Tag: Dietrich Enns

Twins players with just one hit on their Minnesota Twins resume

The players listed below had just one hit while wearing a Minnesota Twins uniform. Most had more than one big league hit in their big league careers but for our purposes we are just looking for those players that had just one hit while wearing Minnesota Twins colors. 

As you might suspect, since this list covers players that played for the Minnesota Twins from 1961 (when pitchers still batted) through 2019 the list has a lot of pitchers on it. The right-hand column on the list shows you the positions played by that player.

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Twins minor league players of the week – Nick Gordon and Zack Littell

The Twins have named Double-A Chattanooga Lookouts infielder Nick Gordon and Triple-A Rochester right-handed pitcher Zack Littell Twins minor league Player and Pitcher of the Week.

Nick Gordon

In seven games this week, the 22-year-old left-handed hitting Gordon hit .400 (10-for-25) with four doubles, one home run, four RBI, four runs scored, four walks and a .484 on-base percentage. So far this season Gordon is hitting .346 in 34 games and has played shortstop in 27 games, 6 games at second base and 1 as the DH. Gordon was selected fifth overall by the Twins in the 2014 First-Year Player Draft and is the son of former major league pitcher Tom Gordon and younger brother of Mariners outfielder Dee Gordon.

You have to figure Gordon is ready to move up a notch to AAA and is likely to see some action for the Twins this season.

Looking at the 41 picks in the 2014 first round, 21 of the selections are position players and ten of the 21 were drafted out of high school like Gordon and none of them have yet advanced to the big leagues. Out of the 11 position players picked out of colleges, seven have or are playing in the majors.

20 of the 41 first round selections in 2014 were pitchers, 10 out of high school and just one of these picks, Jack Flaherty from the Cardinals has thrown off a big league mound. On the other hand, the other 10 pitcher selections were out of a college and only one of the 10 has not seen big league action.

So I have to wonder, why do you spend a first round pick on a high school player? You would think you would want a return on your money sooner than later.

Zack Littell

Littell, 22, who was just recently promoted from Double-A Chattanooga, started two games for the Red Wings this week, going 1-0 with one run allowed on four hits in 12.0 innings, six walks and 14 strikeouts. 

Littell was a Mariners 11th round selection in 2013 and was traded to the Yankees in a minor league transaction after the 2016 season. The 6’4″ Littell was then acquired by the Twins via trade with New York Yankees on July 30, 2017 along with left-handed pitcher Dietrich Enns, in exchange for left-handed pitcher Jaime Garcia. In 2017 between 3 different minor league teams, he put up a 19-1 record with a 2.12 ERA. He too should see at least a cup of coffee with the Twins this season.

Twins Minor League Report 051218

The 2017 Twins Turkey of the Year

It was a good year for the Minnesota Twins, an amazing 26 game improvement from their 103 loss season in 2016 and they even made an abbreviated one game trek to the playoffs, their first taste of postseason action since 2010. The much improved play of the players on the field made the team fun to watch again and the attendance increased from the previous season for the first time since the team started calling Target Field home in 2010.

All those good things happening over in Twins Territory makes it difficult to come up with a Twins Turkey of the Year but the job must get done. Just as sure as there is snow and cold in Minnesota we need to have a Twins Turkey of the Year.

The number of possible candidates for the 2017 award are few, sure we have some of the usual suspects like starter Kyle Gibson who first debuted as a Twin back in 2013 but found himself pitching in AAA Rochester after a horrible start. He finished the season with a 12-10 record but his 5.07 ERA for the second year in a row is more than disappointing.

Pitcher Phil Hughes earned $13.2 million this year and pitched less than 54 innings and had a 6.37 ERA. However; Hughes spent most of his time on the DL in 2017 visiting that list twice for a total of 105 days.

Pitcher Glen Perkins spent 117 days on the Twins DL in 2017 while recovering from shoulder surgery back in 2016. Perkins has pitched 7.2 innings in two years and banked $12.8 million.

Utility player Danny Santana appeared in just 13 games and hit .200 before the Twins traded him to the Atlanta Braves for a minor league pitcher named Kevin Chapman. Santana has appeared in 69 games and hit .203 for the Braves. 

When I have to list Danny Santana on my Twins Turkey of the Year candidate list I am really scraping the bottom of the barrel. Heck, even Joe Mauer bounced back in 2017 and had a decent year at the plate, certainly not a $23 million a year player but what is done is done. One of my favorite TTOY candidates the last few years, hitting coach Tom Brunansky was fired after 2016.

So you can see it has been a lean year for turkeys in Twins territory this season, but, since the role has to be filled I have selected not one but two Twins organization members for the award this year, for the first time ever we have a two-headed Twins Turkey of the year. 

Both of these gentlemen have been on the job for just over one year and their team made the playoffs in their first season at the helm after the team had finished with 103 losses in 2016, the worst record in baseball. It seems like we should be giving them Executive of the Year awards and not the TTOY award. Yes, they did sign Jason Castro, Chris Gimenez, Bartolo Colon (seems strange to put him on the plus side of the ledger), but they also signed a bunch of pitching stiffs and thought they could construct a bullpen while bottom-feeding. 

With the Twins in need of starting help these two guys went out on July 24 and they made a deal with Atlanta and acquired Jaime Garcia and Anthony Recker for Huascar Ynoa. Garcia started and beat the Oakland A’s on July 28 and Twins fans were delighted, that is until these two guys turned around and flipped the 31 year-old Jaime Garcia to the Yankees for pitchers Zack Littell and Dietrich Enns just two days later. Then on July 31 they traded their closer Brandon Kintzler to the Washington Nationals for pitcher Tyler Watson and cash. 

On July 31 the Twins had a 50-53 record and seven teams in the AL had better records than the Twins did. It was obvious that the Twins organization felt that the Twins had run out of steam so they started trading off pieces in hopes of landing some young pitching prospects. But who was to know that the Twins would go 35-20 during the rest of the season and score 346 runs in that stretch, more than any team in MLB while out-scoring their opposition by almost 100 runs. Only the Indians had a better record (45-13) and they had that crazy 22 game winning streak from mid-August to mid-September. When the season ended the Twins were one of the AL wild card playoff participants, who would have guessed that would happen? 

No one in their right mind, right? After all, no MLB team has ever lost 103 one season and taken part in post-season action the next. I didn’t see it coming, but I am not making a ton of money leading the Twins baseball operation either. These guys are supposed to be experts in their field and yet at the end of July they raised the white flag and not only didn’t improve the team for the stretch run but they made it weaker by trading Jaime Garcia and Brandon Kintzler. The way I see it, these two committed the cardinal sin, they gave up on their team. 

That is why the winners of the Twins Trivia 2017 Turkey of the Year award are Twins Head of Baseball Operations Derek Falvey and General Manager Thad Levine. I wish I had a picture of these two sitting in the backyard with their wine glasses in their hand pondering “what just happened?” Let’s hope that Falvey and Levine show their worth this off-season, maybe they are just slow starters. 

Previous Twins Turkey of Year award winners

2016 – The entire 2016 Minnesota Twins team

2015 – Pitcher Ricky Nolasco

2014 – Outfielder Aaron Hicks

2013 – President Dave St. Peter

2012 – Owner Jim Pohlad

2011 – Catcher Joe Mauer

2010 – 3B Brendan Harris

2009 – Pitcher Glen Perkins

 

According to ELIAS – Tribe’s K-Fest streak broken and Aaron Slegers

Tribe’s K-fest finally broken at Minnesota

Carlos Carrasco struck out nine batters over five innings and Cleveland’s bullpen struck out 10 more in the Indians’ 9–3 victory at Minnesota. That tied the team record for strikeouts in a nine-inning game, set in 2015 and tied earlier this season.

It also extended Cleveland’s streak of games with at least 10 strikeouts to 13, which is the longest streak in MLB history. The previous mark of nine consecutive 10-strikeout games was set earlier this season by the Diamondbacks and matched by the Yankees. The Indians more than doubled the former record of six straight games that was set by the Mets in 1990 and which stood until five years ago.

The streak ended when Cleveland pitchers struck out only nine Twins batters in the second game of the doubleheader.

 

Another Twins starting pitcher makes his MLB debut

Aaron Slegers made his major-league debut as the Twins’ starting pitcher in the second game of their doubleheader against the Indians. This is the first time since the team moved to Minnesota in 1961 that four Twins players made their major-league debuts as starting pitchers in one season. The others were Nik Turley, Felix Jorge, and Dietrich Enns.

The last time that four pitchers did so for the Washington Senators, the Twins’ predecessors, was in 1950. The fourth of those pitchers to debut was Carlos Pascual, whose 1–1 career record was overshadowed by that of his brother Camilo, who debuted for the Nats in 1954 and ranks fifth in franchise history with a total of 145 wins.

Aaron Slegers

As for Slegers’ performance, a big thumbs-up, as he allowed two runs on two hits over 6.1 innings in Minnesota’s 4–2 win. Over the last four seasons, only three other starting pitchers reached the seventh inning and allowed fewer than three hits in their major-league debuts: Ross Stripling of the Dodgers and Jharel Cotton of the A’s last season and Eric Skoglund of the Royals on May 30.