Saturday, July 22, 2006

Twins: High octane offense?

Well, for one night at least.

14 runs, 18 hits, and 0 HR. I think the Twins might be the only team that can pull that off. But HR or no HR, the great offensive display was more than enough to get by a shady outing from Carlos Silva and give the Twins their 8th straight victory, putting them now only 3 games behind the White Sox for the Wildcard lead.

The Twins used an 8 run 4th inning to put some distance between them and Cleveland, and then tacked on a couple more in the 6th, 2 more in the 7th, and another one in the 9th for good measure. Though by that point the game was pretty well in hand, obviously.

I could list all of the solid Twins individual performances, but I'd pretty much have to list everyone from the offense. Put it this way - everyone had at least 1 hit except for Jason Bartlett... who hit 2 sac flies.

The biggest thing about this game, I think, is that the Twins actually won on the road. We all know about their 37-11 home record, best in baseball, but this win improves their record on the road to just 18-29, which isn't all that good. If the Twins can continue to play good baseball at home and at least go .500 on the road, thinks will be looking solid for the rest of the year. So this is at least a good start.

Saturday pits Scott Baker in his 2nd start since being recalled up against Jeremy Sowers for the Angels. Neither has an ERA under 5.89, so we could get a lot of runs again. As long as we get the same result, I'm certainly happy with that!

By the way, updated wildcard standings for anyone interested:

Chicago White Sox: 58-37 / -
New York Yankees: 55-39 / 2.5 GB
Minnesota Twins: 55-40 / 3 GB
Toronto Blue Jays: 54-42 / 4.5 GB

2 comments:

twins15 said...

Heh, me and another guy were actually wondering what the most combined runs/hits in a game when there was no HR was. :)

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