MINNESOTA 8, CHICAGO 1 IN CHICAGO
Date: Wednesday, July 24.
Batting stars: David Ortiz was 3-for-5 with a double and a three-run homer, his twelfth. Torii Hunter was 3-for-5 with a double. Doug Mientkiewicz was 1-for-2 with a home run (his sixth) and two walks.
Pitching stars: Kyle Lohse pitched eight innings, giving up one run on eight hits and four walks and striking out four. J. C. Romero pitched a scoreless inning, giving up a hit and a walk.
Opposition stars: Ray Durham was 3-for-5. Kenny Lofton was 2-for-4. Frank Thomas was 1-for-2 with two walks and a home run, his seventeenth.
The game: Bobby Kielty hit a two-run homer in the second to give the Twins a 2-0 lead. A. J. Pierzynski singled home a run in the fourth to make it 3-0. The Twins took control in the fifth, getting a three-run homer from Ortiz and a two-run homer from Mientkiewicz to make it 8-0. The White Sox missed all kinds of chances, stranding two runners in the first, third, fifth, eighth, and ninth and leaving the bases loaded in the second. Their only run came in the sixth, when Thomas led off with a home run. For the game Chicago stranded twelve and went 0-for-11 with men in scoring position.
WP: Lohse (10-5). LP: Jon Garland (8-8). S: None.
Notes: Hunter raised his average to .310.
Kielty was 1-for-3 with a walk and a two-run homer, his eighth. He raised his average to .328.
This was the fourth consecutive strong start by Lohse. In those starts, he gave up just three earned runs in twenty-seven innings for an ERA of 1.00.
Romero lowered his ERA to 2.00.
Chicago starter Garland pitched 4.1 innings and allowed seven runs on nine hits and three walks and struck out two. This was his first full year as a rotation starter, a position he held through 2010. He was pretty much a league average pitcher--his ERA+ was between 91 and 111 every year from 2002-2010 with the exception of 2005, when it was 128. That was his best season--he went 18-10, 3.50, 1.17 WHIP. He made his only all-star team that season and finished sixth in Cy Young balloting. But in each season from 2002-2010 he made either thirty-two or thirty-three starts and pitched 192-221 innings. That's a very valuable man. He stayed with the White Sox through 2007, was with the Angels in 2008, played for Arizona and the Dodgers in 2009, and was with San Diego in 2010. He signed with the Dodgers for 2011, but made only nine starts before needing shoulder surgery. He missed all of 2012. He tried to come back in 2013, but lasted just twelve starts for Colorado before being released. It sounds as if he would like to have given it another try, but no one was interested in letting him do that. In fact, an article last summer said that he had started throwing and was contemplating a comeback, although it does not appear that anything came of it. He's thirty-eight, so it wouldn't be impossible, although it would certainly be quite a story.
Record: The Twins were 61-42, in first place, leading Chicago by fourteen games.