Since the Minnesota Twins started play here in 1961 they have played 9,451 games through August 31, 2020. The Twins obviously needed a starting or in recent times an opening pitcher for each of those games.
Sometimes the starts don’t go exactly as planned as the pitchers on the list included here can attest. If you watched one of these games you were probably saying “get him out of there” but did you know that you were watching something pretty rare? A Minnesota Twins starter getting pulled and sent to the showers before he hardly had a chance to work up a sweat doesn’t happen very often, as a matter of fact it hasn’t happened since 2012 when P.J. Walters was the unlucky victim. Just looking at Twins history, it has happened just 17 times in 9,451 games or in just .0017% of the starts.
If you take a closer look at the list you will see there are some pretty good starters on this list. One of these types of starts doesn’t always guarantee that the team would lose either, in four of the seventeen cases the Twins came back to win the game. In six of the seventeen cases shown here the starter didn’t walk away with the “L”.
| Rk | Player | Date | Opp | Rslt | App,Dec | IP | H | R | ER | BB | HR | UER | BF |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Al Schroll | 1961-08-26 | BAL | L 4-7 | GS-1, L | 0.0 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 6 |
| 2 | Jim Kaat | 1962-04-19 | CHW | L 3-10 | GS-1, L | 0.0 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 4 |
| 3 | Ray Moore | 1963-07-05 (1) | BAL | L 3-4 | GS-1, L | 0.0 | 2 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 5 |
| 4 | Jim Roland | 1964-08-06 | BOS | W 6-5 | GS-1 | 0.0 | 2 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 5 |
| 5 | Tom Hall | 1968-08-09 | NYY | W 4-3 | GS-1 | 0.0 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 6 |
| 6 | Dave Boswell | 1970-06-28 (2) | CHW | L 10-11 | GS-1 | 0.0 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| 7 | Ray Corbin | 1974-06-30 (1) | CHW | L 3-8 | GS-1, L | 0.0 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4 |
| 8 | Vic Albury | 1974-07-19 | DET | W 7-5 | GS-1 | 0.0 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 3 |
| 9 | Ray Corbin | 1975-06-30 | CAL | L 3-10 | GS-1, L | 0.0 | 6 | 6 | 6 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 6 |
| 10 | Pete Redfern | 1982-06-26 | TOR | W 4-3 | GS-1 | 0.0 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| 11 | Bryan Oelkers | 1983-06-21 | TOR | L 3-8 | GS-1, L | 0.0 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 5 |
| 12 | Ken Schrom | 1985-07-20 | NYY | L 3-8 | GS-1, L | 0.0 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 4 |
| 13 | Frank Viola | 1986-05-20 | BOS | L 7-17 | GS-1, L | 0.0 | 5 | 6 | 6 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 6 |
| 14 | Roy Smith | 1989-05-26 | TEX | L 3-5 | GS-1, L | 0.0 | 5 | 4 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 5 |
| 15 | Kevin Tapani | 1990-07-13 (1) | BAL | L 5-8 | GS-1 | 0.0 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| 16 | Frankie Rodriguez | 1996-07-30 | BAL | L 4-16 | GS-1, L | 0.0 | 2 | 5 | 3 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 5 |
| 17 | P.J. Walters | 2012-06-13 | PHI | L 8-9 | GS-1, L | 0.0 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4 |
If you want to check out some Twins historically bad starts in terms of runs allowed, I did a piece on that called “Historically bad starts by Twins pitchers” back on 2015 that you can also check out.