TWINS TRIVIA is hopefully a fun and informative site that will help you to better enjoy the Minnesota Twins and their wonderful history. “History never looks like history when you are living through it” – John Gardner, former Secretary of Health
Cedar Rapids Kernels (Low A) right-handed pitcher Tyler Wells is the Twins minor league Player of the Week. The 6’8″ Wells made the start for the Kernels last Saturday, against Clinton, allowing one run on four hits in 8.0 innings pitched, earning the win with 10 strikeouts and no walks.
Late News: Cedar Rapids placed Tyler Wells on the DL yesterday. This is the second DL stint this season because of a shoulder issue for Wells, who is 4-2 with a 2.21 earned run average in 11 starts. He has allowed just 45 hits and struck out 82 in 61 innings.
David Price allowed no home runs in seven innings, improving his record to 3–2 in Boston’s 6–3 home win over Minnesota last night. In 114? career innings against the Twins, Price has surrendered just five home runs, a rate of one every 22.9 innings. That’s the seventh-best rate by any active pitcher with at least 100 innings pitched against a particular opponent.
Kyle Gibson (P) – June 29, 2013 – Drafted by the Minnesota Twins in the 1st round (22nd) of the 2009 MLB June Amateur Draft. Gibson earned a “W” in his major league debut as a starter against Kansas City with 6 inning pitched, 8 hits allowed and 2 earned runs. A “quality” start.
Mike Dyer (P) – June 29, 1989 – Drafted by the Minnesota Twins in the 4th round of the 1986 amateur draft (January). Player signed May 15, 1986. A tough way to start in the big leagues with a 2 inning start and 6 runs allowed on 6 hits and 3 walks and charged with the loss.
Andre David (OF) – June 29, 1984 – Drafted by the Minnesota Twins in the 8th round of the 1980 amateur draft. A home run in his first big league at bat off Jack Morris at Tiger Stadium but sadly that would be the only home run of his short 33 game career in the majors.
Jerry Fosnow (P) – June 29, 1964 – Acquired from the Indians in 1960. MLB debut in relief for the Twins at Memorial Stadium in a loss to Baltimore. Fosnow pitched 2 innings allowing 2 hits, 2 walks and 2 runs.
The MLB non-waiver trade deadline of July 31 is coming up fast, just slightly over a month away. I am an old-timer, I admit it, I miss the good old days when baseball trades were made based on the skills of the players and the needs of your ball club. Today it is about the money, how long you can control the player, no trade clauses, free agency and who knows what else. Today’s star players are often traded for minor league players with potential for the future. I hate those kind of trades because you are giving up a known commodity for a player or players that might be a star in the future, you are giving up a sure thing for a maybe. But that is baseball today so we need to accept it and move on.
What about our Minnesota Twins, what will they do? I think the Twins find themselves in a very difficult position. The team is winning just enough to stay in the weak AL Central Division race but yet I think management realizes that this is not a playoff team. On the other hand, their attendance and fan interest has been falling since 2010 and they can ill afford to send up the white flag and signal the start of another rebuild process. So what do you do, buy, sell, or do nothing? So what are the odds that the team will make some moves prior to the trade deadline?
Ervin Santana
This will be the first trade deadline for the Twins under the Derek Falvey and Thad Levine regime so there is no real track record to go on. The Twins have players that would interest other teams and they also have players like Miguel Sano, Max Kepler and Jose Berrios that they won’t trade. The team listened to offers for second baseman Brian Dozier all winter and when all was said and done and decided to keep him. The ace of the starting staff Ervin Santana, 34, would be a nice pick-up for a contender but can a team as pitching starved as the Twins afford to give him up? Some would argue that the Twins can’t afford not to trade him because he is having a great season, maybe a career season and he is signed at a very team friendly deal through 2018 with a team option in 2019.
No matter who the team trades they need to get pitching in return and acquiring pitching is such a risky proposition. It is almost a damned if you do and damned if you don’t scenario.
So what is my best guess? I would say that the team will move Ervin Santana, Robbie Grossman and probably some minor league players for pitching. If you go by what Falvey and Levine did this past winter, they will do nothing and wait for their young players to get better.
The Twins scored an unearned run in the bottom of the seventh inning on George Scott‘s second error of the game and went on to win 3-2 at the Met. Twins starter Dave Boswell struck out a personal best 13 batters and evened his record at 5-5 in pitching a complete game even though he gave up home runs to Jerry Adair and Reggie Smith in the fifth that tied the game at the time. The Twins took the well pitched series two games to one as no team scored more than 3 runs in any of the three games. The 36-34 Twins who are still seven games out of first now await the arrival of the 32-41 Washington Senators.
We have three more players that made their major league debut as Twins on June 27.
Derek Lee – Courtesy of the Minnesota Twins
Derek Lee (OF) – June 27, 1993 – Selected off waivers by the Minnesota Twins from the Chicago White Sox on October 5, 1992. Debuted in left field at the Dome in a Twins 2-0 win over the California Angels but went 0 for 4 with 2 strikeouts.
Gladden and Olson in GM1 1991 WS
Greg Olson (C) – June 27, 1989 – Signed as a Free Agent with the Minnesota Twins on November 30, 1988. Debuted at the Dome but was 0 for 1. His entire Twins career lasted but 3 games and 2 PA’s before becoming a free agent and signing with Atlanta. Greg Olson was more famous in Twins history as the Atlanta Braves catcher in game 1 of the 1991 World Series and his big collision with Dan Gladden.
Steve Luebber (P) – June 27, 1971 – Drafted by the Minnesota Twins in the 13th round of the 1967 amateur draft. Debut was a tough one in game 2 of a DH at the Met in a 8-5 loss to the Milwaukee Brewers. Five innings pitched allowing 6 hits and 4 walks and 5 earned runs. Came within one out of pitching a no-hitter for the Twins against the Rangers in a 3-1 Twins victory on August 7, 1976.
Alex Meyer (P) – June 26, 2015 – Traded by the Washington Nationals to the Minnesota Twins for Denard Span on November 29, 2012 . No other way to say it other than it was a disastrous start to his major league career. Meyer gave up a home run to the first batter and it was kind of down hill from there. Meyer didn’t retire a batter until the seventh hitter and then was pulled after facing the number 9 hitter with but one out on the board. 5 earned runs, 6 total runs on 6 hits.
Jorge Polanco (SS) – June 26, 2014 – Signed by the Minnesota Twins as an amateur free agent in July 2009. Polanco drew a walk and later scored in his first plate appearance in which he entered the game as a pinch hitter.
Tyler Robertson (P) – June 26, 2012 – Drafted by the Minnesota Twins in the 3rd round of the 2006 MLB June Amateur Draft. Now this is a stunning big league debut, Robertson entered the Twins vs White Sox game in the top of the 8th inning at Target Field with Twins trailing 3-0 and struck out the side.
It’s 2017 and we’re realists. Although we love a complete-game shutout as much as the next fan, we don’t expect to see them very often these days. But Ervin Santana has pitched three this season, a major-league high, and on Sunday he went six innings in the Twins’ 4–0 win at Cleveland—a “new millennium shutout,” if you will.
In fact, Santana didn’t allow a run in seven of his 13 starts this season. In the live-ball era, only four other pitchers made as many as seven starts without allowing a run by the end of June: Sandy Koufax in 1963, Don Drysdale in 1968 (when he set an MLB record, since broken, with 58 2?3 consecutive scoreless innings), Jeff Locke in 2013, and Adam Wainwright in 2014. The only other pitcher to do so in Senators/Twins history was the Big Train himself, Walter Johnson, with Washington in 1913.
Twins starter Dave Boswell has everything under control as he faces the White Sox and allows but 2 hits through six innings and the home town Twins lead 1-0 on a Bob Allison home run off Gary Peters. The top of the seventh is another story as the WSox put together a rally and knock Boswell from the game with 5 runs. The Twins score a run in the eighth but come up on the short end of a 5-2 game and fall back to the .500 mark (33-33) for the last time in 1967. Gary Peters is credited with his 10th win (3 losses) of the season.
The rest of the stories that I have done on the 1967 AL pennant race can be found here.
Dozier hits 8th-inning HR off Cody Allen, extends streak at Progressive
Brian Dozier
Brian Dozier’s eighth-inning solo homer off Cody Allen put the Twins on top to stay in their 4-2 win in Cleveland. Entering Saturday, the Twins had only two go-ahead home runs in the seventh inning-or-later this season, which had been the lowest total in the majors. One of the prior late go-ahead home runs was hit by Dozier, off the Rays’ Tommy Hunter in the eighth inning on May 27; the other was a ninth-inning walk-off homer by Joe Mauer off Boston’s Matt Barnes on May 5.
Dozier entered his eighth-inning at-bat 0-for-3, but his game-winning home run extended his hitting streak at Progressive Field to 12 games, since August 1, 2016, over the course of which he is hitting .347 with six home runs. The streak is tied with teammate Joe Mauer for the longest current hitting streak at Progressive Field; Mauer went 2-for-2 and is hitting .469 over his 12-game streak there.
