Contemplating Nick Blackburn

Nick Blackburn has already set a career mark for
most walks allowed, and has the worst WHIP
among AL pitchers who qualify for the ERA title.

Another poor outing for Nick Blackburn against the White Sox on Friday: He allowed 13 baserunners while getting just 16 outs, and that's not counting the two errors made behind him. He served up a pair of home runs and set a personal worst with six walks.

The White Sox did not draw a walk in their just-completed four game series against the Yankees. Blackburn walked two in the first inning Friday.

The wonder of it is that he allowed only four runs. It could have been much worse.

It often has. This was Blackburn's 23rd start of the season. He's allowed at least five runs in nine of those starts. He was the starting pitcher in Game 1 of April 28, when the Twins lost 15-3; the starting pitcher on June 27, when the Twins lost 15-0; and the starting pitcher on July 25, when the Twins lost 20-5.

And yet his ERA for the season is 4.58. That's not the worst figure in the league; it's not even the second worst in the Twins rotation (Carl Pavano is at 4.90, Francisco Liriano at 5.03).

It's also deceptive, because he's allowed so many unearned runs. Pavano has allowed 86 runs in 145 innings, or 5.34 runs per nine innings; Blackburn has allowed 85 runs in 135.2 innings, or 5.64 per nine.

Yes, his ERA understates his runs allowed by more than a run per full game. Astounding.

Blackburn has allowed 16 unearned runs  this year. The rest of the rotation — Pavano, Liriano, Scott Baker, Brian Duensing — has combined to allow 20 unearned runs.

In 2010, Blackburn allowed four unearned runs. His ERA was 5.41; his TRA (total runs average) was 5.65.

Look at that again: 5.65 runs per nine innings last year, 5.64 this year.

Methinks we have a trend here.

Late night: Angels 7, Twins 1

Francisco Liriano gave up 10 hits and seven runs
in five innings on Thursday night.

Game story here

Box score here.

The Twins continue to spin their wheels. They last won a series right after the All-Star break, July 14-17, when they took three of four from Kansas City. Since then, they've avoided actual long losing streaks, bu they aren't putting anything together, either.

We can sum up this one in the same way as the opener of the series in Anaheim: One run won't win many games, and one run wasn't close to enough to win this one.

Francisco Liriano wasn't effective, but neither was the Twins defense behind him. That will happen when a right fielder (Michael Cuddyer) is playing second base and a catcher (Joe Mauer) is playing first. As Ron Gardenhire sees it, five of the seven runs scored after the Twins failed to turn two makeable double plays.

Of course, if you wipe out those five runs, the Twins still lose 2-1.

Another what-the-heck-is-going-on moment came when Danny Valencia was thrown out at home plate in the eighth inning. There's no point in taking any risk to score when down 7-1.

The shortstop mess

Tsuyoshi Nishioka has generally appeared
overmatched at the plate this season,  and his
slash line of .208/.259/.233 agrees.

Tsuyoshi Nishioka now leads the Twins in playing time at shortstop— 42 games, 41 starts, 355.1 innings.

Alexi Casilla has 306.2 innings, Matt Tolbert 174 and Trevor Plouffe 133. Adds to to 969 innings, with Nishioka getting about 37 percent of the playing time, Casilla 32 percent, Tolbert 18 percent and Plouffe 14. (Rounding error means those figures add up to 101 percent.)

Offensively, Casilla is the only one who approaches acceptable. (His OPS — on base plus slugging — is .691, which ranks 62nd among the 83 American League players who qualify for the batting title and is roughly the same as Derek Jeter's and Torii Hunter's. Seven of the players behind him are are also middle infielders.) Plouffe has five homers, yes, but his batting average is below .200, his slugging percentage below .400.

Defensively, they all rate below average. The most recent set of the Baseball Info Systems metrics I have  shows Nishi as -2 in plus-minus, -4 in runs saved; Casilla at -4 and -2; Tolbert at -1 and 0; and Plouffe at -5 and -4. (Those numbers are shortstop specific.)

Tolbert may not be the best defensive shortstop on the roster — clearly Ron Gardenhire doesn't believe so — but, for what it's worth, he also comes off best of six men who've played second base in those metrics. Nobody's been quite the blooming disaster at second that Plouffe was at short, but if Michael Cuddyer (-3, -3 in 115 innings) gets enough playing time there, that can change.

The Twins spent last offseason trying to find multi-year solutions to their middle infield. At this point, Nishioka has hardly established himself as part of the solution. The ever-inconsistent Casilla, maybe.

I am growing ever more curious about Brian Dozier, who opened the season at High A Fort Myers and hit .322/.423/.472 there, then moved up to Double A New Britain, where he is hitting .307/.374/.458.  He turned 24 in May, so he's not particularly young for those levels (Plouffe is 25 and has tons of time in Triple A, a level Dozier hasn't touched yet).

Dozier may not be an answer. But I'm seeing increasing evidence that the players ahead of him aren't either.

Late night: Twins 11, Angels 4

Michael Cuddyer hits his fifth career grand slam.

Game story here.

Box score here.

This game pivoted on a curious decision by Anaheim manager Mike Scoscia.

Fifth inning, score tied at four. Joel Pineiro had gotten Matt Tolbert out, but then gave up singles to Denard Span and Ben Revere, then walked Joe Mauer in a fairly obvious pitch-around. That brought up Michael Cuddyer.

Pineiro threw ball one well inside -- and Scoscia pulled him for left-hander Hisanori Takahashi.

A curious decision because Cuddyer mashes lefties and really doesn't do that much against righties. It's true for his career as a whole and even more emphatically so this season. And Cuddyer lived up to his platoon splits by hammering the first pitch from Takahashi for the grand slam.

It was the first of two homers for Cuddyer on the night (he hit his second off a right-hander). Delmon Young doubled his season output for homers with round trippers in consecutive at-bats. Jason Kubel also homered (off Takahashi, a rare dinger off a lefty for Kubel). Yes, the Twins hit five home runs in one game. This is roughly 7 percent of their season total.

Give credit, also, to Anthony Swarzak, who threw five innings of shutout ball in relief of Scott Baker. Swarzak gave up one hit and one walk. Just one strikeout, but he threw strikes and kept the game moving, which Baker couldn't accomplish.

Late night: Angels 5, Twins 1

Torii Hunter hit his 14th homer
Tuesday night. He's hit more than 20
in every season but one since 2001.

Game story here.

Box score here.

One run won't win many games. This wasn't one of the exceptions.

The Twins are now eight games behind Detroit and fading. Their June/July surge was based on starting pitching; now the rotation isn't providing the strong starts, and the offense hasn't picked up the slack.

Torii Hunter hit a solo homer off Brian Duensing in the fifth inning, the final scoring of the game. Hunter is not having a good season — his slugging percentage is .384; for comparison, Denard Span's is .380, and Span has no power — and this might be the year that the Angels' decision to meet his demand for a five-year contract begins to haunt them.

The Angels did get three seasons of Hunter hitting the way he had for the Twins. This is season four, and season five awaits in 2012. And, of course, he's no longer a center fielder, so he needs to hit to justify his lineup spot.

Still, he remains a fixture in the middle of the Anaheim order, as does Vernon Wells, another aging outfielder shifted from center to a corner and struggling even more than Hunter is at the plate. (A cleanup hitter with a .251 on-base percentage? Really? Even Delmon Young's OPB is above .290.)

Somehow, the Angels are just a game behind the Texas Rangers in the AL West. It's a tribute to their pitching and defense.  They're doing what the Twins theoretically do, but they are more than a theory.

Craig Breslow vs. Phil Dumatrait

Craig Breslow. In an at-bat Sunday that perhaps says
more about Jim Thome than about Breslow, Breslow
struck out Thome on nothing but fastballs. Three
swings, three misses.

Craig Breslow pitches at least once in every series the Twins play against Oakland, and even though it's been more than two years since the Twins gave him up it still bugs me that they so badly mishandled him.

To give you the quick summary: The Twins picked him up on waivers in 2008, and even though he was the most effective non-Joe Nathan reliever the Twins had that year (at least until Jose Mijares was called up), Ron Gardenhire refused to use him in game situations. Breslow got five holds and one save, but the save came in a three-inning stint in a game won 12-2. He coughed up only one lead all season, but of his 13 September appearances, nine came in games the Twins lost.

He had a 1.63 ERA in 2008, and the Twins lost out on the divisional title in a Game 163 -- a winnable division lost because of repeated multi-reliever meltdowns involving almost any arm in the pen except Breslow. Gardenhire viewed him strictly as a second LOOGY and mop-up man; he could have, should have, been more prominent.

He had a rough start in 2009, and the Twins waived him after just 14.1 innings. Oakland scooped him up, and he's been solid in their 'pen since -- 3.06 ERA in 181 appearances for the Green 'n' Gold.

Phil Dumatrait's line
against lefties:
.190/.271/.310

Move now to 2011 and Phil Dumatrait. Nothing in his numbers with the Twins suggests that he's nearly as capable as Breslow. His ERA entering today stands at 4.10. His walk rate is high, his strikeout rate is low, right-handers hammer him (.482 slugging percentage) -- yet he has already pitched in as many game situations as Breslow did in 2008.

Unlike Breslow, Gardenhire doesn't treat Dumatrait as a lefty specialist. The odd thing is that Breslow has, throughout his career, been at least as capable against righties as lefties, and Dumatrait this season has fared much better against lefties.

I don't want to overstate Gardenhire's reliance on Dumatrait. The Twins have three lefties in their bullpen, occasionally four, and there's no question that Glen Perkins is the big dog of that pack. I believe that, for all his struggles with the strike zone,  Mijares is still Gardenhire's primary LOOGY. Dumatrait is more likely to be used in long relief and mop-up roles than with games on the line.

But his workload is increasing — he had 14 innings in July, more than in May and June combined, and I do believe that Gardenhire is finding a faith in him that he never had in Breslow.

More on a trade that didn't happen

As has been well-chronicled by now — including in my Monday print column — the Twins did not trade Denard Span to Washington for relief pitcher Drew Storen.

As I said in the column, I'm pleased that such a one-for-one deal didn't go down.

But — and I don't think I'm contradicting myself here — there's reason for the Twins (and Nationals) to pursue such a trade during the winter.

Denard Span is signed though
2014 with a club option for 2015.

From the Twins viewpoint, there are two significant reasons, and some smaller ones, to do so. The big reasons:

• Storen figures to be a four-year bullpen foundation. The Twins now lack that.
• Span and Ben Revere both lack power, and that makes it very difficult to justify playing both regularly.

The smaller reasons range from the mystery of whether Span is vulnerable to repeat concussions to the potential wave of additional center field candidates making their way through the Twins farm system.

Storen plays for a weak team in the other league, so Minnesota fans aren't familiar with him, but he's the goods. A power arm with quality secondary pitches, he was the 10th overall pick in the draft two years ago, which is extremely high for someone who was always projected to be in the bullpen. He made the majors less than a year after he was drafted and pitched 55-plus innings for the Nats last season.

He would be a long-term bullpen piece, and the Twins haven't had that since Jesse Crain and Matt Guerrier emerged to join Joe Nathan and Juan Rincon. The only man in the current bullpen who can be regarded as a sure thing for 2012 is Glen Perkins, and he was arbitration eligible last winter.

If there's a closer worth trading a quality center fielder for even up, Storen's the guy. If.  I think a Span trade should require more sweetening than the Nats are apparently inclined toward at the moment. And that might be worked out in the offseason.

I would be OK, as I said in the column, with trading Revere for Storen. Revere's on-base percentage is never likely to be much higher than his batting average, and that makes him a lesser player than Span in my eyes. As long as the two are both Twins, Revere shouldn't be more than the fourth outfielder.

But if the Twins do trade Span, and find that Revere doesn't fill the bill as the full-time center fielder, Aaron Hicks is coming. Ahead of Hicks is Joe Benson, and he has the tools to play center. There are options beyond Revere down the road.

Which makes trading Span easier to swallow — but isn't a reason to dump him for less than high value. The Twins were right to hold out in July. If their price is met this winter, they would be equally right to make the trade.