Player of the Game
With a meaningless home run after the game had already been lost, Carlos Santana won tonight’s Player of the Game. He scored two of the Indians five runs and finished with a POG score of 3.45.
Feathers Up
Rehab Update: The Indians announced today that Travis Hafner could return to the lineup as early as this week. He should immediately go back to his normal starting DH role to continue on his quest for 200 home runs as an Indian. This will likely be his last year as an Indian so hopefully he can end it on a positive note.
The Indians spread the offense around today, with every starter getting a hit. They even managed to get a couple runs off all those hits, most notably in the 6th inning when a Trevor Plouffe error with Casey Kotchman at bat lead to two unearned runs for the Tribe.
Feathers Down
Mark Shapiro found his twitter account password today and did an impromptu twitter interview (twinterview?) for all his followers. He used this opportunity to answer meaningless questions with real answers (his favorite color is blue) and real questions with meaningless answers (when asked if he regrets any recent trades he said it was a good question and proceeded to not answer it). I don’t know if there was a point to this patronizing, but I didn’t see one. If he is going to give fans enough respect to allow them to ask him questions, why doesn’t he respect the fans enough to give them real baseball answers. While this is just twitter we are talking about, Shapiro had a real press conference with the fans earlier in the season where he did the same thing. Indians fans are smart. We’ve all read Money Ball and visit Baseball Prospectus. Some of us have this bizarre tendency towards masochism that makes us watch every single game. There is no reason to sugar coat or lie about the current situation. The last thing we need is false promises and bad excuses like this tweet:
.@joycekeo I think we will have the ability to spend.Just concerned about depth of FA mket this offseason
— Mark Shapiro (@MarkShapiro) September 18, 2012
If that actually is true, then we have nothing to worry about. Shin-Soo Choo will be getting a brand new contract extension and the Indians will be fighting dollar for dollar with the Yankees for this year’s Yeonis Cespedes. Excuse me for not jumping in head first after a decade of disappointments.
Rehab Update: Rafael Perez had another set back and has been announced out for the season. It’s not really like the Indians need him with 11 pitchers currently in the bullpen, not including Roberto Hernandez, but it would have been nice to Perez pitch again this year. He only threw in eight games before going on the DL in late April.
David Huff was pulled after just 4.1 innings, reminiscent of the last two games where he came in for Jeanmar Gomez early in the game. Tonight it allowed the Indians to use a lot of their bullpen with Frank Herrmann and Chris Seddon taking over the fifth and sixth innings. This ultimately lead to the Indians using a team record (Milestone Alert) 10 pitchers in the game.
Cody Allen recorded his first career blown save tonight. He was bound to get one sooner or later as he is used in more close games and high pressure situations so this wasn’t a terrible time to get the first one out of the way. While he did give up the tying run, he kept the Twins from taking back the lead in the 7th.
The Indians had a runner on third with no one out in a tie game in the 9th inning and didn’t win. This is unacceptable.
Play of the Game
Matt LaPorta made what was very possibly the stupidest play of his career when he didn’t cover first on a ground ball in the 12th inning. As a first baseman your primary job is to stand on first and catch the ball when it is thrown to you. Apparently he forgot the first part of his job as he was wondering aimlessly while Jason Kipnis was actually trying to end the inning with the tie game intact.
Final Score: Cleveland Indians 5 – Minnesota Twins 6
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