I Dislike Your Favorite Team

So with their smooth operatin' legerdemain, the Twins beat the White Sox tonight to take over the lead of the Wild Card race and pull within 4 1/2 games of the oddly struggling Le Tigre.

All of the talking dickheads on ESPN at some point have said something along the lines of, "While the Twins would be very dangerous in the post season, there is no reason to believe they could overtake the Red Sox or White Sox for the Wild Card, much less the Tigers for the AL Central." In fact, most of those bloviators, if they predicted a Detroit collapse (which many, many people did, while taking breaths from fellating Jim Leyland) would posit that it would be the White Sox who benefitted.

Here's why they were wrong, and here's why the Twins will end up in the postseason, and they will be the team that no one wants to play.

1. Starting pitching. Ugly little secret about Chicago's pitching. Their aces aren't as good as they were last year. Buerle in particular stands out as being a disappointment, but really none of their guys are the monsters they were last year. The Twins have a similar situation with Carlos Silva, whose sinker ends up routinely falling right through the middle of the strike zone, when it used to fall right before it got to the power area of a hitter. So, both teams had a very reliable 15 game winner, and neither one will get there this year, so what's the difference? Reason #2 & #3.

2. Adaptability. The Twins have been able to get wins from starting pitchers galore, and it looks like Matt Garza has settled in, after working the Orioles for his first win. Boof Bonser had a 3 hitter after 6 innings against the O's as well. The White Sox don't have any great arms hiding in their minor league system, or we would have seem them by now.

3. Bullpen. The Twins have the best bullpen in the majors, period. Brad Radke tonight didn't make it past the 2nd inning, with stiffness in his bad shoulder. For many teams, that would have been trouble. For the Twins, and their stable of Guerrier, Neshek, Reyes, Nathan, et. al, it meant pitching 7 innings with a combined 1 scored run. Meanwhile, the Chicago bullpen fell apart, giving the Twins just enough runs to win. As we were watching the game, I said to miwacar that I thought that seeing Jenks in the game wouldn't be a bad thing for the Twins. Jenks throws hard, yeah, but there's more to pitching than that. Meanwhile, when Joe Nathan comes in, the game is essentially over. I don't know if he's blown a save yet this year.

4. Small Ball. Last year, the Sox were consummate small ball players with dangerous power in the middle of thier line up. This year, they seem to be relying on the long ball a lot more. Jose Guillen has offered up more respect for the bottom of the Twin's order than any media outlet, calling the light hitting, but speedy 7-9 hitters of the Twins as "piranhas"--presumably, because they take lots of small bites out of you. Couple that with Joe Maurer, still the best hitter in baseball, and Justin Morneau, with his 110 RBI's, you have a team that scores in lots of different ways. Bartlett delivered the game winning RBI tonight, after two slap singles up the middle to put guys in scoring position.

5. AJ pierzinski sucks.