Terry Ryan addressed the media on a number of subjects prior to Tuesday’s Twins-Orioles game, including injury updates, the process by which Monday’s rainout was rescheduled, Joe Mauer batting leadoff and more. Here are the highlights.
Ryan said Kyle Gibson threw a bullpen, and has one more scheduled for later in the week. “He’ll throw another one on Friday,” Ryan said. “We’ll go from there, but so far he’s doing well. We’ll see what he feels like after the Friday session. Then was can start mapping out his immediate future.”
Ryan added that he is under the impression that Gibson is on track with where he ought to be in his recovery, and everything has gone according to plan after he did strengthening exercises early on in his disabled list stint.
The Glen Perkins update was that he’s been playing catch, but nothing more. That’s still considered progress in Ryan’s eyes, but it appears he’s still without a timeline.
The news about playing Thursday’s afternoon game hasn’t looked encouraging. “Tomorrow we’ve got a little bit of an advantage that we’re playing at 12:10 so we can wait,” Ryan said. “I would suspect we don’t want to have another rainout, so if the weather will cooperate at all, we’ll wait it out.”
Ryan was not pleased with how the weather situation played out Monday night, and he said as much in detail. “Last night was unfortunate because we thought it was going to start raining earlier and it didn’t,” Ryan noted. “It didn’t show up until about 9:10 here, because I was sitting here looking for it. It was unfortunate. We probably could have gotten an official game in. I don’t know…our meteorologist anticipated it coming early, going away and coming back, so we didn’t want to burn the starters. That one was unfortunate. I was sorry to have lost that game because we might have been able to get one in.”
The Orioles — most notably manager Buck Showalter — reportedly had plenty of nice things to say about Ryan and the Twins’ flexibility about rescheduling the game, which can be a complicated process. “It’s just a sensitive issue,” Ryan said. “You try to find certainly a date that’s open for both. Not violating the 21 day rule and all those things. You try to find a situation where they’re going to come close to us. Toronto’s not bad. I think the most important thing for the Orioles was what time we start. You can’t hardly start at noon or 1:00 coming out of a night game in Baltimore. There’s TV and radio deals and all that kind of stuff that you have to worry about. It makes sense; we did something that made sense.”
The home team does have the upper hand when it comes to rescheduling, but it wasn’t something the Twins were going to necessarily pull rank on, Ryan suggested.
“”The time of the game is pretty much something that we could say,” Ryan said. “But it’s not right for the opposing team to have to play a 1:00 game coming from the East after a night game in Baltimore. We wouldn’t want that. How would you want to be treated? That’s the way we try to treat the opposition.”
Joe Mauer finally got to lead off after the lineup card said as much before Monday’s game was postponed. Ryan said that’s a move manager Paul Molitor has been talking about for some time. “We’ve talked about that for a long time,” Ryan said. “Paul has been talking about it, and he did it yesterday. The lineup was out there and I saw it. It wasn’t a surprise. He’s been talking about it for a while. Obviously we’re struggling with scoring. So put Joe up front and see what happens. Let’s shake it up and get creative. There’s a few other guys that are in a different spot as well. A lot of people have been clamoring for this move for a while. All the way back to Gardy’s days. We know that; it’s been well documented. So we’ll see how it goes. His OBP is still leading the league. Here we go.”
With an 8-23 start, it’s pretty clear things have not gone to plan. But what things have surprised Ryan?
“I think coming out of spring training I thought we were going to score,” Ryan said. “We’re having trouble scoring. We’re having trouble with some of the fundamentals. Running the bases has been an issue here. The other day in Chicago we got first and second in the first inning and we ran ourselves out of that. We got doubled off the day before. Both of those are not acceptable. So we have not played very fundamental baseball.”
Injuries have also played a role, but Ryan was adamant that that wasn’t an excuse.
“We’ve had some people go down,” Ryan said. “That’s not an excuse. Every team does that. Most guys get hurt in spring training; we came out of there healthy as horses. Then we get to the first week and it all breaks loose. We’ve talked about our depth for a while. We bring up Berrios and Duffey; that’s good enough. Those are the types of guys you’re hoping to reach down and get. Injuries shouldn’t be an excuse at all. I’m not going to go there. We have not played well; we’ve not started enough games where we’ve gotten depth at all. We’re in that bullpen at about the fourth or fifth inning almost every night here. That’s not going to work. Unanticipated? Yes. Our sights were much higher.”
Ryan didn’t focus on the negatives; rather, he singled out one player in specific. “Park has done well,” Ryan said. “That was a big question mark. There’s a few other things that have done what you’d expect, but there’s many things that haven’t. We are where we are; we better start doing something about it, or we’re going to continue to fall farther back. I think we’re 14 games out. That’s a lot of games on May 10.”
