KANSAS CITY 12, MINNESOTA 4 IN MINNESOTA
Date: Monday, August 5.
Batting stars: Doug Mientkiewicz was 2-for-2 with a double. A. J. Pierzynski was 2-for-4 with a double. Cristian Guzman was 2-for-4.
Pitching star: Bob Wells pitched a scoreless inning.
Opposition stars: Carlos Febles was 4-for-5 with two doubles, scoring three runs. Neifi Perez was 3-for-5 with a double and three runs. Brent Mayne was 3-for-5 with a double and three runs.
The game: The Twins scored first, getting a run in the second on a Denny Hocking sacrifice fly. The Royals came back with two in the third, starting the inning with a Perez single, a Mayne double, and a Febles single to take a 2-1 lead. Kansas City added two more in the fifth on doubled by Perez and Febles and singles by Aaron Guiel and Luis Alicea. They put the game away in the sixth, getting five singles and a three-run homer by Alicea. That made the score 9-1. The Twins cut it to 9-4 after seven, but the Royals got the three runs back in the eighth.
WP: Shawn Sedlacek (2-2). LP: Joe Mays (1-3). S: None.
Notes: Hocking was at third base in place of Corey Koskie. He went 0-for-3 with a sacrifice fly.
Torii Hunter was 0-for-3 with a walk to drop his average to .314.
Bobby Kielty was 0-for-3 with a sacrifice fly to make his average .311.
Pierzynski raised his average to .310.
Twins starter Mays pitched 5.2 innings and was charged with eight runs on twelve hits and no walks, striking out one.
Kevin Frederick gave up three runs in 1.1 innings, raising his ERA from 2.70 to 5.63.
The bottom three batters in the Kansas City lineup went 10-for-15 with four doubles and scored nine runs.
Kansas City starter Sedlacek pitched 6.1 innings, giving up four runs on eight hits and five walks and striking out two.
After three frustrating one-run losses, two of them in extra innings, one assumes this game must have felt pretty good for the Royals.
This was the only season Shawn Sedlacek had in the major leagues. For some reason I remember him--maybe it's because I know some people named Sedlacek. He was born in Cedar Rapids, went to Iowa State, and was drafted by the Royals in the fourteenth round in 1998. He made fourteen starts. Four of the first six were fairly good, but the last of those was July 20. He would win one more game, on August 20 against the Blue Jays, and it was a game kind of like this one--not good, but not so awful that his team couldn't overcome it. He's the sort of pitcher that a bad team, which Kansas City was in 2002, tends to have--a guy who's decent at AAA (6-5, 3.70), and since the team has holes in its rotation, they decide to bring him up and see what he can do. Unfortunately, what he could do was not much, and 2002 was the only year he was even decent at AAA. His lifetime AAA numbers were 26-31, 5.19, 1.46 WHIP. He really wasn't even all that good at AA: 24-17, 4.05, 1.32 WHIP. He left the Royals after the 2003 season. He was in the Cubs and Mets organizations in 2004, with Baltimore, Colorado, and St. Louis in 2005, and also played in the Northern League in 2005. There was obviously something people liked about him, that so many teams gave him a shot, but I don't know what it might have been other than the fact that he didn't walk very many people. Maybe it's just that he's a good guy--he and his wife live in Overland Park, Kansas, and have done a lot of work with Royals Charities. He had his own baseball instructional company, Sed Sports, before joining with Matt Williams and ex-Twin Todd Sears to form Complete Game Baseball, which also gives baseball instruction as well as sponsoring teams and leagues.
Record: The Twins were 69-44, in first place, leading Chicago by sixteen games.