Slider key to Pineda's improvement

MINNEAPOLIS -- Even with Michael Pineda struggling to find his footing in the early stages of the season, the Twins’ rotation entered Saturday with a 3.09 ERA since April 14 -- the second-best mark in the Major Leagues.

Though Minnesota’s four-game winning streak was snapped when the bullpen couldn’t hold the Tigers at bay after C.J. Cron’s game-tying homer in the eighth inning, the Twins’ 5-3 loss in the first game of Saturday’s split doubleheader at Target Field saw Pineda take another step in the right direction with his first quality start since April 13.

Pineda struck out five and allowed three runs in six-plus innings, and he did not issue a walk for the second time this season. The trouble was that three of the six hits he allowed left the park, including a pair of homers by Ronny Rodriguez and another from Brandon Dixon.

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“Those aren’t the home runs that are usually going to beat you,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “As far as the way Big Mike pitched, I think he limited damage well. He made pitches when he had to and yeah, he gave up a few home runs, but as a whole, I mean, he made way more quality pitches than not.”

Though he struggled to keep the ball in the yard again, Saturday was the latest in a line of more encouraging starts by Pineda, who had not appeared in a Major League game in a season and a half prior to Opening Day.

The big right-hander generated a season-high 18 swinging strikes in his last start, against the Yankees, and followed that up with 15 more against the Tigers. That improvement has been keyed by the continued progress of Pineda’s slider, a critical component of his pitch arsenal, which he had said he couldn’t command effectively earlier in the year.

“I think what we saw with the strikeouts and the swing-and-miss [against the Yankees] is something to build on and something that I think he's feeling and something that he's happy about,” Badelli had said before the game. “We were happy to see it. It's a great sign and … if he harnesses that slider, which has been kind of his calling card throughout his career, I think that's probably one of the final pieces for everything to come together for him.”

All five of Pineda’s strikeouts came via the slider, and he set season-highs in whiffs with the pitch in both his last start (six) and Saturday’s performance (nine).

“That's what I want,” Pineda said. “Making my good pitches in the game and getting a lot of swings and misses."

As Baldelli has pointed out on many occasions, Pineda has stretches where he has good command of all of his pitches and effectively works through lineups -- as evidenced by the lone single he allowed in the first six innings outside of the three homers. But the next step for Pineda is to decrease the frequency of those lapses and lengthen the stretches of dominance.

Baldelli thought that it was fair to characterize Pineda’s extended absence from the mound and his recent Tommy John surgery as reasons why the right-hander is still feeling out the consistency of his pitches. And with the way the rest of the rotation is throwing right now, it looks like the Twins can afford to let Pineda continue to make adjustments.

“I think, for the most part, it's probably just several batters in a row of making good pitches,” Baldelli said. “There's no way to know if it's a [bad] pitch or three or five, but I think it's smaller subsets of pitches that he finds it, and he has it, and maybe doesn't for a little bit. He's a good adjustment maker. He's a guy that I would expect, as the season goes on, he's going to lengthen out those quality periods."