Notes from the weekend

Nothing against Matt Magill, the most recent fringe guy to land, probably only temporarily, on the Twins roster, but when he came in to pitch Sunday I decided it was permission to turn off the game and take a nap.

Which meant I missed probably the highlight of the day for the Twins, since Magill got seven outs without allowing a run.

And -- surprise! -- he gets to stay on the roster. Tyler Duffey got sent down after the game, with another move to come today.

Agai, this is tinkering with the unimportant parts of the active roster. Duffey and Magill combined to allow one run in 5.1 innings, but Jose Berrios and Taylor Rogers had already allowed seven in 3.2.

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Luke Bard cleared Rule 5 waivers and was returned to the Minnesota Twins, which, as I figure things, means the Twins didn't lose anything through the Tyle Kinley Experiment. Indeed, as Bard is not on the 40-man roster, the Twins emerge slightly better off than had they protected Bard from the draft last November.

And if either Nick Burdi, on the disabled list with the Pittsburgh Pirates, is returned (probably not on the table until 2019) or the Miami Marlins pass on taking Kinley back (doubtful), all the better.

Pic of the Week

Ronald Acuna Jr. hits his first major league home run.

The Atlanta Braves called up the consensus top prospect in the minors last week. Ronald Acuna Jr. won't turn 21 until December, and the Braves have the two youngest players in the majors in their lineup (the other being second baseman Ozzie Albies).

Age matters. As Jay Jaffe explains in this Fangraphs piece, ANY playing time in the majors at 20 --Acuna's age, and Albies's age last year -- signals a rare talent. Acuna, simply by reaching the majors this year, has at least a 5 percent chance of reaching the Hall of Fame. Ditto Albies.

Their career arcs will be interesting to follow.

The Hale you say

During my biweekly radio spot on KMSU Thursday I opined that the Twins were going to be OK. They were leading the Yankees at the time with Kyle Gibson looking good, and the lowly Cincinnati Reds were next on the docket.

And then the Yankees got three in the bottom of the ninth to win that game, and on Friday the Reds hit the Twins pitching with the same ugly stick the Yankees used. Eight losses in a row.

David Hale gave the Twins some length out of the bullpen Friday, in exchange for which the Twins designated him for assignment. This may well have been their intent when they landed him -- try to get him through waivers and stash him on the Triple A roster. Presumably his replacement on the active roster, unknown at this point, will be somebody who can go multiple innings if they get yet another short start today or Sunday.

This is a fringe-of-the-roster move and not all that significant in and of itself. Few games are determined by the 12th or 13th pitcher. What is significant is the reason for the roster churn. This will be four pitchers for that spot in five days, and that's because the important pitchers are suddenly ineffective en masse.

It looks, and feels, a lot like 2016. This is a better team than that. They need to perform like it, and soon.

The arson squad lights up another one

Seven losses in a row for the Twins now, three of them walk-offs. What a disastrous road trip for the Twins.

The veteran bullpen additions -- Fernando Rodney, Zach Duke and Addison Reed -- each bear a walkoff loss on their lines in this span. And yeah, Rodney had some "help" Thursday from the corner infielders (Miguel Sano and Logan Morrison) in setting up the fatal homer, but this remains true: Rodney has yet to have a 1-2-3 inning.

The Twins shuffled a bullpen roster spot repeatedly Thursday: First they filled the spot vacated by Tyler Kinley with Aaron Slegers, which gave them a long man if Kyle Gibson's start went poorly. (It didn't; it might have been the best start of Gibson's career.) During the game they announced that they had claimed David Hale on waivers; after the game they returned Slegers to Rochester. So Slegers had a prime seat for Thursday's game and got paid for watching, which isn't that bad a deal.

Claiming Hale, a 30-year-old who has pitched in the majors for Atlanta, Colorado and the Yankees without really establishing himself, feels like a return to the revolving door of mediocrity the Twins spun around in last season. I didn't expect that this season.

Thad Levine, the No. 2 in the Twins front office, told reporters the Twins had pursued Hale during the offseason. True or not, Hale is not really a fix for what ails this pitching staff. He's going to be used as a long man. The problems are early in games, with inconsistent starts, and late in games, where the Rodney-Reed-Duke-Trevor Hildenberger-Taylor Rogers quintent have not gotten it done.

The end of the Tyler Kinley Experiment

Tyler Kinley's ERA
is 24.38. That decimal
point is not misplaced.

The Twins announced after Wednesday's loss to the Yankees (six losses in a row now) that they would designate Tyler Kinley for assignment. So the Rule 5 guy is coming off the 40-man roster, either by trading his Rule 5 rights to somebody willing to carry him on the 25 man roster all year or by returning him to the Miami Marlins, whence he came.

I've noted often enough that the Twins exposed Nick Burdi and Luke Bard to the Rule 5 draft in order to open a roster spot for Kinley. Bard was DFA'd a few days ago by the Angels; his status is unknown. Burdi will spend most if not all of the season on the disabled list as he rehabs his surgically reconstructed elbow; his Rule 5 clock won;t start ticking until 2019.

My sense of this is that I wouldn't trade either Bard or Burdi for Kinley, but one aspect that I haven't dwelt on much is that Kinley has been healthier than either of the others. Both Bard and Burdi have missed a lot of time to injuries in the minors. (They've also been, generally, more effective when they've been able to pitch than Kinley.)

This is a common thread among the young arms the Twins discarded during the off-season to clear space on the 40-man roster. Not just Bard and Burdi, but J.T. Chagrois and Randy Rosario -- hard throwers with injury histories. If half of life is just showing up, half of pitching is just taking the mound.

Kinley could take the mound. He just wasn't good enough on the mound to get more innings for this team, and even with this losing streak, this team has sufficient ambitions that it can't afford to sacrifice a roster spot to somebody it can't use.

Weather or not, a losing streak

The less said about the Twins play of late, the better.

Nevertheless, I shall expend a few, perhas trite, words on the subject.

• A team is never as good as it looks when it's winning and never as bad as it looks when it's losing.
• The Twins' five-game losing streak is now longer than any losing streak they had in 2017.
• I have no idea how much their sporadic schedule affects their inconsistent performance, but Jose Berrios' outing Tuesday shouldn't have been affected.

That last point probably merits some discussion. Kyle Gibson and Lance Lynn had long layoffs between starts. There was the lost weekend against Chicago during the blizzard, and the trip to Puerto Rico in which neither pitched, and the result was that each went more than a week between starts.

Berrios, however, has worked on pretty close to normal rest -- five days off in Puerto Rico, four days in New York. He was very good against Cleveland on his native island, not very effective against the Yankees. 

The ESPN crew doing Monday's game talked quite a bit about the shortage of games for the Twins, and I will accept the notion that they have yet to get into the rhythm of the season. I haven't yet myself. Too many off days, too many rain/snow outs. 

If that's a problem, it's a self-curing one. They're going to play 162, just not as many of them in April as everybody else.

Busenitz down, Duffey up

As the Twins discover that, yep, they do too need a long reliever. ...

LaVelle Neal assured somebody on Twitter that this year's bullpen is better than last year's. "Going through a rough patch," the Strib reporter said. Perhaps, but that's assuming that the expiration dates haven't been hit on Fernando Rodney and Zach Duke, ages 41 and 35 respectively.

I was a bit surprised two weekends back when the Twins added a relief arm. They were, at the time, in the middle of a series of snowouts and looking at four days in a row without games. The bullpen was, if anything, overly rested at that point.

And then they had a 16-inning game in San Juan. And then they transformed one of those relief arms into the fifth starter (demoting Gabriel Moya to activate Phil Hughes). And the bullpen is pretty beat up.

Bad games and bad series happen, even to the best teams, and one ought not overreact to them. But the Twins really feel like a different team without Byron Buxton in the lineup.