It was an odd scene in the second inning Wednesday when Twins manager Ron Gardenhire and trainer Dave Pruemer went to the mound and ended up talking for a while with righthander Samuel Deduno. Deduno did not want to come out of the game but had no choice when home plate umpire Doug Eddings signaled for Brian Duensing to enter the game.

Moments later, the announcement came that Deduno left because of eye irritation.

I will now get out of the way and allow Gardy to explain.

"Sammy had a little trouble out there," Gardy said. "I think we were all watching it. They were throwing the ball back to him from first base and from the catcher, and it just looked like he was kind of dodging away from the ball. As I'm walking out, the trainer says there's no way I'm leaving him out there, because he had his eyes checked over the last couple days and he says he's fine, but that's not fine. He didn't see fine when he was out there, and there's no way we were leaving him out on the baseball field with that.

"He did not want to come out of the game, as we could all see. I could not get his glove open to get the ball, even. He kept saying he was fine, but if you just watch with your eyes you could see him flinching from balls, and that's not good enough. I will not leave a player out there for that situation He's getting checked out now. He'll get an MRI and then we'll see what happens here.

"But he was cleared from anything. He has eye irritation, and they're trying to figure out why he's having some blurry in his eyes again. But before the game he was fine. That's what the kid was telling us, and that's all we can go by. But that didn't look good to us, so we took him out."

Q: Disappointed won't see Deduno again? (he has one scheduled start left, but can he see to pitch?)

A: "Well, I'm not going to say that because we still got six games left, and if you talk to Sammy he's fine, we're just going to get him checked out and make sure before we put him back out there that we know for sure here."