Deduno Solid Through Six, Dozier Hot

As was usual, Twins starter Sam Deduno was very good through six innings last night. But Gardy left him in to start the seventh and of course the roof caved in.

Not that it mattered much. The Twins ONLY run was another Brian Dozier homerun. That's three homeruns for Dozier in three games. You KNOW that something's wrong when a former AL MVP (Morneau) has had less homeruns (3) for the entire season than the Twins leadoff man (Dozier) has in his last five games (4.) Let's take it a step farther. Dozier has as many homeruns (7) as the OTHER Twin with an AL MVP title (Mauer), but he's done that with 60 fewer at-bats.

Did I mention Dozier is our LEAD-OFF man? I know I did, but that's the point.

I'm excited that the Twins seem to have a lot of guys that can hit a few balls out of the park, but we really do need guys like Morneau and Mauer doing it way more often. I USED to think that having Morneau as a teammate would cause Joe Mauer to become a better homerun hitter. Instead it seems that Morneau is much more content to follow Mauer's lead and has become a singles hitter. Yes, Morneau leads the Twins in RBI, but that has more do do with hitters getting on base in front of him. At LEAST his batting average is way up over the last two seasons.

We took in another Stark amateur game last night since it was at the Sleepy Eye practice field. From when we left out garage until the time we got back after the game was over, total time was one hour and thirteen minutes. It was a slaughter. The Sleepy Eye Squad won it in 5 innings with the 10 run-rule in effect.

I might be done with amateur ball for a while. We'll see. The friends were great. The weather, though overcast was quite pleasant with a beautiful breeze. But the game stunk. I saw more wild pitches last night in the first inning than I've seen in the last couple of years watching Twins games. And that was Stark's BEST pitcher. It just got worse from there.

The Sleepy Eye squad obviously gets some real practice time in. The Stark team obviously does not. They really should not be sharing the same field for a game.

I'm not faulting any individual player. They are just learning the game, but I think Stark players would benefit much more from practicing than actually playing games at this point. They aren't going to get any better until that happens. And if the goal is to get better, they should be practicing.

Playing the game isn't fun for anybody when you aren't very good at it.