MINNESOTA 4, BALTIMORE 3 IN MINNESOTA

Date:  Sunday, July 5.

Batting stars:  Kent Hrbek was 1-for-3 with a home run (his twenty-second) and a walk.  Sal Butera was 1-for-3 with a home run, his second.  Steve Lombardozzi was 1-for-3 with a triple and two RBIs.

Pitching star:  Bert Blyleven pitched a complete game, giving up three runs on nine hits and four walks with seven strikeouts.

Opposition stars:  Larry Sheets was 2-for-3 with a double and a walk, scoring once.  Eddie Murray was 1-for-4 with a home run, his fifteenth.  Ken Gerhart was 1-for-3 with a double and a walk, driving in one.

The game:  Gerhart's RBI double put the Orioles ahead 1-0 in the second, but Lombardozzi hit a two-run triple in the bottom of the second to put the Twins ahead 2-1.  Murray tied it with a home run leading off the fourth, but Butera put the Twins back in front with a home run leading off the fifth.  In the seventh, Rick Burleson hit a one-out double and scored on a pair of wild pitches to tie it 3-3.  It stayed tied until the bottom of the ninth, when Hrbek led off the inning with a walkoff home run.

Of note:  Kirby Puckett went 0-for-4 to make his average .350...Roy Smalley was 0-for-2 with a walk and was batting .320...Baltimore starter Dave Schmidt pitched seven innings, giving up three runs on four hits and two walks with two strikeouts.

Record:  The Twins were 46-36, still tied for first place with Kansas City, which defeated Toronto 4-3 in ten innings.

Notes:  Puckett took a turn in the second spot in the order in this game...Randy Bush batted third and played right field in place of Tom Brunansky.

Player profile:  1987 was by far the best year of Larry Sheets' career.  He is one of two major league players to come out of Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia (Erik Kratz).  He was a second round draft choice of the Orioles in 1978.  He was just eighteen when he signed but reached AA in 1980.  He missed all of 1981, due to "college commitments and his personal indecision about his future" according to b-r.com.  He came back in 1982 and played in Class A, got back to AA in 1983 and to AAA in 1984, getting a September call-up that year.  A left-handed batter, he was often platooned.  He hit well in 1985 and 1986, but 1987 was his year:  he batted .316/.358/.561 with 31 homers.  He never came anywhere close to duplicating that:  his highest batting average after that was .261, in 1990, and his highest home run total after that was ten.  He stayed with the Orioles through 1989, but after two consecutive years of sub-.700 OPS they traded him to Detroit for Mike Brumley.  He bounced back some for the Tigers, batting .261/.308/.403, but he became a free agent after the 1990 season.  It appears that he did not play at all in 1991, played in Japan in 1992, and came back to the United States in 1993, spending most of the year at AAA but getting 20 at-bats with Seattle at the end of the season.  For his career, he hit .266/.321/.437 with 94 homers, almost a third of which came in that 1987 season.  At last report, Larry Sheets was a high school baseball coach in Maryland.  He is a member of the Eastern Mennonite University Athletic Hall of Fame.