August 22, 2021

Yanks won’t sweep Twins after Sunday’s game is postponed by Hurricane Henri

Life offers three inescapable realities: death, the Internal Revenue Service and the Minnesota Twins losing to the New York Yankees. They lost Thursday, they lost Friday and they lost again Saturday, 7-1, to drop the series to the Bronx Bombers. But at least Mother Nature is a Twins fan because she has nudged a hurricane in the direction of New York City, which means Sunday’s finale has been postponed and rescheduled for Sept. 13, according to MLB.com.

The Twins now head to Boston to take on the Red Sox Tuesday. A starter hasn’t been named.

Extra innings…

-In the good news department, pitching prospect, Joe Ryan, who came to the Twins via the trade for Nelson Cruz, pitched well on Friday for the Triple-A St. Paul Saints.

According to MLB.com:

The 25-year-old allowed one run and one hit in four innings with nine strikeouts, fanning the first six batters of the game. His only blemish came on a fourth-inning solo homer. Ryan has tallied high strikeout and low walk totals across his three-year pro career with 318 strikeouts and 52 walks in 221 innings, a K/9 of 13.0. In 2021, Ryan has amassed 84 strikeouts and 11 walks in 61 innings with a 3.54 ERA.

-More Twins/Yankees: On Aug. 22. 1968, Twins pitcher, Jim Merritt, lost his shutout against the Yankees when Mickey Mantle hit a pinch-hit home run in the ninth before almost 16,000 fans at the Met. The game was played in one-hour, 42 minutes, according to Baseball-Reference.com. It was Mantle’s 16th home run of the season. He would hit only two more in his final season of major league baseball.

Merritt allowed only one run on three hits over nine innings with four strikeouts to improve to 9-14 with a 3.21 ERA.

COMMENTS

Hi, I’m Rolf Boone, Twins fan.

I became a fan of the Minnesota Twins after a friendly wager in the early 1980s. I survived Ron Davis, the meltdown in Cleveland, Phil Bradley at the Kingdome and then marveled at a rising generation of stars and two World Series wins in 1987 and 1991. Brad Radke made the 1990s bearable, while Kirby Puckett’s eye injury, exit from the game and eventual death made it almost too much to bear. The new century ushered in more talent — Joe Mauer, Johan Santana, Joe Nathan, Torii Hunter, Justin Morneau — and consecutive seasons of playoff baseball, followed by consecutive seasons of losing baseball. A winning season returned in 2015. So here we are. Go Twins.