Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Red Sox-Twins

Since this series starts tonight with Santana-Schilling, I figured I'd throw out some random Twins notes that I've gathered from watching the first four minutes of this game:

1. Johan Santana - he had a rough start, mostly attributed to the WBC (by the way, they just showed a replay of Oriz's home run off of Santana in the first inning of the Venezuela-Dominican game... what a game that was, and what a week), but he's back, baby. There's something strangely intimidating about watching him pitch, despite the fact that he's built like a left-handed Pedro and he looks like a left-handed Fernie Estalla. He also stands further to the third base side of the rubber than any pitcher I've ever seen, and I can't beleive I'm just noticing this now.

2. Joe Mauer - everyone knows that he's leading the AL in batting average and should be starting in the all-star game, but I love that he's wearing an old-school, tri-colored Twins helmet behind the plate. I'll try to find a picture of it if I can, but it's very sweet. (EDIT: I captured a picture from the first inning - it's kinda blurry, but you can see the sweeeeeeeeet helmet.)

By the way, Santana just struck out the side in the first inning. And Schilling just walked his first batter in 34 innings or so.

3 comments:

Greg said...

Santana has it going on tonight, with 8 strikeouts and 2 baserunners through 4 innings. Schilling has been pretty good, but not that good. It's scoreless in the bottom of the 4th.

Greg said...

Now it's 1-1 in the bottom of the 8th. It was scoreless through 6, then dueling solo homers from Varitek and Cuddyer in the seventh gave us this score. Through five, Santana had 11 K's, and was in legitimate 20-strikeout territory the way he was throwing. He had 13 when Varitek hit the bomb off of him, and now it looks like Nathan is coming in for the 9th.

Greg said...

Well, that loss sucked. I'm not running game threads anymore...