You never know when you’re going to have a Minnesota Twins moment.
There I was, perusing the internet as I often do, when I came across a Twins Almanac tweet about a Twins/Yankees game played on April 29, 1972, in which Harmon Killebrew hit a rare triple and Jim Kaat tossed six innings of four-hit baseball to blank the Yankees at the Stadium, 2-0.
After a 13-game players’ strike that season, the Twins got off to a fast start. They went 8-3 in April, then 15-9 the following month. Among those wins, they beat the Boston Red Sox twice at home, then took three of four games against the Yanks, including that 2-0 victory, then stayed on the road to sweep three games from the Red Sox at Fenway Park.
The New York Daily News was on hand for the Twins’ 2-0 win. The headline: “Killer silences Yanks, 2-0.”
“A lot of baseballs Harmon Killebrew hits usually end up as topics of conversation. But yesterday, in the Twins’ 2-0 Stadium win over the Yankees, he walloped a first-inning triple that Bobby Murcer refused to even talk about.
“Just why the usually glib Murcer wouldn’t explain, let alone elaborate, on the play that drove in the runs that gave Fritz Peterson an 0-3 record, isn’t known.
“Murcer was neither curt nor sarcastic, he just bluntly refused to enlighten newsmen. ‘I know what you’re going to ask me and I’d rather not talk about it,’ he said, the usual Murcer lilt missing from his voice.”
The Twins moved on to Boston and wrapped up their sweep with an 8-4 win. “Twins spank Red Sox again for sweep, 8-4,” The Boston Globe headline reads.
“The Red Sox talked long into the night last night, but it didn’t change a thing,” Peter Gammons wrote. “They talked and complained about the game’s most important play, a single by Harmon Killebrew that almost everyone screamed was foul. They talked about lineup shakeups and the strike — the hitting was weak again — but at midnight nothing had changed. The score was still Minnesota 8, Boston 4 before 11,747 non-Bruins funs.”
Despite the strong start to the season, April and May were the team’s only winning months of baseball. They finished at 77-77 because of the strike.
Bert Blyleven went 17-17 with a 2.73 ERA with 228 strikeouts across 287-plus innings. That season was Jim Kaat’s last full season with the Twins before he moved on to the Chicago White Sox. He turned in a 10-2 record with an impressive 2.06 ERA across 113-plus innings.
Killebrew didn’t hit for average that season, but he still had some power and could get on base, earning 94 walks to go along with 26 home runs and 74 RBI. Bobby Darwin led the team in runs batted in with 80, but he also struck out 145 times, the most in the majors that season, according to Baseball-Reference.com.
Extra innings…
–Despite Tuesday night’s walk-off loss to the Cleveland Guardians, the Twins are playing better ball. They were 7-15 on April 20, but since then have gone 6-2, getting a series win over the White Sox, a sweep of the Angels and a Game 1 blowout win over the Guards, 11-1. They lost 2-1 Tuesday.
The Twins took a 1-1 tie into the bottom of the ninth inning when the artist formerly known as Louie Varland faced the Guards’ Kyle Manzardo. Manzardo, a former Washington State Cougar, hammered Varland’s third pitch into the stands for the win. The Twins are now 13-17.
–The Twins’ radio crew was not happy on Tuesday because of a three-hour and 10-minute rain delay in which it never really rained, according to Kris Atteberry, Paul Molitor and others. First pitch was pushed back to 9:20 p.m. and then the game was played in two hours and 17 minutes, almost an hour shorter than the actual delay.
Sources: Newspapers.com