Baseball: It’s all relative

After suffering through two devastating losses by the Minnesota Twins the last couple nights, I’ve tried to step back and look at the big picture. A month ago before the season started most people would probably have looked at the upcoming two game series against the Detroit Tigers and figured they would be tough games to win. Not that you ever want to expect to loose but the Tigers are clearly the better team on paper and loosing two games in a row to them in April shouldn’t be that devastating. It’s all relative though as before playing the Twins, the Tigers had the worst record in baseball and looked like a team the Twins should be able to take advantage of. Thus my expectations were raised going into the series and the defeats are harder to take.

It’s also worth noting that had we won those two games (and we nearly did both nights) then the majority of Twin’s fans would be declaring this team was on a roll as our bat’s were really coming alive. And they definitely were as Joe Mauer broke out of his mini slump along with the rest of the team as the Twins scored 14 runs between the two games. Instead of being excited about our newfound offense though the main thing I find myself dwelling on is how the wheels came off our bullpen who surrendered leads in the eighth inning each night. Even if Pat Neshek had been able to stop the bleeding without giving up the go-ahead run we most likely would overlook all the other runs they gave up.

To be fair as poorly as the pen pitched against the Tigers the offense never gave up and even came close to mounting rallies in the ninth inning both nights. That’s good to see and as much as it hurts to say it, I feel better seeing the bullpen struggle then had our offense struggled and we lost a couple of low scoring games. The reason is because the Twin’s bullpen was clearly there strength coming into this season and a couple of bad outings aren’t going to change that. The offense is a much bigger question mark but if they can keep hitting the ball well, the pen will come around and the wins will start coming.

Right now the Twins are rebuilding and even after a couple of tough losses, the rebuilding process seems to be taking steps forward. A lot of these young guys are only going to get better the more they play together. And if you take away the final score (thanks to our bullpen) the future is looking bright. As long as they can stay around 500 for the first few months of this year they are going to have a shot at making some noise which should be fun.