I totally get why people like Ron Gardenhire. He's a good quote. He seems and looks like a pleasant enough guy. His teams always start out looking utterly uninspiring and end up at or near the top of the division, and it's easy to assume that he has something to do with it. And at some level, maybe he does.

But as a manager of the game on the field, he's virtually clueless.

In the first game yesterday, if there was a runner on base with less than two out, Gardenhire called for a bunt. I swear, the Twins bunted eleven thousand times in that game, give or take, and one of them was a totally foreseeable suicide squeeze that Punto ended up turning into a pop-up double play. They ultimately won 3-2 in 10 innings, but may well have won 4-1 or so in regulation if they hadn't spent most of the game giving outs away like they were those "70 hours free!" CDs that AOL used to send you.

And then game two...oh, game two. Having fallen behind 5-0 and then mounted an impressive comeback, the Twins entered the bottom of the 8th down by one with Curtis Granderson leading off for the Tigers.

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Here is what Curtis Granderson has done this year against left-handed pitching, through Monday:
188 PA, .178/.243/.237, 4 2B, 2 HR

Here is what the Twins' superb lefty Jose Mijares, in his two-year career, has done against left-handed batters like Granderson:
123 PA, .125/.195/.188, 1 2B, 2 HR
Mijares threw three pitches on Friday night, and five pitches in game one yesterday. I'd say he was pretty fresh for game two.

Here's what Granderson has done against right-handed pitching:
485 PA, .278/.361/.540, 18 2B, 25 HR

To be fair, the Twins' superb righty Matt Guerrier has also been excellent against lefties (.190/.241/.238 in 2009). But Mijares is even better, and more to the point, Granderson is great against righties but sucks against lefties. As baseball decisions go, they don't get a lot easier than this. If you have a Jose Mijares in the bullpen, you use him against Curtis Granderson in the bottom of the 8th inning in a one-run game. This is exactly what the Jose Mijareses of the world were created to do. If Mijares wasn't the obvious choice in this situation, Mijares just wouldn't freaking exist. There'd be no point. If Mijares is going to pitch to only one batter all season, it should be Curtis Granderson, right there.

Gardy, as you can probably tell, did not use Mijares, but rather used Guerrier. Guerrier, as you either know or can guess by now, served up a homer to Granderson. That made it 6-4. The Twins added one run in the top of the 9th (thanks to a misplay by Granderson, ironically), meaning that Granderson's homer was the difference between a tie game and a Tigers win. Given the fact that the Twins' bullpen (if used properly) is just much, much, much better than the Tigers' -- and their offense, too -- it was very likely the difference between a Tigers win and a Twins win. Which is somewhat likely to have cost the Twins the season.

So one mistake, no matter how glaring, shouldn't cost a manager his job. But the fact is that almost every time there is a difficult decision to be made, Gardy makes the wrong one. Morneau and Crede getting hurt is a problem, but playing two of the worst defenders in the game (Young and Kubel) in the outfield at the same time, and the essentially useless Matt Tolbert at third, are no part of the answers to that problem. He routinely starts Kubel at DH against lefties, who he can't hit. Lately, he seems to have forgotten that Brendan Harris is on the team.

He's a likable guy, says funny things, and seems to have a good relationship with his players. But Ron Gardenhire has no idea how to manage a baseball game.

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