CLEVELAND – Officially, the Twins and Indians game Friday never happened, and the 2-2 score when the rains came could be interpreted as a draw anyway.
But the Twins, and especially Jake Odorizzi, feel like they lost.
"I'm frustrated," Odorizzi said after throwing two innings that were wiped from the record book by a storm that arrived 45 minutes after the game began. "I wanted to pitch against those guys, and that opportunity is gone now."
It is, and the result is that a pitching staff already a starter short now has to ask its bullpen to cover at least 18 innings in one day. Friday's game was called off after two hours of rain with the score tied 2-2, and will be made up in its entirety Saturday at 12:10 p.m. Central time. The 6:10 p.m. game will go on as scheduled, too, and the Twins don't have a starting pitcher for that one, either.
"I'll probably sit down with [pitching coach Wes Johnson] and talk about how we're going to map this thing out," Baldelli said of the Twins' third doubleheader of the season. "This is a pretty unique experience. I don't know if I've seen two bullpen games in one day, but I think we have the personnel to make it work."
They might have more players, actually, since Marwin Gonzalez and Jake Cave, held out of Friday's lineup, have another day to recover from their injuries. But that's small consolation to Odorizzi and the Twins, who hold a 3½ game AL Central lead on the defending champion Indians.
"It doesn't really affect [the Indians] as much as it would affect us," Odorizzi said, because Cleveland has a starting pitcher, Mike Clevinger, available for one game, while the Twins already were going to be shorthanded, because of Michael Pineda's suspension, on Saturday. "But it's [bad] for me because this is my last time to see these guys this year, and I fared pretty well against them."
The Twins are 5-0 since the All-Star break when Odorizzi starts a road game, and he is 2-0 with a 1.61 ERA in four starts against Cleveland this year.