Twins set to begin grinding road trip
They will fly an estimated 6,234 miles to Anaheim, Seattle, Oakland, Toronto and back to the Twin Cities. They will be on the road for 15 nights and play 14 games.
This will be the longest road trip since 1969, when the Twins were gone for 17 days and played 15 games. It was a five-city trip East that started in Detroit.
And manager Billy Martin and pitcher Dave Boswell made it memorable.
On the third night in Detroit, they engaged in drunken fisticuffs in the alley behind the Lindell AC. Boswell wound up with 20 stitches, and a Twins’ team that was perhaps the best in franchise history went 6-9 on the journey.
“The Twins sent Boswell back to Minnesota and we didn’t see him for 10-12 days,” Tony Oliva said. “His face still was black and blue.”
It is unlikely that Ron Gardenhire, the current manager, will get in a similar ruckus with a hurler, no matter how much additional angst he’s faced over the condition of his bullpen.
There’s no one more important to that bullpen - and a road trip that permits survival in the American League Central race - than Matt Guerrier.
A year ago, Guerrier was the Twins’ most durable reliever with 73 games and 88 innings. He also rivaled closer Joe Nathan in reliability, putting up a 2.35 ERA that was second only to Nathan’s 1.88 in the bullpen.
Guerrier would on occasion take the eighth-inning duties from Pat Neshek in tight games. This Twins’ bullpen lost Neshek in early May because of a partial tear of an elbow ligament.
Initially, Gardenhire tried Jesse Crain and/or Dennys Reyes in most of the situations where the Twins were trying to hold a narrow lead in the eighth inning. In early June, Guerrier stopped the Yankees for five outs before a Nathan save, and Gardenhire started to go mostly with him in setup situations.
Tags: game, games, innes, occ, Road Trip, Trip
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Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 1:27 am under