Contemplating Sam Deduno

Sam Deduno reacts as left fielder Ryan Doumit makes
a catch to end the sixth inning Thursday in Boston.

Results matter. Wins, losses, runs allowed, runs scored, runs denied. The outcomes are the point of the games.

How one gets those results matter too, because the process is predictive.

Sam Deduno threw six shutout innings Thursday evening in Fenway Park. He is now 3-0 with a 2.48 ERA.

And he's doing it all wrong.

On Thursday, Deduno allowed just two hits. He also walked four and struck out just one. In his five major league starts, a total of just 29 innings -- yes, he's averaging less than six innings per start despite that gaudy ERA -- he has walked 20, struck out 19. More walks than strikeouts.

This is not sustainable. No pitcher can maintain that low an ERA while walking more men than he strikes out. No pitcher can maintain that kind of ERA walking more than six men per nine innings.

And the problem for Deduno is that this is who he is. This is why he's a 29-year-old who has kicked around the minors for eight seasons. His minor league walk rate for his career is 5.1 BB/9.

The walk rate by itself tells us that he's not exactly pounding the strike zone. By my calculations, Deduno has thrown 492 pitches for the Twins. Just 288 of them have been strikes (called, swinging, fouled off, put in play), while 204 have been called balls: roughly 58 percent strikes, 41 percent balls (rounding error). In contrast, Scott Diamond has thrown 66 percent strikes.

The buzz phrase has been "effectively wild." That can work for an individual game, for a month's worth of starts. It's not the basis for sustained success.

Notes, quotes and comment

Quick, without looking it up: Which current Twins player is an Olympic medalist?

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Robin Ventura is having a good first season as manager.

The Chicago White Sox left Target Field on Wednesday having won the series — and in first place in the American League Central.

Not a bad season so far for a team whose general manager at one point during the winter used the word "rebuilding" to describe its status and his approach.

There is credit to be spread around, and some of it should go to Robin Ventura, the truly rookie manager of the Pale Hose.

Ventura's selection to succeed Ozzie Guillen raised eyebrows because he had not managed a team on any level. Nor had he been a coach. A successful player, absolutely— Ventura may be the best third baseman in franchise history — but making such a man the dugout boss without an intervening training period has long been regarded as a discredited approach.

I'm not aware of any specific change in on-field strategy or tactics between Guillen and Ventura. There is, however, an obvious difference in public persona. Ventura projects a aura of quiet professionalism. There is nothing quiet about Guillen.

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Manny Acta and the Cleveland Indians have seen
enough of Derek Lowe.

While the White Sox doggedly remain atop the standings, the Cleveland Indians are rapidly fading. And on Wednesday they designated Derek Lowe and his 5.52 ERA for assignment.

Lowe is 39, and this may well be the end of his road; his strikeout rate this year is almost half his career norm, and his walk rate is nearly a career high.

Not many pitchers have led the league (in different seasons) in wins, saves and losses. Lowe has.

Lowe also holds this distinction: In 2004, he was the winning pitcher for the Red Sox in all three postseason series — Game Three of the division series against the Angels, Game Seven of the ALCS against the Yankees, Game Four of the World Series against St. Louis.

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Answer to the Olympian question above: Brian Duensing, who pitched for Team USA in the Beijing Games in 2008. The Americans won the bronze medal in those games, the last with baseball or softball in the mix.

Twins quiet on deadline day

Francisco Liriano in his White Sox debut.

The nonwaiver trading deadline passed at 3 p.m. CDT with nothing more done by the Twins.

Terry Ryan is taking some criticism for not following Saturday night's trade of Francisco Liriano with the purging of more veterans, but I'm fine with Tuesday's inaction.

Things may well have been different were Carl Pavano and/or Matt Capps sound, but they're both on the disabled list. (It's permissible to trade a player on the disabled list, but it doesn't happen often.) Pavano is a free agent after the season, and Capps can be if the Twins don't exercise their option. They fit in the "move 'em or lose 'em" category; Ryan would have been a motivated seller, as he was with Liriano.

It's a different story with the Twins who were rumored to be involved in trade talks at the deadline -- Josh Willingham, Justin Morneau, Denard Span, Jared Burton, Glen Perkins. These guys are all under team control through 2013 at least. As long as the Twins are comfortable with the payroll space those guys eat up, Ryan didn't have to move any of them now.

Ryan's been pretty vocal about what he wants in a trade: Top-end pitching prospects with which he can reconstruct the rotation. Those guys, with one exception, weren't getting moved at the deadline. The Tigers did send Jacob Turner to Miami in the Anibel Sanchez/Omar Infante trade; I really doubt Detroit would have sent Turner (the No. 9 overall pick in 2009) to a division rival. And Jim Callis of Baseball America says Turner's status has faded.

Ryan is right to hold out for what this organization clearly needs. No need to create new holes in the roster if you're not fixing the roster's biggest problem.

Today, it's Liriano vs. the Twins, and the trade deadline

Francisco Liriano comes out
for the White Sox's batting practice
Monday at Target Field. I'm not
sure they found a cap that fits.

I fully expect that today's matchup will be so overhyped in Minnesota that you'd think nobody ever before got traded and then faced his former team.

It happens from time to time, however. And it happens tonight, when Francisco Liriano takes the mound in Target Field to face his former teammates.

As I post this, we don't know for sure which of his former teammates he'll face. The nonwaiver trading deadline is at 3 p.m. our time, and there are rumors of interest in Denard Span, Justin Morneau and Josh Willingham.

That teams are interested in trading for them is a given. Whether any are seriously bidding is another. There were, according to Terry Ryan, a goodly number of teams interested in Liriano, yet the offer Ryan thought was the best was reckoned disappointing to many fans.

Moving Liriano for small change made some sense; moving Span, Morneau or Willingham for pittances does not.

My sense of things is that other teams are mainly interested in profiting from a fire sale. I suspect that some teams eying Morneau in particular figure that the Twins may want to dump next year's salary and open first base for Chris Parmelee, who is having a big season in Triple A.

I will be surprised if that proves to be the case. My guess is that the Twins will not make a notable trade before the deadline. But I've been wrong before.

Further thoughts on the Liriano trade

Francisco Liriano and
pitching coach Rick Anderson
in 2011.

My Monday print column on the Francisco Liriano trade of Saturday night can be found here. It's short, deliberately so; it was a tight sports section, and between Vikings training camp and the Olympics, there was plenty of other things to fit into the limited space.

So I'll expound further here.

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The wonders of social media reveals that a vocal number of Twins fans believe the Twins didn't get enough for Liriano. They expected more than a couple of Grade C minor leaguers.

Chalk this reaction up to what I think of as "Dick Bremer Disease" — the tendency many, if not all, of us have of taking a player's best short-term performance and holding that as the yardstick of his talent.

I saddle Bremer with the name, perhaps unfairly, because back in 2002, Torii Hunter hit .371 in the first month of the season, and Bremer latched onto that performance as a legitimate measure of Hunter's ability. It took years before Bremer stopped talking about Hunter as a guy who could hit for a high average.

Hunter wasn't a legitimate .300 hitter, of course. He just had a particularly good month.

Twins fans latched onto Liriano's periodic strong stretches and held those times to be who he is. About a half season of 2006; the last two months of 2008; most of 2010; his recent stretch of good starts this year. All told, a bit more than two seasons worth of quality pitching.

Two seasons — over a seven-year period.

Yes, Liriano was brilliant in 2006 until he got hurt. That isn't how the rest of baseball sees him, because he has too many other stretches in which he was awful, injured or both.

We may value Liriano as the wunderkind of '06. The rest of the world doesn't.

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You may have seen elsewhere that Baseball America this winter ranked Eduardo Escobar, the shortstop the Twins got in Saturday's trade, as the White Sox' No. 10 prospect. The value of that ranking is somewhat diminished by the fact that BA regarded the Sox system as the weakest in the game.

Pedro Hernandez wasn't to be found the BA rankings for the Sox, but that's because he was included in the San Diego system; he came to the White Sox in the Carlos Quintin trade in late December. He was No. 23 on the Padres list.

Hernandez, as I indicated in the print column, is the acquisition I have the most hope for. The scouting reports I've seen on him say he has command, he has a quality change, and he has gained velocity in the past couple of years, from 87 mph or so to 90-92 mph.

Jeff Manship was
6-2, 2.35 in
Rochester this year.

What isn't clear is the quality of his breaking ball, and whether he can develop a usable one may determine his future as a major league pitcher.

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Escobar and Hernandez are now on the Twins' 40-man roster; they cleared a spot by putting P.J. Walters on the 60-day disabled list, as they did last week with Carl Pavano. Walters last pitched on June 13, so he can't be reactived until sometime in mid-August — and as far as I know he won't be ready before then anyway. 

Jeff Manship got the call to replace Liriano on the 25-man roster. He may get to start; while Brian Duensing had a successful outing Sunday filling in for Liriano, the Indians are particularly vulnerable to lefties. It will be interesting to see which way Ron Gardenhire goes with this one.

Pic of the Week

A clean-shaven Ichiro Suzuki acknowledges the ovation
from the Seattle crowd before his first at-bat with the
New York Yankees.

Of all the deadline trades to date and to come, only one figures to involve a franchise icon, a sure-fire Hall of Famer.

While the sight of Ichiro Suzuki in a Yankees uniform is emotionally grotesque, the trade makes sense for all three parties.

The Mariners have resolved what I call "the Ripken dilemma" — the issue of what to do with a fading face-of-the-franchise.

Ichiro, nearing the end of his brilliant career, gets a shot at the World Series.

The Yankees get a reasonable replica to fill in for the injured Brett Gardner.

Ichiro is no longer Ichiro!, and that was a problem for the Mariners.  They could no longer be built around him — not effectively, at any rate — and their shared history made a secondary role for him almost impossible.

The Yankees aren't tied to his past. And they don't need him to be great (although they certainly won't object if he has a three-month flashback to his prime).

Gardner is a pale imitation of Ichiro at his best, but at this stage of their respective careers, a healthy Gardner is better than Ichiro. Gardner being unable to play, Ichiro is an upgrade on the Yankees' alternatives.

Ichiro is said to have initiated the trade himself, and it's believable if only for the checklist of concessions he agreed to:

• He'll play left field, not his accustomed right.
• He'll hit at the bottom of the order, not at the top.
• He'll be clean-shaven.
• He'll wear No. 31, not his favored 51.

So this works for everybody, except for those of us sentimentalists who'd prefer to know the star only in one uniform.

A farewell to Frankie: Liriano traded

Francisco Liriano: 50-52, 4.33 in his
exceedingly up-and-down Twins tenure.

The deal went down soon after the Twins clobbered Cleveland Saturday night: Francisco Liriano goes to the Chicago White Sox for a left-handed pitcher (Pedro Hernandez) who appears to be more command than power, and a good-glove, no-hit shortstop (Eduardo Escobar).

Both players have seen some major league time with the Sox; both are being sent immediately to Rochester.

The trade will be the topic for my Monday print column, so I'm not going to delve any more deeply than this into it tonight.