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
Another Twins season ends and another Turkey of the Year appears
What a year 2020 has been. The baseball season started like it does every year with spring training taking place in Florida and Arizona in mid February as normal even though there was chatter about something called the coronavirus taking place and that a world-wide pandemic was imminent.
Then it happened, on March 12th Major League Baseball announced it had cancelled the remainder of its Spring Training games, also announcing that the start of the 2020 regular season would be delayed by at least two weeks due to the national emergency created by the coronavirus pandemic. https://twitter.com/i/status/1238181980367466496
2020 has been a year that we will never forget and one that will go down in the history books for a variety of reasons. A lot of us have gone through various struggles this year and many of us have lost someone near and dear. In spite of all the trials and tribulations we have endured in 2020 we all still have much to be thankful for. We at Twinstrivia.com would like to thank you all for stopping by our site now and then and we would like to wish each and everyone of you a very special, safe, healthy and Happy Thanksgiving.
Julio (Villegas) Becquer was born in Havana, Cuba on December 20, 1931. The 88 year-old Becquer passed away in Hopkins, Minnesota on November 1, 2020.
Becquer batted and threw left handed and was 5’11” and about 178 lbs. Julio attended the University of Havana and was signed to play for the Washington Senators as a free agent prior to the 1952 season by super scout Joe Cambria who was famous for signing numerous Cuban players. After spending 1952-1954 in the minors, Julio got his first call to the big leagues in late 1955 but in 1956 he was back in the minors.
Sid Hartman a Minnesota legend and Minnesota sports columnist, radio personality and an old-school home team booster who once ran the NBA’s Minneapolis Lakers and achieved nearly as much celebrity as some of the athletes he covered died at the age of 100 on October 18, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Sid was born in Minneapolis on March 15, 1920. His Father, Jack Hechtman, was born in Russia and immigrated to the United States at age 16, changing his name to Hartman after he arrived. Sid Hartman’s mother, Celia Weinberg, immigrated to the United States from Latvia at age nine. Sid grew up in a Jewish family in North Minneapolis and by the age of nine was selling newspapers.
From a humble start selling newspapers on the street in 1928, he wrote about sports for the Star Tribune for the ensuing decades. At the age of 100 he was still writing three columns a week with his final one appearing on the day he died. According to a count by Star Tribune staffer Joel Rippel, Hartman produced 21,235 bylined stories in his career, from 1944 until the one that ran on C2 of Sunday’s Sports section. This, in addition to his various sports gigs on WCCO radio for 65 years and participating in a TV Sports panel for over 20 years.
Sid Hartman’s office
Sid was one of those people that everyone in Minnesota knew by just his first name, kind of like Kirby, Harmon, and Bud. Sid obviously led an interesting life in which he worked to the very end in a job that he loved. No many of us get to spend a life doing something we love to do. Having said that, he was also very good at what he did and he had an unbelievable work ethic. No one worked harder than Sid to get a story and he loved to be the first to break a story and there are numerous stories floating around about what he would do to make sure that happened.
Ron Perranoski a big league relief pitcher for thirteen seasons with the Los Angeles Dodgers, Minnesota Twins, Detroit Tigers and California Angels passed away at his Vero Beach, Florida home on Friday, October 2, 2020 of complications from a long illness, his sister Pat Zailo told the Associated Press on Saturday. “He was a ballplayer and he loved that life, he thrived on it,” Zailo said.
I have been working on a very long term project whereas I do a brief recap of Twins games on my “In This Day in Twins History Pages.” So my plan is to give you a brief recap of the Twins first season as it plays out on a weekly basis. For more info on a particular game you can also click on the date and go to the appropriate “In This Day in Twins History Page” as there you will often get to see some player pictures and supporting documentation. This is the 25th week and final installment of our recap of the Twins first season in Minnesota back in 1961.
1961-1969 Twins primary logo
The 1961 Minnesota Twins begin their final week of play at home with four games left in the 1961 season and their record stands at 70-86.
I have been working on a very long term project whereas I do a brief recap of Twins games on my “In This Day in Twins History Pages.” So my plan is to give you a brief recap of the Twins first season as it plays out on a weekly basis. For more info on a particular game you can also click on the date and go to the appropriate “In This Day in Twins History Page” as there you will often get to see some player pictures and supporting documentation. We will see how long I can keep up with it, no promises. So let’s see what we have for week twenty-four.
Met Stadium main entrance
The Minnesota Twins begin this week in seventh place with a 67-83 record and they are on a three game winning streak. They have just one game on the road remaining before they head for home to play their final three series at Metropolitan Stadium to close out their first season as Minnesota Twins.
I have been working on a very long term project whereas I do a brief recap of Twins games on my “In This Day in Twins History Pages.” So my plan is to give you a brief recap of the Twins first season as it plays out on a weekly basis. For more info on a particular game you can also click on the date and go to the appropriate “In This Day in Twins History Page” as there you will often get to see some player pictures and supporting documentation. We will see how long I can keep up with it, no promises. So let’s see what we have for week twenty-three.
The Minnesota Twins begin this week with a 62-81 record and they are officially playing out the string after being mathematically eliminated from any shot of winning the AL pennant. They are currently in eighth place in the AL but have a chance to move up a spot or two.
I have been working on a very long term project whereas I do a brief recap of Twins games on my “In This Day in Twins History Pages.” So my plan is to give you a brief recap of the Twins first season as it plays out on a weekly basis. For more info on a particular game you can also click on the date and go to the appropriate “In This Day in Twins History Page” as there you will often get to see some player pictures and supporting documentation. We will see how long I can keep up with it, no promises. So let’s see what we have for week twenty-two.
The Minnesota Twins start this week with a 59-79 record and they are officially playing out the string after being mathematically eliminated from any shot of winning the AL pennant this past week. They are currently in eighth place in the AL but have a chance to move up a spot or two.
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”.
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.
