outs. Even if the umpire had granted the out on the transfer play, he still would not have turned the DP. No runs resulted. (Two runs)

Eighth inning: With two out, Hardy makes a poor throw to first base, getting no outs and allowing two men to reach scoring position. The next batter singles home both runners. (Four runs.) That, by the way, is five errors for Hardy in the past two weeks.

Ninth inning: Casilla again fails to start a double play, settles for force out. No runs resulted. (Four runs)

To be sure, the Tigers had their own problems defensively. But it's the Twins this space is concerned about.

1 comment:

  1. "and I will continue to insist that this team is doing a horrible job in the field."

    "Horrible" is a relative term and I'm curious as to who or when you are comparing them to come to the conclusion that they are "horrible." Please explain.

    ReplyDelete