While frustrating, I'm not too worked up about all that's gone on with the Twins lately -- aside from the inconsistency of the terrible trio of Blackburn, Slowey and Baker.
Even Bert was all over Baker on Sunday for pitching without a clue, and he grouped Slowey in with him as pitchers who don't "have a game plan." The freeze frame on Sunday was when Baker threw a hanging breaking pitch that was fouled off by Jeff Francouer -- a classic hole-in-his-swing guy -- and then came back with the exact same pitch in the exact same spot.
Home run, Mets. One of three given up by Baker in the fourth and fifth innings. Nil-nil quickly became 6-nil
In the big picture, Baker's inability or unwillingness to adjust can be seen here by looking at his inning-by-inning ERAs -- 2.25, 2.25, 1.12 for the first three innings; 10.69, 7.71, 5.91 for the middle three. That's over 16 starts, a large enough sample size to say, "Gardy, we have a problem." And if there are doubts, his career ERA in innings 1 through 2 is 3.70; for innings 4 through 6 it's 5.46. (It's 5.23 for innings 7 through 9, when Baker manages to get that far.)
By comparison, Carl Pavano's career thirds are 4.31/4.56/3.79.
There's a school of thought, expressed by colleague Patrick Reusse on the radio today, that the Twins don't deserve Cliff Lee because 40 percent of the rotation would still be problematic.
The counterpoint is that getting Lee and sitting one of the terrible trio in favor of lefty Brian Duensing could very well give the Twins a rotation that can be considered 80 percent reliable.
We keep waiting for Slowey and Blackburn to learn from their mistakes, instead of making the same ones repeatedly.
