ALDS Game 1: Yankees 7, Twins 2

No drama to this one. Twins took the early lead, and the Yankees scored the next seven.

I've been skeptical of the way Ron Gardenhire handled his starting pitching the last three games, in part because the choices he made culminated in this game.

Brian Duensing was scheduled to start Sunday, but Gardenhire chose to use Carl Pavano on short rest. Had he started Duensing on Sunday, he could have started Pavano — who has pitched much better against the Tigers than Scott Baker — in Tuesday's game 163. Which, in turn, would have freed Baker, his best starter and one with some success in the past against New York, to pitch Game 1 of the ALDS.

It is true that the Sunday and Tuesday games were essentially elimination games, and Tuesday's wasn't. The Twins had to win those first two games, and they did. And Duensing's previous two starts were unimpressive (a combined 10 1/3 innings with eight earned runs).

But the net effect of putting off Duensing's start was to step up the quality of opposition. Afraid to trust Duensing against weaker teams, Gardenhire found himself forced to start him against the best team in the league.

Duensing did throw strikes — 59 of them in 79 pitches. But during his good run of starts, he kept the ball in the yard, and Derek Jeter took him deep on Wednesday. Which makes three starts in a row with a home run allowed.

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Scattered hits: In a book about the Twins 1991 season, Tom Kelly said he figured that if the Twins got 10 hits in a game they'd score plenty of runs.

The Twins got 10 hits Wednesday, and scored just two runs, one of them on a passed ball. Why so few? Because there was just one extra base hit and one walk. And an inconveniently timed DP in the middle of the Twins two-run inning.

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So the Twins, heavy underdogs, are down 1-0 in the best of five series. At least they might get some sleep before the next game.

The Dome will not die

There's something about this AP photo from Tuesday night that I just love. Delmon Young on his cell phone sitting on the Metrodome pitching mound in the dark.

It's a forlorn image at a time of great joy — he's out there for the call because there's a party in the clubhouse — in an empty arena ball park that's supposed to be dead now, at least for baseball.

It ain't dead yet. The Dome will not die, at least not easily and certainly not quietly. There was very little quiet to Tuesday's game.

There is something simultaneously hopelessly hokey and soul-stirring to the sound of some 54,000 people sing-shouting to a Journey song — Don't stop believin' — and laughable about their replacing a reference to Detroit with boos.

There is something odd about the guy who sat about a dozen feet away, a tattoo of this much-derided arena on his left biceps peaking out from the sleeve of his Michael Cuddyer T-shirt. I can't help but wonder: Is he going to be happy with that piece of body art in 20 years?

The game was a tease, riddled with mood swings, alternating brilliant exploits with jarring mistakes in judgment and spicing the mix with a few blown calls.

Did the Dome have something to do with it? Probably. Baseball is a liquid; it takes the shape of its container. The contest is always shaped by the venue.

Maybe Ryan Raburn would have misplayed Cuddyer's single to lead off the bottom of the 10th in another stadium. But it was in this one, in this mutant mushroom with plastic carpet atop concrete, and when the ball skipped past him only Cuddyer's lack of speed made it a triple rather than an inside-the-park homer.

Cuddyer was still on third one out later with Matt Tolbert at the plate when I noticed water falling onto the aisle steps. The Dome was leaking. Or crying.

Moments later Tolbert singled to tie the game anew. And the weeping Dome was just leaky.

And two innings later, another light-hitting infielder would insure himself a place in Twins lore with a game-winning single — this after screwing up as a pinch runner.

And we'll Casilla later today.

The Yankees have generally had immunity to whatever infection the Metrodome imposes on visitors, and this series opens in the Bronx, but there will be baseball played again at the Dome. Perhaps the Dome can stave off its baseball demise a bit longer still.

Division champs

I'm still absorbing one of the strangest, and best, games I've ever attended.

So much to say about Tuesday's 6-5 12-inning tiebreaker.

I'll start with this: I was seated in the upper deck right field, which means that the right fielder was just a rumor to me and that home plate was about 400 feet away.

To my eyes, the home plate ump (Randy Marsh) was brutal. I understand, having perused a few stories and columns since I got home, that people with a better angle than I agree.

Further comments:

*Nick Punto was a marvel. His last three plate appearances were superb — a single on a 3-2 pitch (and a run scored), a walk on another 3-2 pitch, and what should have been the game-winning sac fly. I believe he fell behind in all three at-bats and battled back. Plus he had that marvelous force play at the plate to save Bobby Keppel's bacon in the 12th inning.

* That forceout followed what I thought was a questionable decision by Ron Gardenhire to walk Ryan Raburn intentionally to load the bases. Yeah, Raburn is a better hitter than Brandon Inge or Gerald Laird; that's not saying much. My issue with it is that Keppel's command is always dicey.

Inge bounced into the force play, but only after apparently getting grazed by a Keppel pitch. I thought it caught his jersey, at least, but — again — I was 400 feet away, and if that's the best place to call pitches they'd put the ump out there. Laird followed the force out by getting ahead 3-1; I said to the guy next to me that Jim Leyland should give him the take sign. Instead, Laird fouled a pitch off — I suspect it was high — to go to 3-2, then chased a low pitch for the strike out.

Questionable decision by Gardy, worse one by Leyland.

* I wanted Brian Buscher to pinch hit for Alexi Casilla in the 12th. Gardenhire had other ideas. His worked. Still, Casilla had had just two at-bats since Sept. 11, as Gardenhire follows his pattern of running with a set lineup in the final month — and Casilla was the worst hitter with 200 plate appearances in the AL this year. And he was in the DH slot, so defense wasn't a consideration. But then, Buscher has had one game appearance — no trips to the plate — since Sept. 19.

*Rick Porcello struck out eight Twins. That matched his season high. Considering his low K rate — 4.4 K/ entering the game — and the tight leash on innings he's been kept on — I'm surprised he'd had an eight strikeout game. If he stays healthy, he's going to be great.

* Leyland apparently boiled his bullpen down the four guys he was willing to take a chance with: Fu-Te Ni, Zach Miner, Brandon Lyon and Fernando Rodney, which is how he wound up having his closer throw 48 pitches. Gardenhire went a lot deeper than that — I think he would have used Jeff Manship in the 13th if the game had gone that far — and was, if anything, over aggressive in pulling Ron Mahay after one batter.

* Jose Mijares may have hit the wall. Or be scared by the Delmon Young incident last week. Or something. Whatever it is, he's been brutal his last few outings, and they'll need him effective against New York.

* Other than Jason Kubel's home run — and wasn't that a bomb? — the Twins' RBIs came from Matt Tolbert, Casilla and Orlando Cabrera. Joe Mauer reached base four times, but when he came up with men on base, he was walked.

*Miguel (Drunk Tank) Cabrera doubled, walked and had a two-run homer (plus three ground outs). Had he rung up another 0-fer as he did through the White Sox series last weekend, he would have been a prime scrapegoat for the Tigers' failure to win the divisional title.

He still may be, but he's still Detroit's best player. Which, in a way, only deepens their dilemma about what to do with his behavior.

Hurting the team, hurting himself

Ballplayers, as a group, aren't saints. (Neither are journalists, for that matter.)

So it's not necessarily surprising that Miguel Cabrera had a few drinks after Friday's game.

But that he stayed out until 5 a.m.; that he got into a fight with his wife when he returned home; that he blew a .26 on an alcohol breath test — more than three times the legal limit — all these things are bad news.

And that he did this in the middle of a crucial series ... well, if his teammates aren't displeased with him, something's wrong in that clubhouse.

Cabrera is a talented hitter. With Vladimir Guerrero on the downslope of his career, Cabrera may be — check that, IS — the best right-handed hitter in the American League.

I'm in no position to make a judgment on the domestic violence part of the story. The police deemed both Cabrera and his wife to be aggressors, and while one suspects that there would have been no fight had the husband come home earlier and sober, it is also possible that theirs is the sort of marriage that is combative even without alcohol.

It's the drinking — the amount of drinking as well as the timing — that sets off alarm bells. With the divisional title slipping away, this 240-pound man (so he is listed) spent the night getting massively sloshed.

That sounds like a problem drinker to me.

A Metrodome memory

I have been to several hundred Twins games in the Metrodome — a pretty good number considering that I started out boycotting the place. Eventually I concluded that I had to come to peace with the indoor arena or abandon the team, and I couldn't do the latter. (I tried, but that's another story).

So when it came time to write a farewell to the Dome for Monday's print edition, there was little chance of working everything I could say into 20 column inches. What follows here is a segment I wrote, then excised.

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The Star Tribune on Friday listed the Top Ten baseball moments in the Dome. It turns out I and/or my wife were there for eight of the 10.

Games 6 and 7 of the ’91 Series; games 6 and 7 of the ‘87 Series. The welcome home after winning the 1987 pennant. The day the Twins became the first team in American League history to draw 3 million in a season.

And the two oddities.

Yes, I was there on May 4, 1984, when Dave Kingman’s popup went into the roof and stayed, and I was there on April 26, 1986, when a storm ripped a hole in the fabric during a game against the California Angels. Just lucky, I guess.

That latter probably should have scared me away from the joint for years.

The roof was rippling, the lights were whipping back and forth, the players dashed off the field and the crowd streamed into the aisles — and stopped, I suppose because there was no place to go. The concourse was nowhere near large enough to accommodate a crowd of nearly 32,000.

My friend and I were in the middle of one of those outfield rows. We couldn’t reach an aisle, much less the concourse, and I finally said, “Well, if we’re gonna die, it might as well be in a ball park.” We went back, sat down and watched the spectacle.

Call up the play-by-play of that game at Retrosheet.com and you’ll find this deadpan description of the home half of the eighth inning:

... Hatcher hit a sacrifice fly to right [Lombardozzi scored]; 15 minute delay because of roof collapse; Hrbek flied out to right ...

And that might not have been the biggest collapse of the night. Mickey Hatcher’s sac fly made the score 6-1 Twins.

But with a massive rent in the roof, the stadium operators had to jack up the air pressure to keep it inflated, and maybe that had something to do with the disaster that followed in the top of the ninth:

Double, homer, single, homer, foulout, walk, strikeout, homer. Three two-run dingers, the first off Frank Viola, the last two off Ron Davis, and the Angels won 7-6.

Yep, the Domefield advantage went the other way that night.

When 162 games just isn't enough

The Twins are making a habit of this extra regular-season game stuff.

I landed a ticket online Sunday evening. It's not a prime location, but I will be there Tuesday. One more trip to the mutant mushroom.

Jim Leyland on Rick Porcello, the 20-year-old who'll start for Detroit:

"He's been young all year and he pitched awful good against Minnesota the other day. I know one thing for a fact — he will not be scared. He'll be excited."

OK, but he hasn't heard the Metrodome in a playoff.

A few comments from the weekend:

1) Give the Chicago White Sox credit. They played that series in Detroit with passion, won two of the three games easily and came inches away from perhaps tying Sunday's tilt. They made it possible for the Twins to catch the Tigers.

2) Interesting quotes from Zach Greinke in LaVelle Neal's blog:

Even when they were getting out they were taking good at bats up there. The only team that I faced over the years where they…they actually elevate their game when the pressure is on the line. Most teams either stay the same or get tight and try to do more than they can do.

Delmon Young, perfect example. I threw a fastball to him hoping he would try to get big and hit a home run with it. He just stayed through it and hit it to the opposite field and I haven’t seen him do that a whole lot.

It shows how relaxed they stayed in pressure situations. And I don’t expect that.

3) Phil Rogers of the Chicago Tribune after Sunday's Twins-Royals games:

... (Y)ou know Joe Girardi and the Yankees will be rooting for the Tigers on Tuesday, and not just because the Tigers failed to protect a seven-game lead with 26 games to play. No visiting team ever wants to play high-stakes games in the white bubble that has been the Twins' home since 1982.

The award polls

We'll give this a post of its own.

AL MVP: Joe Mauer in a landslide. Shocking, isn't it? Mauer 24 votes (96 percent); Miguel Cabrera one (4 percent). I know who you are.

NL MVP: Albert Pujols, easily. Pujols 16 (83 percent), Hanley Ramirez two (11 percent) Chase Utley 1 (5 percent).

AL Cy Young: Zach Grienke, and I'm both surprised and pleased by the margin. Zach got 21 votes (95 percent); one (4 percent) went to "somebody else." Mariano Rivera, maybe?

NL Cy Young: Tim Lincecum in a fairly tight one. Lincecum 10 votes (58 percent), Cris Carpenter 6 six (35 percent), Adam Wainwright 1 (5 percent).

AL Rookie: Rick Porcello gets a plurality. Eight for Porcello (47 percent), Elvis Andrus 5 (29 percent), Gordon Beckham 3 (17 percent) "somebody else" one (5 percent). Interesting that Andrew Bailey (6-3, 26 saves, 1.86 ERA in 82-plus innings) got shut out.

NL Rookie: Tommy Hanson, barely. Hanson five (35 percent), Chris Couglan four (28 percent), J.A. Happ three (21 percent), "somebody else" — probably Andrew McCutchen, who I should have listed on the ballot rather than Randy Wells — two (14 percent).

My choices, by the way: AL MVP: Mauer; NL MVP: Pujols: AL Cy Young: Greinke; NL Cy Young: Lincecum; AL Rookie: Andrus; NL Rookie: Hanson.

New poll up