A Forlorn Twins Fan

It's a trying time for all Twins fans right now. On Sunday, they lost to the Rangers 5-3 in 12 innings after leading 3-1 in the seventh. On Monday, they seemed to bounce right back, staking a very early 12-2 lead against the Athletics, only to give it all back and lose in dramatic fashion, 14-13. On Tuesday, they managed a win, thank goodness, in a 10-inning affair with Oakland. But the next day, they played like a little league team and lost 16-1 to the worst offense in the American League.

Finally, the Twins had earned their reprieve; they led 5-3 in the ninth inning in the opening game of the series against the Los Angeles Angels. Joe Nathan was coming in to protect the lead, the same Joe Nathan who hadn't allowed a run since May 15th, a span of 22 2/3 innings, and hadn't even allowed two baserunners in an outing since June 13th. Of course, as I'm sure you know, it just wasn't to be. Nathan just didn't have it last night and struggled throwing strikes, before allowing a little dribbler past the mound to bring in the tying run with 2 outs. After that I didn't want to see any more, so I turned the game off and went to bed. It was the kind of game that I just knew they were going to lose anyway.

To be clear, I do not mean this post as an attack on Joe Nathan--there will be a rare occasion when he takes the mound and simply doesn't have his best stuff. Unfortunately, he is human, and that occasion was last night. Despite that, had that slow roller off the bat of Howie Kendrick taken a minutely different bounce, he could have saved the game regardless.

There are other important things to talk about from the game, but I'm just not in the mood to do that. Jesse Crain took the loss in his first game back from AAA, Alexi Casilla continued not hitting with an 0-4 night (he's now 3-26 with a .373 OPS since his return), and Scott Baker had trouble with his control and thus in limiting his pitch count. But, as I said, I'm just not in the mood to talk about anything of substance in regard to the Twins. After getting my melodramatic spiel out of the way, at this point I'd rather just forget that they existed. Until about 10:00 EST tonight.