Pic of the Week

Adam Jones takes a homer away from the Dominican's
Manny Machado in a signature moment from the World
Baseball Classic.

The 2017 World Baseball Classic lived up to the last part of its name, and that's not just the nationalist in me celebrating the United States finally taking the title. There were some really outstanding games and moments, not the least of them this catch by Adam Jones off his Baltimore teammate.

There are plenty of things I would change about the WBC given absolute control of the sport, but nobody has that, and the things I'm not fond of are necessary compromises to make the tournament happen.

And making the tournament happen is better than not having it.

Bring on the regular season. Let's see what it has to offer that can match Jones' catch.

The four Twins on Puerto Rico

Paul Molitor was making noises of impatience earlier in the week about getting the four Twins on Team Puerto Rico back into camp. And now that the tournament is over, the Minnesota manager will get his wish.

How did their absence from spring training affect the four? There are, no surprise, four answers.

For Eddie Rosario, the World Baseball Classic had to be a net plus. He played regularly in right field and he impressed with big hits and big throws. He left Fort Myers the presumptive left fielder; he returns the same, only having raised the question in the minds of many: Why is he the left fielder with an arm like that?

For Hector Santiago, it was neither a detriment nor a springboard. He pitched, oddly, exclusively out of the bullpen and fared well, although he did walk a few hitters -- which is Santiago's M.O. It's possible that the Twins would have liked him adding to his pitch count, but he left camp with a rotation berth and he returns with a rotation berth.

For Jose Berrios, it was possibly a minor impediment to his ambitions of making the opening rotation. He pitched twice -- a start against Italy in the first round and a relief outing in the championship game Wednesday night that showed both his impressive talent and his flaws.

That wasn't enough work to help his cause -- but his cause was probably doomed from the start. I doubt that the Twins ever wanted Berrios to open 2017 on the big club. Giving themselves means of filling the rotation without him was part of bringing the now-released Ryan Vogelsong to camp.

For Kennys Vargas, the WBC was unquestionably a problem. He was glued to the P.R. bench, and without playing time and at-bats not only could not make strides toward winning a job with the Twins but couldn't give scouts a chance to see him.  Byungho Park is now the front-runner for the DH job, and Vargas is almost certainly destined for Triple A once again.

For the Twins as a whole, their absences were probably beneficial. Other pitchers got a chance to show their stuff with the starts and innings vacated by Santiago, Berrios and Ervin Santana. The men competing for a reserve outfield job got more at-bats with Rosario gone.

And nobody got hurt, at least as far as we know. Overall, more good than bad for the Twins out of this.

Team Israel in the WBC

Spent a goodly chunk of my day off -- at weird hours, which is typical for me, as anybody paying attention to the time stamps on my posts might have figured -- watching Team Israel beat South Korea and Chinese Taipei in the first two games of the World Baseball Classic.

The two teams "expected" to emerge from Pool A at the start of round-robin play were South Korea and the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Even Taiwan has a significant professional league to draw talent from.

But it's Israel with a 2-0 record and a leg up on reaching the second round. (KoN hasn't played yet.)

There is one actual Israeli resident on the Israeli squad. The rest of the roster is American Jews who qualify for Israeli citizenship, From a Houston Chronicle story on how the Israeli squad was assembled by a Astros scout who also serves part-time as Israel's general manager:

Israel offers citizenship to anyone who is a Jew, which the country qualifies as: the child or grandchild of a Jew, or the spouse of a child or grandchild of a Jew. Team Israel abides by the same laws for its players.

There are some Twins connections for Team Israel. Center fielder and leadoff man Sam Fuld played about a half season for the Twins in 2014; he didn't have a team in 2016, major or minors. Game One start Jason Marquis, who pitched (horribly) for the Twins in 2012, did have a team for a brief while in 2016, but the Reds released him after nine starts. Ike Davis, the DH and No. 3 hitter, is the son of Ron Davis, a relief pitcher remembered by Twins fans of a certain age with a mixture of fondness and loathing; Ike Davis was born in Minneapolis.

Agree it is South Korea's weakest team. Still a big upset. Israel won with retired players, FAs, Indy ball guys and Class A players. https://t.co/wXDm0TJzNZ

— JJ Cooper (@jjcoop36) March 7, 2017

Sam Deduno and the fifth starter job

Sam Deduno reacts after striking out
Angel Pagan to end the fifth inning
Tuesday night in the WBC final.

Sam Deduno had an impressive World Baseball Classic: Three starts, 13 innings, one run allowed, 17 strikeouts. He was one of many reasons the Dominican squad went undefeated in the tournament.

He also showed the flaws that led the Twins to drop him from the 40-man roster, and that led the rest of baseball to let him pass through waivers. He has great movement on his pitches but little command.

In his start against the United States, he needed 80 pitches to navigate four innings -- 20 pitches a frame. In the championship game Tuesday night against Puerto Rico, Deduno was dominant for four innings, wild in the fifth, and done after five. Seventy-six pitches, 46 for strikes, 30 for balls.

Five and fly is not a characteristic of good starting pitchers, and that's what Deduno was in his half-season in the Twins rotation last year: 15 starts, 79 innings, just over five innings a start. In the limited pitch-count world of the WBC, Deduno went four innings, four innings, five innings.

So I can hardly blame the Twins if they remain skeptical of Deduno as a rotation option. They should be skeptical of everybody who was part of last season's rotation disaster.

Still, 13 innings of one-run ball -- in games played with a purpose -- stands out when compared to the starts the Twins have been getting in Grapefruit League play, and even though one shouldn't put any weight on spring training numbers, it gets noticed.

Deduno went five innings Tuesday against a lineup with five major league regulars. I'm not sure any of the rotation guys the Twins are counting on have done that.

USA , WBC, OUT

Team USA shortstop Jimmy Rollins makes a play in
the ninth inning Friday against Puerto Rico.

Team USA was eliminated Friday from the World Baseball Classic. This is the third WBC, and the United States has never made it to the final round.

Some followers of the game regard this with apathy; an international baseball tournament held in the middle of spring training doesn't ring their bells.

Some regard it with anger. Team USA's failures, as they see it, are the result of apathetic players — a lack of stars on the roster, a lack of passion among those who do play.

The rest of us take it as another example of the wonderful randomness of the greatest game on the planet. The best team doesn't always win a series, much less a game, and the WBC format doesn't leave much room for error.

I see no reason to question the effort or commitment of the players on Team USA's roster. David Wright resisted Thursday when the Mets pulled "Captain America" out of the tournament, but the word Friday out of New York was that the third baseman (whom the Mets owe $138 million) is likely to open the season on the disabled list. This is hardly evidence of lollygagging.

Was the roster as deep as it could have been? Of course not, and particularly among the starting pitchers. It would be easy to compile a more imposing USA rotation than R.A. Dickey, Ryan Vogelsong, Derek Holland and Gio Gonzalez: Justin Verlander, Clayton Kershaw, David Price, James Shields, Cole Hamels, Matt Cain, Steven Strasburg, CC Sabathia ... none of them were there.

But none of the men who agreed to take the ball for Joe Torre is dreck. Dickey won the Cy Young last year, Gonzalez won 21 games, Vogelsong and Holland are rotation fixtures for World Series teams. The two starters who stifled the American lineup the last two days — Sam Deduno for the Dominicans on Thursday, Nelson Figueroa for Puerto Rico on Friday — are non-roster invitees who aren't particularly likely to win major-league jobs.

The USA didn't have the best starters eligible to play for it, but you'd have a hard time finding the game where it didn't have the better starter anyway. Randomness. On Thursday, Deduno pitched better than Dickey; on Friday, Figueroa pitched better than Vogelsong. It happens.

As for the position players ... as I said here earlier in the week, I think playing time is a factor. There aren't a lot of true stars who are going to come sit on the bench for two weeks. And so it happened that Willie Bloomquist, overachieving utility player, wound up starting on Thursday at third base when Wright was pulled; he took an oh-fer and was charged with an error.

That said, I don't quite understand how it happened that Eric Hosmer wound up the regular first baseman after Mark Teixeira's injury took him out off the roster before the games began; certainly Prince Fielder, Paul Konerko, Adam LaRoche or even Nick Swisher (just going off the top of my head) would have been more logical choices than a guy who hit .232/.304.359 last season. (Some of them would have been more logical choices than Teixeira, for that matter.)

But Hosmer was invited, and Hosmer said yes, and as I see it any blame goes to the people who selected and played him, not to Hosmer.

Joe Torre and the Team USA roster

Team USA manager Joe Torre, flanked by bench coach
Larry Bowa and pitching coach Greg Maddux.

It has been said that there are two things every American male believes he can do better than anybody else: Drive a car and manage a baseball team.

In that sense, it's easy to find fault with Joe Torre, the manager of Team USA in the World Baseball Classic, who has a roster loaded with stars and an Internet loaded with pointed criticism.

The American squad played its fourth game of the tournament Tuesday night, thumping Puerto Rico 7-1.  As I followed the game, I thought about the difference in how this year's roster was constructed as opposed to 2009 and 2006 — and how less is more in this case.

Torre this year has used one shortstop (Jimmy Rollins), one second baseman (Brandon Phillips), one third baseman (David Wright). He has locked in the top five slots in the batting order: Rollins-Phillips-Ryan Braun-Joe Mauer-Wright. Adam Jones has been the full-time center fielder and Eric Hosmer the first baseman.

In short, Torre has a regular lineup — and an actual, honest-to-goodness bench.

Previous editions haven't. The 2009 roster had Chipper Jones (replaced in the second round by Evan Longoria) and Wright at third, and manager Davy Johnson tried to make playing time for both. It had Rollins and Derek Jeter at short, and those two stars were rotating in and out of the lineup.

The 2006 roster had, in anything, even more star power going on. Jones and Alex Rodriguez; Jeter and Michael Young and Chase Utley up the middle — and every lineup was different.

They had to be different. No matter who the manager is, he had to recruit these stars to be on the team, and he had to keep them happy — and they didn't abandon their day jobs to sit on the bench.

Torre may not have a roster filled with the absolute best talent the United States has to offer, but he has has a roster he can be consistent with. Willie Bloomquist is nobody's idea of a star, but he knows what being a utility man is all about. Team USA would theoretically be better if Mike Trout were on the roster instead of Shane Victorino, but who sits in that case? Braun? Trout? Jones? 

Torre's doing enough shuffling with Giancarlo Stanton and Ben Zobrist and the other two catchers, Jonathan Lucroy and J.P. Arencibia; he doesn't need another superstar to find at-bats for.

I'm sure Victorino, Bloomquist and Arencibia would like more playing time, but I also think they knew going in what their roles would be.

The Twins and the WBC

J.O. Berrios —
or is it Jose?

Today's print column was a general look at the World Baseball Classic, but it hardly exhausts the topic.

The Twins had 13 players — from former MVPs to teenagers — in the WBC. No organization provided more participants. Here's a few comments:

* How raw is J.O. Berrios? So raw there's no consensus on what he's to be called. The Star Tribune is going with Jose on first reference; Baseball America uses the initials; Baseball Reference at one point used the initials and now has gone with the first name. So far I've gone with the initials.

Berrios (and fellow Puerto Rican Eddie Rosario) was in the Twins major-league camp before the WBC only because of the event; both prospects took advantage of the opportunity to catch the attention, and imagination, of the big-leauge staff. 

Rosario got a lot of playing time in the early exhibitions, Berrios did not. But Berrios pitched Sunday in relief against the Dominican Republic in a game aired by ESPN. (The broadcast was in Spanish, which means I understood only occasional words of the commentary, such as beisbol; this was a vast improvement over the likes of Rick Sutcliffe and John Kruk.) 

Deolis Guerra pitches for
his homeland.

Berrios had a rough outing — two runs, both earned, in 1.2 innings, and he was charged with the loss — but it was still easy to be impressed. The kid (still only 18) blew a high fastball past Robinson Cano for strike three. He throws from a lower arm angle than I had expected to see, and the motion looks easy.

He needs, obviously, experience and good health. That's not an easy combination to achieve. But he can be a good one.  

* Deolis Guerra was pitching for Venezuela but left in mid-round with what was initially described as a pectoral injury. It turned out to be a blood clot in his shoulder. He's to have part of a rib removed to free up space.

This was a potentially serious development, but since it's been caught it's not a career-threatening one. There's no reason Guerra shouldn't be able to pitch again. Still, it's a blow; most of this season is lost for him.

It seems like we've been waiting for him forever; he was the high-ceiling piece of the Johan Santana trade, made just before spring training in 2008. He'll never be the stud starter envisioned at the time, but he's still only 23.

* It's easy to criticize the game strategy Team USA manager Joe Torre employed in the first round. 

Sam Deduno struck out five and walked
none in his start against Spain.

The Americans attempted four sacrifice bunts Sunday against Canada. Now, I love the bunting game, but I love it in its place. Torre has a lineup filled with legitimate All-Stars, and — no offense to the Team Canada pitchers — they're facing moundsmen of much lesser accomplishment. Giving away outs with guys like Adam Jones and Ben Zobrist is just silly.

But in another light, Torre is in a unique situation. He's got a roster of All-Stars, players who left their jobs to play for this team, and none of them came to park their butts on the bench. Torre made a point of getting everybody some playing time in the pool games. Ego massage comes with the territory, and perhaps all the bunting is a way of reminding them that the ego massage only goes so far. 

*Sam Deduno was a late addition to the Dominican roster, and when he opted to pitch in the WBC I saw some muttering from the metro media that he was hurting his chances of making the Twins rotation and wasn't likely to pitch for D.R. anyway.

He started the second game of pool play for the Dominican — four shutout innings against Spain for the win. Yeah, it was Spain, the weak sister of the San Juan pool (Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Venezuela and Spain), but Deduno did pitch. 

And, realistically, he wasn't making the Twins rotation out of camp even had he stayed. Do the math: There's Scott Diamond, Vance Worley, Mike Pelfrey and Kevin Correia, all of whom will either be in the rotation or on the DL. Then there's the contenders on the 40-man roster — Kyle Gibson, Cole DeVries, Liam Hendriks — all of whom rank ahead of Deduno. 

Notes, quotes and comment

When I composed Wednesday's off-the-cuff assessment of the Cleveland Indians, I hadn't seen this item on how Terry Francona intends to deploy his defense.

In a nutshell: Michael Bourn in center, Drew Stubbs in right, Nick Swisher at first, Mark Reynolds as the primary DH and Carlos Santana at catcher.

Francona hasn't seen all that much of Santana behind the plate, and it's possible that once he has, he'll rethink that plan. Or perhaps he's not as concerned about defense from his catcher as predecessor Manny Acta was. Acta found plenty of reasons/opportunity to have Lou Marson catch, with Santana at first base or designated hitter. Francona apparently intends to handle Santana differently.

---

Elliot Johnson, one of the two shortstops DFA'd by Tampa Bay, went to the Kansas City Royals as the player-to-be-named in the James Shields deal.

That's an unusual PTN. Usually they're minor leaguers. Seldom are they players with appreciable major league service time. Anyway, one of the two out of the way, one to go.

---

Rich Harden, the talented but oft-injured pitcher the Twins signed to a minor league deal this winter, was one of the first to take a bullpen session when camp officially opened Wednesday in Fort Meyers, Fla. He later told the writers that he was at about 80 to 85 percent of his arm strength -- which isn't particularly worrisome, as no pitchers should be ramping it up yet -- and that he hasn't felt this good in six years.

Harden didn't pitch at all in 2012 after extensive shoulder surgery. One wishes to be optimistic about him, but his track record is riddled with injury and disappointment, and shoulder damage is notoriously difficult to come back from. On the plus side, the Twins aren't really counting on him, so anything they get is to the good.

It's too soon to tell if he's going to pay off or add to the medical bills, and too soon to know what role he would play if healthy. I've assumed all along that he's a starting candidate, but there is considerable chatter about a bullpen role for him.

---

Crowded camp indeed: The Twins have three extra players in camp -- non roster guys who aren't official invitees, but who are there to get ready for their participation in the World Baseball Classic: Left-handed pitcher Andrew Albers (Canada), right-handed pitcher J.O. Berrios (Puerto Rico) and second baseman/outfielder Eddie Rosario (Puerto Rico).

Rosario's time in camp may be interesting. The Twins, of course, are trying to turn him into a second baseman. He played mainly outfield in winter ball, however, and will be an outfielder for Puerto Rico in the WBC. I wonder if the Twins will try to work him at second while he's with the major league staff, or if they'll let him focus on the outfield he'll be playing in the tournament.

Rostering up for the WBC

The provisional rosters for the World Baseball Classic were announced Thursday. There's no shortage of Twins connections to various teams. Joe Mauer and Glen Perkins are on Team USA's roster, Justin Morneau on Canada, Drew Butera on Italy (really) ... at least six players on Australia's roster have been in the Twins system at one point or another.

I'm rather torn on the WBC. There's something about national teams that appeals to me. The only soccer I can sit and watch is World Cup. For all its flaws -- and it is tremendously flawed -- the WBC is as close as we're ever likely to get to that kind of tournament of nations in baseball.

But it's not close to major league baseball. Not close. Too many of the best players either don't want to play in the WBC (Buster Posey and Justin Verlander, to name just two) or aren't permitted to because of injury-protection rules (Scott Diamond, for example, was ruled out for Canada because he had his elbow scoped during the winter; Johan Santana can't pitch for Venezuela because he ended last season on the disabled list).

This is the WBC's core problem: It's secondary to the regular season, to the real business of professional baseball. It's being held in spring training because nobody wants to interrupt the regular season for it. The early March schedule carries problems of its own, notably the question of athletic readiness for competition, but it is the least objectionable.

Soccer halts itself for the World Cup. The NBA and NHL have, at least grudgingly, accommodated the Olympics. Baseball wants to have an international platform of that ilk, but it's not going to build that platform unless the WBC gets an elevated priority.