Carlos Gomez Is Fun to Watch, Unless You're His Manager

Since I am officially responsible for covering two divisions and nine teams here at FanHouse, I have to spend a lot of my time watching baseball. It's a hard life, I assure you, but these are the sacrifices I'm willing to make for you, the reader.

One of the players I've been particularly interested in following this season is Twins centerfielder Carlos Gomez. I went over these reasons in the spring during our Under the Gun feature, where I profiled Gomez as the one member of the Twins who's under a lot of pressure this season. One, because he came over from the Mets in the Johan Santana trade, and two, because he's also faced with the task of replacing the team's most popular player since Kirby Puckett in Torii Hunter.

So far, I'm having a blast watching Gomez play. He's not exactly tearing it up at the plate in his first month, as he finished April hitting only .265/.275/.373, and he's struck out 25 times in only 102 at bats. Still, he's been a joy to watch while on the base paths and in the field. Well, that is unless you're his manager Ron Gardenhire. Then some of the things he does probably drive you crazy.

"It's kind of crazy, really. It's high school," Gardenhire said of Gomez's antics. "I don't even know if it's college (level). But he's so enthusiastic and such a talent ... "

If you watched the Twins play the White Sox on Wednesday, you saw some examples of what Carlos can do to both please a manager and raise his blood pressure at the same time. In the first inning Carlos led off the game for the Twins with a single before dancing around at first enough to cause White Sox starter Nick Masset to balk. That's good. Later in the game though, Gomez was on second with two outs, and with Joe Mauer at the plate. For some reason Carlos decided he should steal third, which when you consider the situation and the fact that he could score easily from second on a base hit, is a huge no-no. That's bad.

Gomez was safe at third when Joe Crede dropped the ball, but as it rolled away from Crede, Carlos took off for the plate where he was called out on a close play. Gardenhire came out of the dugout to argue the call, but admitted after the game that his heart wasn't in it because he was too busy trying to figure out "what the $%&@ [Carlos] is doing."

Still, even though he's going to drive Gardenhire insane from time to time, Gomez is such a talent that any manager worth his salt will be willing to deal with the heartburn. Gomez is only 22 years old, after all, and the older he gets and more experience he gets, the better he's going to be. With that maturation, he's going to give his manager a lot more reasons to love him than to throttle him.