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
The number of players in camp was different back then too, in their first camp the Twins had 33 big leaguers and 14 farmhands as they called their minor league invites back then. The PDF below will show you who was invited to the Twins first spring training at Tinker Field.
The Twins of course had a medical staff made up of Dr. William E. Proffitt Jr. and Trainer “Doc” George Lentz. Some of their techniques might be questioned today. The main tool trainers used back then was ethyl chloride, which had long been used by physicians as a local skin anesthetic to reduce pain when lancing boils and making small incisions. The numbness is produced by freezing the skin, however; the use of too much ethyl chloride results in frostbite.
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The Twins have 28 spring training games scheduled with the first game to be played at Tinker Field on March 11.
Eddie Lopat (credit Getty Images)Clyde McCulloughSam Mele
Mark Buehrle started more games against the MN Twins than any other pitcher.
The Minnesota Twins have faced a lot of good pitchers since they started play as the Minnesota Twins in 1961. There are eight pitchers that have beaten the Twins 20 or more times during their careers and one of them is still pitching. One opposing pitcher has beaten the Twins 30 times. The Twins have beaten one pitcher 20 times but they have also lost to him on 19 occasions. Who are these guys? Follow the link below to see how the best opposing starting pitchers have fared against the Minnesota Twins over the last 58 seasons. Data courtesy of B-R Play Index.
Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow and that means that the Minnesota Twins will win more games than they lose in 2019.
On Friday morning, Phil was yanked from his burrow by men in suits and top hats to make his forecast via his shadow. After seeing it, Phil’s handlers announced amid much hoopla that there will be a winning team playing at Target Field in 2019.
Spring Training is just around the corner and your favorite team is ready to start playing some baseball. Thank God I have not heard the Twins slogan from 2018 “This is how we baseball” for months now and if I never hear it again it will be too soon.
This is the year that Miguel Sano and Byron Buxton bust out and show Twins fans it was worth the wait because if they don’t it could be six more years of waiting. Phil has been doing this for 131 years and he has been right………… twice. All right, those aren’t the best odds but they are better than winning the Powerball or the Minnesota Vikings winning the Super Bowl.
The Official WasWatching.com Scorecard of the Longest 9 Inning Game In Major League History.
The Major League Baseball definition of an error is: A fielder is given an error if, in the judgment of the official scorer, he fails to convert an out on a play that an average fielder should have made. Fielders can also be given errors if they make a poor play that allows one or more runners to advance on the bases. A batter does not necessarily need to reach base for a fielder to be given an error. If he drops a foul ball that extends an at-bat, that fielder can also be assessed an error.
Defensive errors are a vital tool in many statistical equations. For instance, batters do not receive RBIs for any runs that would not have scored without the help of an error and pitchers are not assessed any earned runs for runs that would not have scored without the error.
According to several sources the official scoring for MLB games was primarily done by home town newspaper writers that covered the games prior to 1979 when most major newspapers banned their writers from doing official scoring.
Since there are no official records kept of who official scorers have been for Minnesota Twins home games in the past I have put together a list as best I can by using the Sporting News and Star and Tribune archives. The best information I garnered though was by talking with Laurel Prieb from MLB and Stew Thornley and Howard Sinker who either have been official scorers or currently are performing that function.
Prior to 1979 – BBWAA home town newspaper writers
1979 thru 1987 – Bob Beebe
1988 – Bob Beebe and Howard Sinker (Glenn Gostick did a game in 1988)
1989 – June 1991 – Howard Sinker and Tom Briere
June 1991 to May 2007 – Tom Mee with Barry Fritz filling in when Mee was unavailable.
Remainder of 2007 – Barry Fritz, Stew Thornley, Gregg Wong and Howard Sinker
2008 – Stew Thornley and Gregg Wong
2009 thru 2012 – Gregg Wong, Stew Thornley and Kevin Hennessy did a few games each year
2013 – Stew Thornley and Gregg Wong
2014 thru 2018 – Stew Thornley, Gregg Wong and Dr. Kyle Traynor
According to MLB the official scorer is permitted to change a judgment call for up to 24 hours after a game concludes or is suspended. A player or team can request that the executive vice president of baseball operations review a call in which said player or team participated. This request must come within 72 hours after the conclusion or suspension of that game, or 72 hours after the official scorer’s call in the event a post game change is made.
It is time for us to take a look back in Minnesota Twins history with the help of Baseball-Reference.com and see how the Twins have fared in this important baseball statistic. Or are errors just another thing that happen during a game playing a minor role in terms of wins and losses? How often have you heard “that you have to be strong up the middle” to be a good team? Probably more often than you have heard that “liars figure and figures lie”. Take the 1965 Minnesota Twins for example, we all know that they played in the World Series that year and lost in seven games to the Los Angeles Dodgers but did you know that they led the American League with 172 errors that season?
Twins play-off teams and where they ranked in errors
1965 – ranked 10th out of 10 teams with 172 errors
1969 – ranked 9th out of 12 teams with 150 errors
1970 – ranked 3rd out of 12 teams with 123 errors
1987 – ranked 1st out of 14 teams with 98 errors
1991 – ranked 2nd out of 14 teams with 95 errors
2002 – ranked 1st out of 14 teams with 74 errors
2003 – ranked 2nd out of 14 teams with 87 errors
2004 – ranked 6th out of 14 teams with 101 errors
2006 – ranked 2nd out of 14 teams with 84 errors
2009 – ranked 1st out of 14 teams with 76 errors
2010 – ranked 2nd out of 14 teams with 78 errors
2017 – ranked 2nd out of 15 teams with 78 errors
So it appears that it helps to have a strong defense to be a play-off team but it there are no guarantees as five Twins teams over the years had the fewest or second fewest errors (82, 84, 88, 94 and 99 and still spent October at home. The most errors the Twins team committed was in their first season (1961) when they had 174 errors.
So what Minnesota Twins players had the most errors in a single season? That would be shortstop Zoilo Versalles with 39 errors in 1965, the year he won the American League Most Valuable Player award. Last Twins player to have 30 or more errors in a season? That would be Roy Smalley in 1977 with 33 boots. The Twin have committed 6,699 errors since they started play in 1961, that averages out to 114 per season. The first Twins error was made by outfielder Jim Lemon in the Twins first ever game.
The Office of the Commissioner of Baseball announced yesterday that three Minor League players have been suspended following their violations of the Minor League Drug Prevention and Treatment Program.
One of the three was Minnesota Twins Minor League pitcher Alex Schick, who is currently on the roster of the Single-A Cedar Rapids Kernels of the Midwest League, has received a 50-game suspension without pay after testing positive for Amphetamine, a stimulant in violation of the Program.
Schick is a 24-year-old RHP drafted by the Minnesota Twins in the 6th round of the 2016 June amateur free agent draft and signed for a reported $400,000. Schick last pitched in 2017 for Cedar Rapids and spent 2018 recovering from Tommy John surgery.
The Minnesota Twins announced today that closer Joe Nathan and former Twins Executive Jerry Bell will be inducted in the Twins Hall of Fame on August 3-4.
I would like to see the Minnesota Twins be more transparent about the voting process and the voting results. It would be nice to see who received how many votes and where they ended up when the voting was completed.
It is no secret that I think Cesar Tovar belongs in the Twins Hall of Fame and I did my best this year to try to get him in and so did a number of others. But I have no idea where he ended up in the voting or what the total voting process entails. Seems to me that the fans should be more in the know here. Just saying……
Although WAR is not always the best answer on how good a player is/was, I find it useful in doing player comparisons. The B-R tool regards a WAR of 2+ as a starter, 5+ an All-Star and 8+ as MVP worthy. Remember too what I am doing here covers position players only, we will leave the pitchers for another day.
Rod Carew
First Base – Having watched the Minnesota Twins for many a year I was pretty sure what Twins player had the best season in team history and when I put Play Index to work, sure enough it verified for me that Hall of Famer Rod Carew and his 1977 season in which he made a run at hitting .400 at the age of 31 stood at the top. If you missed seeing Carew play ball in Minnesota I feel bad for you because you missed out on seeing one of the best baseball players ever. There have been eleven seasons by Twins players when someone had a WAR of 7.0 or greater, Carew had four of them.
A lot of Minnesota Twins fans are frustrated that the Twins front office isn’t doing more to improve the Twins team. With Joe Mauer retired and his $23 million salary no longer on the books many fans figured the Twins would spend some money, and they have, but not much of it. If the 2019 season started tomorrow, the Twins payroll would sit at about $98 million after spending around $131 million in 2018.
But Derek Falvey and Thad Levine have told us they are busy laying ground work for rebuilding the Minnesota Twins organization from the ground up and it will take some time.
It wasn’t until I stopped by the CenturyLink Sports Complex this afternoon that I fully understood what they meant. At the rate it is going it will take some time, here is what I found when I got there.
I didn’t get close enough to tell for sure but I think that is Falvey in the red shirt and Levine with the green shirt.
Here I think we have Mr. Pohlad himself on the Bobcat leveling the playing field.
We all know that strikeout rates are up all across baseball for the last few years but today we will look at Minnesota Twins batters and their strikeout rates going back to 1961. We used B-R’s amazing Play Index to find what we were looking for.
The top two all time Twins leader in strikeouts are Harmon Killebrew with 1,314 and Joe Mauer with 1,034. Mauer? What the heck? Longevity can do strange things to numbers and the devil is in the details.
Leonard Charles Green (born January 6, 1933, in Detroit) was the middle of three sons born to Eugene and Anna Green and passed away on his 86th birthday on January 6, 2019 in Detroit, Michigan.
After graduating from Pershing High School, Lenny Green was signed as an amateur free agent by the St. Louis Browns late in 1952 to play for York of the Class B Inter-State League. But before he ever put on a York uniform or a Browns uniform for that matter the Army called and he spent 1953-1954 in the service of his country during the Korean War. Green was stationed stateside and ended up playing on a baseball team with and against players like Willie Mays, Don Newcombe, Billy Martin and Zach Monroe. After being discharged from the Army as a corporal, Green was free to resume his pro baseball career but thing had changed and Green experienced his first MLB franchise shift as the Browns became the Baltimore Orioles.
