Adventures with a misshapen roster

Jason Bartlett: Not
an outfielder.

Strictly speaking, the Minnesota Twins didn't need a legitimate bench outfielder Sunday.

It only looked that way.

The Twins were without Oswaldo Arcia from the get-go. Arcia missed Saturday's game with his sore wrist, which was checked by a doctor in Cleveland and pronounced nothing serious. He sat out Sunday and supposedly is to test it with some swings today but not play then either. (I groaned when I read Ron Gardenhire's statement that if Arcia can't play by Wednesday he'll go on the disabled list because "we're not going to play shorthanded this year." Listen, Gardy: You already are.)

Then Josh Willingham took a Justin Masterson pitch off his wrist and came out of the game an inning later.

Cue the Jason Bartlett experiment. Cue the Jason Bartlett embarrassment: Two badly overmatched at-bats with men on base (both strikeouts) and a third plate appearance for which Cleveland walked Joe Mauer in order to get to Bartlett only to plunk him. And a horrid inning in which he kept diving for balls he couldn't catch and risking further damage.

To be fair, I don't know that he's a worse defensive outfielder than Willingham, who is essentially immobile. Bartlett can run. But he's a career shortstop almost completely lacking in outfield experience, and he clearly doesn't know where his capabilities end and the risk begins. Willingham wouldn't have gotten close to either of the balls Bartlett dove for, but he also wouldn't have left his feet.

Bartlett didn't finish the game; Eduardo Escobar pinch-hit for him (and struck out) and stood in left field for a couple of innings without incident.

The word Sunday evening was that Chris Herrmann, catcher-outfielder, was on his way to the Twin Cities for the home opener. Presumably he'll be activated today for one of the Arcia-Willingham duo. Which would still leave the bench shorthanded, but not as shorthanded as it would have been. And there'll be a reserve who has played a full professional game in the outfield.

Pic of the Week

Avisail Garcia demonstates how difficult it is to play
outfield with one's eyes shut.

This play, in a roundabout way, helps demonstrate the silliness of using runs-batted-in as a projective stat.

This outfield blunder by Garcia, the White Sox right fielder, came in the third inning of Thursday's Twins game and turned a well-hit but eminently catchable ball hit by Chris Colabello into a three-run "double."

Colabello ended the game with six RBIs, but these three were a gift from the White Sox. Yet the next day, Ron Gardenhire justified keeping Colabello in the lineup on the basis of those six ribbies.

Colabello may, in fact, be one of the Twins' better options in the middle of the lineup. I don't have a lot of faith right now in Josh Willingham or Jason Kuebel. But the RBI stat is more an indication of who does hit in the middle of the lineup than an indication of who should.

Four games, one start for Kubel

Chris Colabello watches his home run fly Friday.

When Ron Gardenhire sat veteran Jason Kubel for the opener against Chris Sale, the Twins manager took pain to say he's not platooning the left handed hitter with Chris Colabello.

Kubel, Gardenhire insisted, "hangs in there" well against lefties. Kubel sat Monday's game out , Gardy said, because Sale is just an exceptionally tough lefty.

Well, yes, Sale is exceptional. But Kubel has 949 career plate appearances against left-handed pitchers, not all of them exceptional, in his major league career, and he has a slash line of .234/.304/.374 in those trips to the plate. That's not good enough to justify using him as a DH or (considering his defensive limitations) corner outfielder against southpaws.

Colabello started against Sale. Kubel started the second game, against a right-handed starter.

The White Sox used a lefty again on Thursday -- and Colabello played, and Kubel sat. Colabello had a big game (6 RBIs), and on Friday -- against a righty -- he started again (and hit a home run).

I do not expect Colabello to become the full-time DH, at least not this quickly. And given Gardenhire's well-established distaste for platoons, I still expect that Kubel will get far too many chances to flail and fail against the southpaws.

But even if Gardenhire does limit Kubel's exposure to left-handed pitching, we should not expect the manager to acknowledge that he's platooning. That would be OK; I'd rather have the manager platoon and pretend he isn't, than pretend he doesn't need to platoon at all.

What's on second

Jorge Polanco hit .308
last year in Low A ball.

The Twins have accumulated an intriguing collection of second basemen in their organization. Or, more accurately, a collection of possible second basemen.

Start at the big league level, where Brian Dozier has the job. If his 2013 production is sustained, he's capable of being the regular second baseman for a good team -- hitting at the bottom of the order. The Twins don't now have a deep enough lineup to avoid having him in the top half. But he's a good defensive second baseman, and he has shown some pop, just not a very good batting average or on-base percentage.

Then there's Eddie Rosario, currently serving a 50-game suspension for a repeat recreational drug violation. Rosario projects to be something of the opposite to Dozier: At best an average defender at the keystone, but a line-drive machine capable of filling a top-of-the-order role.

Rosario finished 2013 at Double A, but where he'll pick up after serving his suspension is uncertain. (He was excused from spring training for unspecified "personal reasons," and as far as I know has yet to report to the Twins complex in Fort Myers.) Had he not been suspended, I thought it likely that he'd have moved up to Triple A; as it is, he might have to re-serve some High A time.

High A is where Jorge Polanco is. Polanco is a 20-year-old Dominican who was signed in the same summer as Miguel Sano and Max Kepler, who got more attention. While Polanco's at a lower level of play, he might offer a combination of Dozier's defense and Rosario's batting average.

Also at Fort Myers with Polanco: his DP partner at Cedar Rapids last year, Niko Goodrum, a second-round pick in 2010; and Levi Michael, the Twins' first round pick in 2011 as a shortstop.

This is Michael's third season at High A, and he's been largely relegated to second base. The Twins probably hoped when they drafted him that by now he'd be ready to challenge for the shortstop job, if not have already pushed Pedro Florimon aside. It hasn't happened, and probably won't. Goodrum, a tall, lean bundle of fast-twitch fibers, might not be destined to be a shortstop either; there's been chatter practically since he was drafted about a possible position switch for him.

Still, the Twins have sizable financial investments in all three middle infielders. And all three are on the same team.

Every time I saw Polanco working on defense during my time wandering the minor league fields last month, it was as a shortstop. And when the Miracle opened their season Thursday night, Polanco was at short, Michael at second and Goodrum at third base.

I suspect that Polanco's arm, like Dozier's, is a bit light for shortstop. If there's a major-league shortstop in that bunch, my money's on Goodrum. But it makes sense for the Twins to take a serious look at Polanco at short. Second base is getting a bit crowded, and his bat would certainly play at shortstop.

Deduno in the bullpen

It was an ugly way for the Twins to lose Wednesday: the stoppers at the back end of the bullpen combined to surrender a three-run lead, and the long reliever threw two wild pitches and committed a balk in the bottom of the 11th.

Ron Gardenhire grumped some after the game about the lengthy review in the top of the seventh, but I'm not buying the notion that had the game flowed at its usual pace that Kevin Correia was going to pitch into the eighth. Gardy would probably have gone to Jared Burton in the eighth, and certainly would have brought Glen Perkins in for the save in the ninth. It's what Gardy does. It didn't work Wednesday.

(MLB blamed the delay on two simultaneous challenges, but I sat through a couple of way-too-long replay review delays at Fort Myers last month. When the second one began, the fans started booing. I expect longer delays when an out call is overturned and the umps have to figure out where to put the baserunners.)

And then there was slingin' Sam Deduno unloading a couple of wild pitches in the bottom of the 11th. Deduno is wild. He's difficult to catch. That's who he is and what he does. Letting him pitch with the winning run on third base is a baseball version of Russian roulette; sooner or later the gun's going to fire.

In retrospect, I don't think the Twins were ever particularly serious about Deduno as a contender for the rotation this spring. As far as the public knew, Deduno was competing with Scott Diamond, Vance Worley and Kyle Gibson for the fifth starter job. Gibson won, as he should have -- he has the highest ceiling of the four -- but while Deduno pitched quite well during exhibition play, he never actually started, and frequently got his innings after the established hitters in the opposing lineup had been removed. The others all got multiple starts.

I now think the Twins -- quite aware that Deduno had had shoulder surgery at the end of the 2013 season and Tommy John surgery years before he came to the organization, and also mindful of the difficulty he has had going even six innings -- wanted him in the bullpen more than as a starter. Perhaps Deduno would have gotten the job had Gibson struggled as much as Diamond and Worley did, but it was only going to happen as a last resort.

The problem is that a reliever with his lack of command is likely to have trouble pitching out of other people's jams. I kept hearing the announcers this spring talking about Deduno being the guy brought in to get a strikeout, but the truth is (a) he doesn't have a good strikeout rate despite his movement and (b) he's a real risk for a wild pitch.

He wasn't asked to clean up somebody else's mess Wednesday. He created his own, and didn't get out of it cleanly. That's something a starter can get away with. A reliever, not so much.

Ryan Braun's standing ovation

The fans in Milwaukee cheer Ryan Braun in his first
game back after a steroids suspension.

We all know the Ryan Braun saga: Winner of the National League MVP award, flunked a drug test, convinced the arbitrator to toss his suspension on the basis that his sample was mishandled, snagged anyway in the Biogenesis investigation, suspended for the final 65 games of the 2013 season.

Ryan Braun returned to action Monday in Milwaukee to a standing ovation.

My Twitter feed erupted with outrage from the press box types. How dare the fans of Milwaukee greet him like a conquering hero when he's a liar and a cheat?

Me, I expected it:

Standing O in Milwaukee for Braun. Of course. PED use is only bad when it's the other team.
— Edward Thoma (@bboutsider) March 31, 2014

It's not just the fans, either. The players are at best passive aggressive in their opposition to performance enhancing drugs.

It's an interesting clubhouse dance they wind up performing. The union and MLB just completed a reworking of the drug policy that steps up the suspension for first and second violations -- 80 games for a first violation, 162 (full season) for a second -- but allows a softening of punishment for an inadvertent violation.

And it includes what we might call the Peralta rule: Violators are ineligible for postseason play.

That provision follows the return last fall of Detroit's Jhonny Peralta from his 50 game suspension in time for the playoffs; he hit a crucial home run that helped advance the Tigers past Oakland to the ALCS.

The players, as a whole, were unhappy with the fact that Peralta was permitted to play. But I doubt any of his Detroit teammates wanted to give that game back, or didn't want him on their side last October. Peralta has since signed with the Cardinals as a free agent. I'm sure the St. Louis players also supported the Peralta ban now in effect, but I'll wager they have not given him as frosty a reception as, say, the replacement players who partook in spring training during the 1994-95 strike.

The players are conflicted. They want the sport cleaned of the drugs, but they want to win more.

If a cheater can help them win, great. Just as long as he doesn't get caught. That is the greater sin.

Kurt Suzuki and other catchers

Kurt Suzuki strokes a two-run double Monday.

Kurt Suzuki hit second in the Twins lineup on Opening Day, and for one day, at least, it worked. The veteran catcher singled and doubled and had all three of the Twins's RBIs.

Good for him. The fact remains that he has complied more than 3,200 major league plate appearances and has a career OPS-plus that is 14 percent below league average. He doesn't belong in the upper half of a major league lineup.

My fear is that Ron Gardenhire will remember this one game of production and base the lineups for the next month on it.

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The Twins had a chance late in the game to get back in it. They were down three going into the eighth, and Aaron Hicks led off with a double. With Pedro Florimon due up against the lefty Chris Sale, Gardenhire sent up a pinch-hitter — not hard-hitting catcher Josmil Pinto, but light-hitting Eduardo Escobar.

Really.

Escobar struck out (I'm tempted to say of course), and while Suzuki later drove in Hicks, the potential rally went no further. Pinto never got into the game.

Keeping Jason Bartlett over Chris Herrmann is a curious decision on the face of it. If this kind of player use is the result, the roster decision looks even worse.

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Remember 2011, when Joe Mauer missed about half the season and the catching load in his absence was carried by the duo of Drew Butera and Rene Rivera? Yeah, you were trying to forget that; those two make Suzuki's numbers look good.

Well, Butera made the Dodgers roster; he's the backup to A.J. Ellis. And Rivera not only made the Padres roster, he started their opener Sunday night.

Never underestimate how much teams value defensive skills at catcher.

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The Washington Nationals were (are) not only counting on Wilson Ramos (once the Twins' top prospect) as their regular catcher, but as their cleanup hitter as well.

The oft-injured backstop didn't make it through Monday's opener, however. He left in the seventh inning with a hand injury, and the Washington Post reported he fractured a bone. The Nats announced, however, that a preliminary X-ray showed no fracture. More exams are expected.