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
Congratulations to Tony Oliva and Jim Kaat on finally getting that call to the Hall that you should have received many years ago. Well deserved and we all thank you for the wonderful memories. The numbers speak for themselves, nothing more needs to be said on why these two gentlemen belong in the MLB Hall of Fame.
Yesterday afternoon as I was watching the Minnesota Vikings vs the San Francisco 49ers football game the news broke that the Minnesota Twins and Byron Buxton had reached agreement on a seven year extension worth about $100 million. I have to say that I was very surprised, I fully expected that this would not happen and that the Twins would be trading him to a team with deeper pockets that could afford to take such a gamble and not be hurt if Buxton got the big bucks but couldn’t stay healthy.
I like Buxton as a player but I have always been bothered by the fact that he could not stay healthy and for me a player sitting on the bench because he is not healthy enough play is worthless. It makes no difference if it is bad luck, bad karma, or whatever, if you can’t play you bring no value. There have always been players across all sports that spent more time in the training rooms than they did on the playing fields. It is what it is.
The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum announced on Friday November 5 the 10-person ballots that will be considered by its Early Baseball Era Committee and Golden Days Era Committee for Hall of Fame election for the Class of 2022. These Era Committees will both meet on December 5 at baseball’s Winter Meetings in Orlando, Florida.
The Golden Days Era ballot includes Dick Allen, Ken Boyer, Gil Hodges, Jim Kaat, Roger Maris, Minnie Minoso, Danny Murtaugh, Tony Oliva, Billy Pierce and Maury Wills. Kaat, Oliva and Wills are the only living members of this group. Twins fans are excited to see “Tony O” and “Kitty” get another opportunity to enter the hallowed halls of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Both players are in their early 80’s and deserve the opportunity to enter the HOF while they are still around to enjoy it.
Dwight Leroy Siebler was born in Columbus, Nebraska on August 5, 1937, as the third of four children of William and Viola Siebler. Dwight Siebler passed away on June 16, 2021 in Omaha, Nebraska at the age of 83.
Jim “Mudcat” Grant was born on August 13, 1935 in Lacoochee, Florida, a small town of about 500 people in central Florida. According to the Cleveland Indians, Mudcat Grant died peacefully in Los Angeles, California on June 11, 2021. Jim Grant was 85 years old.
It isn’t often that a MLB pitcher gets ten or more strikeouts and issues no bases on balls in a game. The way things are headed in baseball nowadays it will probably be even an even rarer event in the future. The other day New York Mets pitcher Jacob deGrom struck out 14 with no walks over eight innings and all he got for his efforts was a “L” after he gave up a home run to the Miami Marlins Jazz Chisholm in in the second inning and his team ended up losing 3-0.
As you watch the 2021 MLB Opening Day games tomorrow one of the things that you are unlikely to see is a complete game win by a starting pitcher. Back in the day, it was normal to see starting pitchers throw complete games in their final one or two spring training exhibition starts and complete games on OD were a normal occurrence. Not so in todays baseball.
Last year Chicago Cubs starter Kyle Hendricks pitched a complete game throwing 103 pitches as he shutout the Milwaukee Brewers 3-0 on July 24. It was the first complete game on OD (not counting a five inning effort by Gerrit Cole in 2020) since April 1, 2013 when Clayton Kershaw shutout the San Francisco Giants 4-0. The last complete game on OD in the American League goes back even farther, back to April 1, 2011 when Felix Hernandez got a CG 6-2 win against the Oakland A’s. The last pitcher to pitch a complete game against the Twins was Rick Rhoden when he was pitching for the New York Yankees on April 5, 1988 after the Minnesota Twins won the 1987 World Series.
The Minnesota Twins OD complete games are documented below.
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.
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.
A complete game in baseball is about as rare nowadays as finding a pay phone at your local corner service station. The complete game has gone by the wayside and this year with what is going on in baseball with the COVID-19 situation it will be even more of a rare occurrence.
The top ten MLB pitchers in complete games from 1961 to 2019 are all in the Hall of Fame. The leader is Gaylord Perry with 303 complete games and tenth on the list is Jim Palmer with 211. The Twins Bert Blyleven is number six on that list with 242 complete games.
If you only look at the American League from 1961 through 2019 the leader is Bert Blyleven with 222. Bert is also the all-time Twins leader in complete games with 141 followed by Jim Kaat with 133. So now you know why Bert always brags on TV about pitching complete games.
If we look at Twins complete game leaders by decade you get a list that looks like this:
