MINNESOTA 7, MILWAUKEE 6 IN MILWAUKEE
Date: Sunday, June 16.
Batting stars: Dustan Mohr was 2-for-4 with a home run, his fourth. Torii Hunter was 2-for-5. Corey Koskie was 1-for-4 with a home run (his sixth) and a walk.
Pitching stars: Tony Fiore pitched 2.1 scoreless innings, giving up a hit and a walk and striking out two. J. C. Romero struck out two in 1.1 scoreless innings, giving up one hit. Eddie Guardado struck out two in a scoreless inning.
Opposition stars: Richie Sexson was 3-for-4. Tyler Houston was 3-for-4. Geoff Jenkins was 1-for-4 with a two-run homer, his tenth.
The game: The Twins jumped on Milwaukee starter Ruben Quevedo with four runs in the first inning, three of them scoring on a David Ortiz double. The Brewers came back with three in the second, as Jenkins hit a two-run homer and Robert Machado had a RBI double. In the fourth, Mohr and Denny Hocking led off with back-to-back homers to put the Twins ahead 6-3. Milwaukee had another three-run inning in the fifth, getting a double and four singles to tie it 6-6. With one out in the seventh, Koskie hit a home run to put the Twins back on top 7-6. The Brewers got only one hit after that, a single by Tyler Houston in the eighth.
WP: Fiore (5-1). LP: Nelson Figueroa (1-5). S: Guardado (20).
Notes: Matthew LeCroy started at catcher for the first time all season and one of only three times in 2002. He went 1-for-3 with a walk and no stolen bases were attempted...Jacque Jones was 0-for-5, dropping his average to .313...Hunter raised his average to .306...LeCroy was now batting .338...Mohr raised his average to .313...Kyle Lohse went 1-for-2. Twins pitchers were now 4-for-9...Lohse was not as successful on the mound, pitching 4.1 innings and allowing six runs on nine hits and no walks and striking out three...Romero's ERA fell to 0.68...Quevedo pitched five innings, allowing six runs on nine hits and two walks and striking out two...Quevedo was in the big leagues for parts of four seasons and never really had any lasting success. He started his pro career at age seventeen with Atlanta, had two very good seasons of rookie ball, had a good season in Class A in 1998, and was jumped to AAA in 1999 at age twenty. He didn't do very well, as could perhaps have been expected, but was still thought of highly enough to be included with another minor league player in a trade to the Cubs for Terry Mulholland and Jose Hernandez. He split the 2000 season between AAA and the majors, doing decently but not outstandingly in AAA but not getting much accomplished in the big leagues. Still only twenty-two, he started 2001 in AAA and pitched very well, but was traded to Milwaukee at the July trade deadline. The Brewers put him into their starting rotation and left him there through 2002. Over that time, he made 35 starts and went 10-16, 5.43. He apparently had injury problems after that, as he made only fourteen appearances in 2003, nine of them in the majors. He signed with Baltimore for 2004 but made just one appearance for AA Bowie. One source says that he pitched in Venezuela for several years after that, but b-r.com lists just one winter ball season in 2008-09. He did, however, play for the Venezuelan National Team in the South American Championships in 2005. I often complain about guys who succeeded in the minors and were never given a chance, but here we have the opposite--a guy who was rushed to the majors before he was ready and was never really given the chance to develop. We'll never know what would've happened if he'd been handled differently, but the way they did it clearly didn't work. Sadly, Ruben Quevedo died of a heart attack on June 7, 2016 at the young age of thirty-seven.
Record: The Twins were 39-30, in first place by five games over Chicago and Cleveland.