Forget the slow start to the 2025 season because the Twins won again Saturday to extend their win streak to seven games and improve their record to 20-20. They are a very welcome 13-5 since they fell to 7-15 on April 20.
Again, they didn’t do much on the offensive side of the ledger — Trevor Larnach hit a two-run homer — but they got a solid start out of Joe Ryan and closer Jhoan Duran locked down the game for his seventh save and a 2-1 win over the San Francisco Giants.
Ryan, whose start got pushed back because he was ill, allowed just a run over six innings with no walks and seven strikeouts. He’s now 3-2 with a 2.74 ERA on the season.
There were two interesting moments in the game:
-Listening to it on Friday, it sounded like both teams were unhappy with the home plate umpire’s strike zone, which finally prompted Twins manager Rocco Baldelli to emerge from the dugout and attempt to argue balls and strikes. He was immediately ejected, but he got his money’s worth because even on the radio I could hear him cut loose with a string of f-bombs.
-The other moment was when catcher Christian Vazquez picked off a runner at third base, which had Twins radio guys Kris Atteberry and Dan Gladden recalling Tim Laudner to Gary Gaetti to get Darrell Evans at third base in Game 4 of the 1987 ALCS between the Twins and Tigers.
The Detroit Free Press put the photo of that play on the front page of the Oct. 12, 1987, edition of the newspaper.
From the game story:
“One startling Detroit miscue that might have cost them the tying run came in the sixth inning when Darrell Evans was picked off third base. After the umpire called him out, Evans — who experienced one of his worst nights as a Tiger — knelt next to the bag in seeming disbelief.
“This is getting real close to Thousand Oaks,” said Tigers Manager Sparky Anderson, referring to the city in California where he spends the winter.
“But Anderson said he would have no special message for his team today.
“I don’t think they have to be told anything.”
We know how that ended, don’t we Twins fans?
Pablo Lopez gets the ball Sunday.
Extra innings…
–Two crazy games were played Friday night:
The San Diego Padres absolutely steamrolled the crummy Colorado Rockies, 21-0. Ex-Twin Luis Arraez went 3-for-7 at the plate with a triple, two runs scored and three RBI in the win.
The other game that caught my eye was the tilt between the Reds and Astros. The Reds had a 10-run first inning, but Houston came right back with seven runs of their own, only to fall short 13-9.
–Just finished sportswriter Jeff Passan’s book “The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports,” which, put another way, is more specifically about the rise of pitching arm injuries, both here and abroad, and what can be done about them.
I follow Jeff on social media and enjoy his work on ESPN. It’s a good book, although the cause, effect and solutions-focused narrative that he lays out didn’t always hold my interest. The book is at its best revisiting the injuries that Sandy Koufax battled and Tommy John made famous, plus the personal journeys of pitchers Todd Coffey and Daniel Hudson, as both suffer arm injuries and then do their best to get back to the majors with mixed results.
One of the stranger moments of the book is when Passan visits former Los Angeles Dodgers reliever Mike Marshall, who ended his career with the Twins, near a swamp in small-town Florida where he has embraced and is teaching a bizarre pitching motion to prevent arm injuries.
“Marshall took the pitching delivery and blew it up,” Passan writes. “What he spawned was so unorthodox an approach, so far afield from what baseball pitchers were supposed to look like, that no matter how biomechanically sound — no matter how many injuries it may have prevented — nobody would ever adopt it.”
Marshall notched a career-high 32 saves for the Twins in 1979.
Sources: Newspapers.com