MINNESOTA 5, CHICAGO 4 IN MINNESOTA
Date: Monday, June 24.
Batting stars: Corey Koskie was 2-for-3 with a double. Luis Rivas was 2-for-3 with a double and a stolen base, his third. Jacque Jones was 2-for-5 with a double.
Pitching stars: Matt Kinney pitched six innings, giving up four runs (one earned) on six hits and three walks with no strikeouts. LaTroy Hawkins struck out two in two shutout innings, giving up one hit. Eddie Guardado pitched a perfect inning.
Opposition stars: Jose Valentin was 2-for-4 with a home run, his tenth. Royce Clayton was 2-for-4 with two stolen bases, his second and third. Magglio Ordonez was 1-for-4 with a two-run homer, his thirteenth.
The game: The Twins made two errors in the third, leading to three unearned runs. Two of them scored on a home run by Ordonez. Three Twins singles in the bottom of the third got one of the runs back, as Doug Mientkiewicz got a run-scoring hit. It stayed 3-1 until the sixth, when Valentin led off the inning with a home run to make it 4-1. Rivas singled in a run in the bottom of the sixth to cut the margin to 4-2. In the seventh, Torii Hunter delivered a two-out two-run homer to tie the game. In the eighth, the first two Twins were retired. Rivas then drew a one-out walk, went to second on a wild pitch, and scored on Jones' double to put the Twins ahead. The White Sox went down in order in the ninth.
WP: Hawkins (3-0). LP: Bob Howry (0-1). S: Guardado (22).
Notes: Hunter's home run was his eighteenth...Jones raised his average to .308...Dustan Mohr was 0-for-4, making his average .305...A. J. Pierzynski was 0-for-3 with a walk, dropping his average to .321...Hawkins' ERA fell to 1.70...Guardado's ERA was now 2.21...Royce Clayton was another favorite of mine for reasons I don't remember any more. He was certainly not a great ballplayer, but he played for a very long time. He got a September call-up with San Francisco in 1991 and became the Giants' starting shortstop in 1992. He remained the starter there through 1995. He appears to have been an adequate but not exceptional defender. On offense, he had very little power, drew some but not a large number of walks, and so even when he hit for a decent average he did not make that much of an offensive contribution. He was traded to St. Louis after the 1995 season and was the Cardinals' starting shortstop through the end of July in 1998. He made his only all-star team in 1997, a year in which he really was no better or worse than any other year in his career. He was traded to Texas at the 1998 July trade deadline and had his best year for the Rangers in 1999, batting .288/.346/.445 with fourteen home runs. He matched that home run total in 2000, but his other numbers dropped to .242/.301/.384, numbers which are much closer to his career totals. He was the White Sox from 2001-2002, Milwaukee in 2003, Colorado in 2004, Arizona in 2005, Washington and Cincinnati in 2006, and Toronto and Boston in 2007. He was a starting shortstop all of those years except the last one, and he began the year as a starter then. For his career he batted .258/.312/.367. He played in 2108 major league games over seventeen seasons. He never had an OPS over .800 and most years was below .700. But he almost never got hurt, and while he never had a great year he never had an awful one, either. He was someone whose name you could write down on the lineup card every day and know what you were going to get, enabling you to focus on other areas. While that doesn't qualify him for the Hall of Fame, there is value in it, and there are a lot of managers who would be happy to have a shortstop like that.
Record: The Twins were 43-33, in first place, seven games ahead of Chicago.