One that got away

The Twins had an opportunity to extend their lead, but didn't take advantage of it. Putting the eighth-inning problems concisely:

• Sergio Romo is probably not the best right-hander in the pen to face a lefty with power and
• Jorge Polanco is in a fielding slump at shortstop.

Winnable games get away sometimes. They always hurt. They particularly hurt in a pennant race.

Two interesting developments regarding minor league bullpen possibilities on Wednesday.

First, the Twins lost Ryan Eades to the Baltimore Orioles on waivers. Eades had a brief callup earlier in the season, pitching in two games. He had 3.2 scoreless innings but had six baserunners.

This is a good development for the right-hander; he's got a lot more opportunity with the Birds, who have a team ERA of 5.91 and have gone through 36 pitchers this year. (Some of them are position players, but still ...)

Selling off Eades opens a spot on the Twins 40-man roster, which would allow them to add somebody on waivers or to bring up somebody who isn't on the 40 already.

The odds are against a useful piece hitting outright waivers. The odds are even more against a useful actually reaching the Twins, who do have the fourth-best record in baseball despite all the wailing and gnashing of teeth. So the more likely benefit from the Eades move is to create a route for a not-on-the-40 player to come to the Twins.

Which brings us to the other development: Brusdar Graterol, generally considered the Twins' top pitching prospect, made his first relief appearance since 2017 (his first season in the states), picking up the save for Double-A Pensacola and reportedly hitting 102 on the radar gun.

I'm personally skeptical of the notion that the 20-year-old will get a September role. That he pitched in relief isn't surprising despite his lack of such use. He's missed much of the season with injury, and they weren't going to have him trying to goe five innings (or more) fresh off the injured list.

But I get why outside observers might anticipate such a move. The Twins bullpen lacks power arms, and Graterol is certainly a power arm. Since he has just 12 games pitched on his 2019 stat line, the Twins don't need to shut him down to avoid overuse.

The Sergio Romo trade

The Twins on Saturday picked up veteran reliever Sergio Romo from the Miami Marlins in an odd prospect trade.

The Twins not only got Romo, the one established major leaguer in the deal, but a decent pitching prospect in Chris Vallimont and a player to be named later..

The cost was Lewin Diaz, a left-left first baseman who is having a big 2019 season after a poor 2018. Miami must have really wanted Diaz, who has split this season between high A Fort Myers and Double A Pensacola,  to include two throw-ins.

Perhaps this trade will be known down the road as the Lewin Diaz trade, but the reality is that Diaz is Rule 5 eligible and the Twins were likely to have trouble finding a spot on the 40-man roster for him in the offseason. Yes, incumbent first baseman C.J. Cron is a free-agent-to-be, but the Twins have plenty of first base options who rank ahead of Diaz.

As I said in the Monday print column, Romo, 36, doesn't truly check my boxes for the Twins bullpen priorities. He's not left-handed, and he's not a power arm who can trade off long saves with Taylor Rogers.

But he helps. His high-grade slider makes him particularly tough on right-handed hitters, he has a track record of performing in a variety of relief roles, and he's not likely to be scared by pitching under pressure. The man picked up three saves in the 2012 World Series, after all.

The Twins DFA'd Carlos Torres, who never got into a game for the Twins, to make room for Romo.

The Tampa Bay experiments

An intriguing statistical tidbit from the weekend (no longer up to the minute):

Your up-to-the-minute ERA leaders since the Rays started the Jonny Bullpen games on 5/19:

Rays: 2.95
Yankees: 3.03
Dodgers: 3.19
Red Sox: 3.28
Cubs: 3.37

Rays have played vs BAL, OAK, SEA, TOR, NYY, HOU, WAS in this run (collective .536 winning %). 24 last 27 vs teams > .500

— Jason Collette (@jasoncollette) June 26, 2018

Since the Rays shut out the Nationals on Tuesday, the larger point still stands. This is a team running with two traditional starters, and almost five weeks into it, with a bunch of games against good lineups, it's working.

I caught the end of the Rays' 1-0 win Tuesday, which featured some really out-of-the-box managerial strategy from Kevin Cash.

Top of the ninth, the Nats have up Bryce Harper (lefty), followed by Anthony Rendon (righty), Juan Soto (lefty) and Daniel Murphy (lefty). Four high quality hitters. Cash brings in Jose Alvarado, his top lefty reliever. Alvarado promptly walks Harper, who showed bunt on practically every pitch.

Now ... Cash doesn't want Alvarado pitching to Rendon with the tying run on, but he wants him to face Soto and Murphy. What to do?

His answer: He pulled right fielder Johnny Fields; moved Mallex Smith from left to right, shifted first baseman Jake Bauers to left field and had Alvarado play first base (with Bauers' glove), with Chaz Roe coming in to pitch. (As a sidelight to all this, the Rays lose the DH). Alvarado was laughing as he took his new position.

This kind of thing -- moving the pitcher to a defensive position for a batter -- isn't unprecedented. Paul Richards did it a few times in the 1950s, and Whitey Herzog did it in the 1980s. But they generally were putting the transplant someplace where they didn't expect the ball to go. First base may carry the lightest physical demands, but the first baseman is quite likely to touch the ball.

So the Nats announcers are speculating on whether Roe dares try a pickoff throw and if Rendon should bunt toward first and force Alvarado to make a play. There are a lot of ways for the Nationals to try to take advantage of this novice playing first base.

And they did none of them. Harper doesn't take a monster lead and steal second; Rendon doesn't bunt toward first. Rendon strikes out.

And Cash undoes all his earlier moves. Bauers reclaims his glove and returns to first, Smith goes back to left, Carlos Gomez comes in to play right, and Alvarado returns to the mound (and gets his warmup pitches). The Rays have lost their DH for the remainder of the game, but they have their favored lefty to face Soto and Murphy, so they're where they want to be.

Soto singles to center, Harper stops at second. Murphy singles to left; Harper stops at third. All this maneuvering to get Alvarado to face the lefties, and he retires none of 'em.

Now the Nats have right-handed hitters up, Trea Turner and Michael A. Taylor. Cash brings in Sergio Romo, who throws a few sliders and pops up Turner and fans Taylor, end of game.

And all the postgame attention went not to Cash's brainstorm but to the postgame yelling by Romo at Taylor, who apparently drew Romo's ire in a previous game by stealing a base. Eyeroll.

That, in my mind, is just stupid jock stuff. It's nowhere near as interesting as a pitcher playing first for a batter.

Notes from the weekend

I'm not a neurologist who has examined Joe Mauer. Even if I were a neurologist who has examined Joe Mauer, I doubt I would have a definitive opinion on what the return of "concussion-like symptoms" means for his future.

But clearly this is not a positive development for him, or for the team. He left Friday's game early and went on the disabled list Saturday. (Technical note: He went on the 10-day DL, and I wonder if they abolished the seven-day concussion DL when the 10-day DL came into being.) All we know for sure is he won't play for more than a week.

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The Twins finally played a clean game Sunday. And they won. What a novelty.

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I am amused by the reaction to Tampa Bay's newest pitching innovation: The one-inning starter.

The Ray's rotation had left-hander Ryan Yarbourgh scheduled for Saturday's game at Anaheim, but manager Kevin Cash announced earlier in the week that he would open the game with veteran reliever Sergio Romo, who once closed for a team that won the World Series and had never started a game in his career. The rationale: The Angels don't have a left-handed bat in the top half of their lineup, so the right-handed Romo can deal with the Mike Trouts and Justin Uptons in the first inning and Yarbourgh can have a slightly easier time of it when he came in in the second.

I heard somebody, I'm not sure who, on MLB Radio ranting about this. What sabermetrics, what analytics, tell you that a guy who's never started in his life is a better matchup?

Hey, it's one inning of pitching. One inning at a time is what Romo has done in the majors for 11 years. First inning, sixth inning, ninth inning -- it's all short stints for him.

He struck out the side in the first. Yarbourgh entered to start the second inning and went 6.1 innings, his longest outing of the season. (And got the W.)

And on Sunday, Romo started again. This time Cash stretched him out to 1.1 innings. The Angels won Sunday -- it was Shohei Ohtani's day to pitch, after all -- but Romo gave them another shutout inning at the start of the game.

After which Angels infielder Zach Cozart complained that using Romo this way was "bad for baseball." Seriously.

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Cozart's may not have been the single silliest utterance of the weekend, however. I bow in this regard to the Dutch Master of old-school, Bert Blyleven, who complained mightly during Sunday's telecast about the pulling of Jake Odorizzi in the sixth inning. At one point he declared that Odorizzi is like Justin Verlander and capable of going 120 pitches.

What Odorizzi has in common with Verlander is that they're right-handed and have spent their entire major league careers in the American League. Verlander has 10 seasons with more innings than Odorizzi's career high. Odorizzi has thrown 120 pitches (his career high) exactly once, in 2016.

Odorizzi is a good major league starter. He's not Verlander. It insults the listeners' intelligence to pretend they are equivalent pitchers. We were all better off when Blyleven was on his extended break from the booth.

Pic of the Week

San Francisco closer Sergio Romo fires a
pitch on Thursday against the Miami Marlins.

It's relatively easy to find a photo of a pitcher in mid-motion that makes one wince at the notion of contorting one's own arm into that position, and this is one such.

It's been oft-said — and I'm sure I've said it myself — that pitching is an unnatural motion, that the human arm is not designed for the act.

But it occurred to me during a recent dog park visit, watching other dog owners play fetch with their canines (my beagle is deeply uninterested in such activities) that humans are obviously designed to throw objects.

We stand erect. We have hands that can grasp objects, not paws. We have shoulders hinged for a wide range of motion. Other than our fellow primates, we are the creatures who can throw.

And a baseball is perfectly designed to throw. Pick one up, and anybody will immediately devine that purpose to the object. Light enough to throw for distance, hard enough to make a satisfactory impact.

Throwing, I think, is ingrained in us from homo sapien's earliest days as a hunter.

Pitching major league ball tests the limitations of the arm as a hurler of projectiles, without a doubt. But it's not unnatural. It's part of who we are as humans.