The Twins’ Rick Anderson is one of baseball’s best pitching coaches, an authority on pitching to hitters. I mentioned to him that the Twins’ Justin Morneau has so much plate coverage with his swing that he can reach for an outside pitch and stroke it for a base hit.
“Amazing,” Anderson said. “And he’s a pitcher’s nightmare because you think, ‘Well, I am not going to come into him because he can hit one 400 feet to right field.’ But then you stay away…he can hit it 400 feet to left field. …He says, ‘When I am swinging the best, I use the whole field.’ When he’s not, he’s trying to pull home runs, but when he stays with his plan and trying to use the whole field, he’s tough to pitch to. …”
Anderson said if Morneau were on another team he wouldn’t “know how” to pitch to him. The 6-foot-4, 230-pound Morneau is second in the American League in RBI with 89 while batting .311 with 18 home runs.
The Twins, who have a 24-30 road record and lost two of three games in Seattle earlier this week, are nearing their longest road trip of the year starting on August 21. The Twins will play in Anaheim, Seattle, Oakland and Toronto before returning to Minneapolis for a series against Detroit starting on September 5.
Before the 2008 major league schedule was made the Twins communicated to major league baseball officials that Republican Convention organizers asked that the team be out of town during the convention, September 1-4. Team president Dave St. Peter told Sports Headliners the first draft of the schedule had the team in town during the convention. The final draft changed that but resulted in an unusually long time away from Minneapolis.
St. Peter described the Twins as “disappointed” the schedule wasn’t made more favorably but said MLB has requests from all 30 teams and faces a challenge in sorting things out. He also said it’s a “quirk” in the schedule that the Twins didn’t play Seattle until this month and now play the Mariners nine times in August.