BALTIMORE 3, MINNESOTA 1 IN BALTIMORE

Date:  Saturday, July 24.

Batting stars:  Joe Nossek was 1-for-2 with a double and a run.  Tony Oliva was 2-for-4 with a stolen base, his tenth.  Bob Allison was 1-for-3 with a walk.

Pitching star:  Camilo Pascual pitched 5.1 innings, giving up only one run despite four hits and five walks with two strikeouts.

Opposition stars:  Boog Powell was 3-for-4 with a home run (his eighth) and two RBIs.  Dave McNally pitched six innings, allowing one run on five hits and one walk with two strikeouts.  Norm Siebern was 2-for-4 with a double and a run.

The game:  It was scoreless until the fifth, when Zoilo Versalles delivered a two-out RBI single to give the Twins a 1-0 lead.  Powell answered with a run-scoring single in the sixth to tie it 1-1.  The Orioles almost took the lead in the seventh, but Jimmie Hall threw out Siebern at the plate as he tried to score from second on a single.  The Twins loaded the bases with two-out in the eighth, but Sandy Valdespino, pinch-hitting for Earl Battey, grounded out to end the threat.  Powell gave Baltimore the lead in the eighth with a leadoff homer and relief pitcher Dick Hall drove in an insurance run with a two-out double to left.  The Twins went down in order in the ninth.

Of note:  Versalles was 1-for-4 with an RBI.  Rich Rollins was 0-for-4.  Harmon Killebrew was 0-for-3 with a walk.  Battey was 0-for-2 with a walk.  Hall entered the game as a pinch-hitter in the seventh and was 0-for-2.

Record:  The loss made the Twins 59-36.  They remained in first place, but their second straight loss to Baltimore cut their lead over the Orioles to 2.5 games.

Notes:  Battey's average dropped to .310...Hall fell to .305...Pinch-hitting Valdespino for Battey seems a curious move, but Valdespino was hitting .286 at the time and they did gain a platoon advantage.  There may have been other reasons for the move, too--it's hard to second-guess the manager fifty years after the fact...In my memory Boog Powell was a great slugger, and some years he was, but he was not very consistent.  He hit over thirty homers four times, but he also had five seasons of more than four hundred at-bats in which he hit fewer than twenty.  1965 was one of those seasons.  in 556 at-bats, he hit only seventeen home runs and posted a slugging average of .407.