Date: 8/25/10

Opponent: Texas Rangers

Home/Away: Away

Starting Pitcher: Duensing

Final Score: L 4-3

Record: 72-55

Recap: Okay, I think it's clearly my presence that is causing the Twins to lose. My apologies. I won't be at tomorrow's game, so hopefully we can pull out a win. While I don't like losing 3 games in a row, that's sort of the nature of baseball. You're always going to have losing streaks and winning streaks, so I can't be too upset. At least not yet. If this continues I may be singing a different tune. On the plus side, at least the past 2 games were close games. And today's game didn't feature any blatant misplays in the field, so there is that. Plus the White Sox lost. I always try to stay positive after all. I'm just such a glass-half-full kind of person. Haha. 

Duensing pitched okay, but he had some trouble keeping the ball in the park. Josh Hamilton hit a 2-run homer, and Vlad Guerrero hit a go-ahead solo home run in the 6th inning. The other run scored after Michael Young walked, advanced to 2nd on a wild pitch, and then scored on a single. I guess that was a pretty costly wild pitch. Bummer.

The Twins on the other hand left too many on base. Kubel scored on a ground out after doubling and advancing to 3rd on an error. Then we tied it up in the 5th, but we really should have scored more runs. Valencia and Hardy singled before Span doubled to score Valencia and leave runners at 2nd and 3rd with 1 out. Hudson walked to load the bases for Mauer, and while he grounded out to score the game at 2, we couldn't get a hit to really get some momentum going. We had other opportunities, too, but nothing came of them. The Rangers bullpen has been absolutely mowing us down in this series, and today was no exception. They used 5 relievers over 3 innings, and they didn't allow a run (actually, they only allowed 1 hit and struck out 5). Yikes. I'm crossing my fingers that tomorrow we can at least salvage a win against Scary Mofo and get going a bit during this road trip. I'm hoping for an absolute blowout.

Best Moment: Kubel's double. It was his first hit of the series. Yay for him! And against a lefty, too.

Most Questionable Moment: I couldn't really tell that well, but the strike zone seemed a bit odd to me.

Worst Moment: Losing. Again. *sigh*

Quotations of the Day:

• ""We were swinging good coming into this series, and they've pretty much shut us down. It's a good hitting park, too. We haven't gotten anything going against them. It's tough." - Jason Kubel
• "Unfortunately for us, we couldn't come up with another big hit tonight to get us over the hump. That's just the way it's gone here in Texas." - Ron Gardenhire
• "We have to keep playing and stay positive. Things will turn around. It's baseball." - Brian Duensing

Suck-Ass Performance of the Game: Michael Cuddyer (0 for 4, 1 strikeout, 4 left on base)