An A.M. Dial Full of Brain Surgeons

There are a lot of things I would be terrible at. A brain surgeon. A rocket scientist. A manager of a major league baseball team. And this is what drives me crazy about rabid sports fans. They act like they could run a pro sports team better than the guys who get six figures to just that. For the past 24 hours KFAN and WCCO has been plauged by callers criticizing Gardenhire for leaving Joe Nathan in for a third inning last night.

Gardenhire says now he may have left Nathan in too long, but this is all in hindsight. And it's not even talk show listeners that are guilty of thinking they know more about a team and its players than the manager does. Even King Kaufman, whose job is to write about every single mainstream sport, thinks he could have done a better job last night than Gardenhire, whose job is to oversee the Twins every single day. But somehow Kaufman thinks he can manage Joe Nathan better than Gardie can, even though Kaufman is lucky if he has even met Nathan, let alone coached him on a daily basis. Click here for his story, which includes a decent synapse of last night's nail-biter for those of you who don't know that the Yankees beat the Twins in 12 innings.

Gardenhire had a tough call to make and it's easy to say he ended up making the wrong choice. But we have no idea how things could have turned out if he went another direction. Jesse Crain is a rookie and JC Romero is a head case. He could use one of those guys or bring Mullholland or Loshe out of the bullpen, a role they are not familiar with. These are all unappealing options. A 12 inning game is a war of attrition, and the Yankees just happen to have more fire power. It may not have mattered who Gardenhire threw out there to face the meat of the Yankees' line-up.