Friday, September 01, 2006

Johan Santana = Cy Young

With the Twins coming off back-to-back losses against the Royals, a win was a must on Thursday. Lucky for them, Johan Santana was on the mound.

Santana, who is definitely in the running to win his 2nd Cy Young this year, gave a Cy-worthy performance, striking out 11 and allowing only 1 run in 7 innings of work today. This was just good enough to get the win, and the Twins eeked out 3 against the Royals, winning the series finale 3-1.

With the win Santana improves to 16-5 on the year, and his ERA dropped down to 2.95. So in the AL, his stats look like this:

Wins - 16 (T-1)
ERA - 2.95 (1)
Strikouts - 207 (1)

In the other big Twins news of the day, they dealt for Phil Nevin. Aarom Gleeman, as usual has this covered very well. I agree with his sentiment, provided it's just a low-level prospect the Twins are giving up, this looks like a very good move. Phil Nevin isn't a great threat at the plate anymore, but he's a solid right-handed bat, and he can't be any worse than what the Twins have thrown out there at DH this year. He's a semi-legit power threat that can hit lefties, which, at this point of the year, is a very nice pickup, especially for a Twins lineup that needs a boost. Great work Terry Ryan!

It was an all-around good day for the Twins, as both the Tigers and White Sox lost. This puts the Twins 0.5 GB of the Sox for the Wildcard, and 5.0 GB of the Tigers for the division lead. Here's the 3 teams pitching matchups for Friday:

Twins: Carlos Silva (8-12, 6.50 ERA) vs. the Yankees (Cory Lidle)
White Sox: Jose Contreras (11-6, 4.25 ERA) vs. the Royals (Runelvys Hernandez)
Tigers: Kenny Rogers (14-6, 4.06 ERA) vs. the Angels (Ervin Santana)

By the way, I'll be out of town for the Labor Day Weekend, so this will be it as far as posts go on here for a few days... take care, have a nice holiday, and GO TWINS!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well, it is Sunday night and the Twins lost the series. The one I get to watch on cable TV, being from CT and all. The offense was unclutch. The Twins were lucky to score on Saturday with Cuddyers sac fly. If he caught that better, it would have been tied going into the 8th and who knows what would have happened.

But they did win so that is good. The other good news is the Chi Sox and Red Sox didn't do too well, either. Twins still control their destiny and that is good considering they lost 4 of 6. Here's to hope for a winning week :)