Blogging will be on hold until next week because of my annual trip to the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) convention, which begins tomorrow in Washington, D.C. My plan is to post updates from the convention via my new Twitter account, so if you're into reading 140-character missives about presentations I'm attending or alcohol I'm consuming feel free to check that out. I'll be back Monday to talk about the convention and trades that did or didn't happen.

Last night's win puts the Twins back at an even .500 through 100 games, but more importantly they lost Kevin Slowey for the remainder of the season. Slowey landed on the disabled list earlier this month, as the Twins revealed that he'd "battled pain in his wrist for a while" and had trouble "opening doors and things like that." At the time the hope was that he could return in a couple weeks, but unsuccessful throwing sessions were followed by a canceled rehab assignment and now he's going under the knife.

Slowey will undergo surgery to remove bone chips from his wrist, which despite being fairly innocuous in the grand scheme of pitching injuries will sideline him for several months and ends his year at 10-3 with a 4.86 ERA and 75-to-15 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 91 innings spread over 16 starts. Slowey's great 10-3 record obviously doesn't match his mediocre 4.86 ERA, but he had a 4.04 mark before giving up 11 runs over six innings in his final two starts while hurting and still finished with a solid 4.36 xFIP.

Slowey's injury means that Anthony Swarzak will remain in the rotation for the rest of the season after going 3-3 with a 3.74 ERA and 26-to-17 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 46 innings through eight career starts. Swarzak's sub par strikeout-to-walk ratio, high fly-ball percentage, and 5.32 xFIP suggest that he likely has a trip back down to earth in his future, and even if he can continue to out-perform those secondary numbers his having to step into the rotation on a full-time basis ruins the Twins' pitching depth.

Instead of having Slowey in the rotation, Swarzak waiting in the wings at Triple-A, and enough capable options to possibly include one starter in a trade, the Twins now have Kevin Mulvey, Brian Duensing, R.A. Dickey, and Bobby Keppel next in line if another starter is needed. None of those guys figures to have much success in a major-league rotation right now, and Scott Baker, Nick Blackburn, Francisco Liriano, and Glen Perkins haven't exactly formed an air-tight front four.

Baker has quietly gone 8-3 with a 4.14 ERA and 80-to-21 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 94 innings spanning 15 starts since beginning the year 0-4 with a 9.15 ERA and Perkins thankfully bounced back from his disastrous one-inning outing last week, but Blackburn's deal with the devil predictably appears to have expired and Liriano ruined what had been a very positive six-week stretch by serving up three homers Friday. We're a hundred games into the season and Twins starters rank 12th in the AL with a 4.80 ERA.

Even with Slowey done the rotation is nowhere near being the glaring weakness that second base has become and within the pitching staff adding another late-inning relief option is still a far bigger priority than adding another starter, but clearly the Twins have no shortage of holes as Friday's trade deadline approaches. At some point trying to patch up everything on the fly ceases making sense and the odds are slim for Bill Smith pulling off multiple trades, let alone multiple trades that actually help the team.

Guys like Orlando Cabrera aren't going to make a big impact in the final 60 games, we're nearing 15 straight months without Smith addressing the bullpen's lack of setup-quality arms after Pat Neshek's injury, and an already shaky rotation is a tweaked elbow from including Mulvey or Duensing. Certainly sitting at 50-50 after 100 games is far from disastrous, especially in a division where that puts you just three games back of a plenty flawed team, but you can only patch so many holes on July 31.

Both local newspapers and multiple national outlets report that the Twins spent the weekend talking to the A's about acquiring shortstop Orlando Cabrera, with Buster Olney of ESPN.com noting that the two sides are "deep into talks and talking composition of a deal." Naturally no one from the front office was willing to comment on a possible trade, but Ron Gardenhire had no problem telling reporters that he wants the team to deal for a middle infielder and specifically likes Cabrera:

I like Cabrera, yes. I'm not allowed to talk about players, but yes I like Cabrera. It's a direct question. I can answer a direct question. I think he's a great player. [White Sox manager] Ozzie [Guillen] and he really butted heads. [Joe] Crede told us he was a great teammate, hard worker. These guys over here said fantastic things about him, played the game, played hard, the whole package.

It just can't continue with both guys in the middle struggling at the same time at this pace. We're not really getting much out of either one of those two. There's just too many outs. You're playing the game with less outs than you should be. You can't continue that. That's hard, really hard to do, and there are no answers. There's nowhere to go.

Twins second basemen have batted .186/.272/.234 in 410 plate appearances and their shortstops are at .238/.301/.328 in 405 trips to the plate, which combined gives the team an embarrassing, MLB-worst .212/.286/.281 line from the middle infield. Gardenhire's points about simply giving away too many outs are right on the money and something that I've been harping on in this space for most of the season, but unfortunately his unabashed praise of Cabrera is significantly less encouraging to hear.

There's perhaps some room for debate about whether or not Cabrera was ever, as Gardenhire puts it, "a great player." He certainly never fit my description of greatness, but as a two-time Gold Glove winner with 1,740 hits, nearly 200 stolen bases, and a .275 batting average over 13 seasons in the majors it's not shocking that Gardenhire is a big fan. However, even stretching your standards to give Cabrera the "great" label at one point in his career leaves him miles from that level now.

Cabrera will be 35 years old in three months and like the majority of mid-30s shortstops throughout the history of baseball his range has deteriorated. He was once a legitimately great defender and Cabrera managed to remain very good defensively into his 30s, but this season Ultimate Zone Rating pegs him as 9.3 runs below average. Even if you give him the benefit of the doubt at the age of 35 and assume that he simply had a bad first 96 games, Cabrera is unlikely to be better than average at this point.

Of course, average or slightly below average defense at shortstop is hardly a terrible thing if it comes along with strong offense, and Gardenhire would probably tell you that Cabrera is a really good hitter. After all, his batting average is .276, he rarely strikes out, he's on pace for a ninth straight season with 15-plus steals, and Cabrera no doubt "battles his tail off." In reality, he's hitting .276/.313/.366 this year after batting .281/.334/.371 last season and has a lifetime adjusted OPS+ of 86 where 100 is average.

2008/2009              AVG      OBP      SLG      OPS
Brendan Harris        .264     .318     .386     .704
Orlando Cabrera       .279     .327     .369     .695
Nick Punto            .253     .333     .329     .662
Alexi Casilla         .250     .309     .328     .637

Since the beginning of last year Cabrera has a solid-looking .279 batting average, but it's completely empty with 40 walks per 600 plate appearances and a puny Isolated Power of .090. He doesn't get on base or hit for any power, and at this point in their respective careers Cabrera is essentially Brendan Harris, offering sub par defense and a .700 OPS. Harris and Cabrera have both been better than Nick Punto offensively, but that's obviously not saying much and the difference is just 30-40 points of OPS.

Bringing in Cabrera at shortstop and moving Punto to second base while using Harris primarily at third base and sending Alexi Casilla back to Rochester would probably make the Twins slightly better and would definitely make Gardenhire think that the Twins were significantly better. However, unless the A's are willing to basically give Cabrera away the cost likely doesn't justify such a small upgrade and still leaves the Twins with a horrible middle infield for the final two months of the season.

It's nice to hear that the Twins are actually attempting to upgrade the awful middle infield that's dragged them down all season and because of how bad they've been plenty of potential upgrades are (or were) rumored to be available as Friday's trading deadline nears, but Cabrera is not someone who's likely to make a major difference down the stretch and that Gardenhire and/or the Twins' front office believes he'd be a big upgrade perhaps explains why the Twins are in this mess to begin with.