MINNESOTA 5, BOSTON 0 IN MINNESOTA
Date: Friday, August 16.
Batting stars: Doug Mientkiewicz was 2-for-3. David Ortiz was 1-for-3 with a home run (his fifteenth) and a walk. Jacque Jones was 1-for-4 with a home run, his nineteenth.
Pitching star: Joe Mays pitched a complete game shutout, giving up two hits and two walks and striking out six.
Opposition stars: Carlos Baerga was 1-for-1. Johnny Damon was 1-for-4 with a double. Pedro Martinez struck out ten in a complete game, giving up five runs (three earned) on eight hits and a walk.
The game: There was no score, and no threat of a score, until the fifth. With one out, Torii Hunter and Mientkiewicz hit consecutive singles and Mohr grounded out to bring Hunter home with the game's first run. The Twins broke it open in the seventh. Ortiz hit a one-out home run, followed by an error and consecutive singles by Mientkiewicz, Mohr, and A. J. Pierzynski to make the score 4-0. Jones led off the bottom of the eighth with a home run to close out the scoring. The Red Sox did not get a hit until Damon's two-out double in the sixth.
WP: Mays (2-4). LP: Martinez (16-3). S: None.
Notes: This was easily Mays' best game of the season. He had a game score of 87--his next highest was 67 in a game in September. It got his ERA below six for the first time all season, at 5.92.
This was one of two complete games for Martinez. Oddly, both were losses. The other was a 2-1 loss to Atlanta in June. Only once all season did he give up more than the five runs he gave up here--in the first game of the season he allowed eight runs (seven earned) in just three innings.
Infielder Carlos Baerga peaked early, but he hung around for a long time afterward. He signed with San Diego as a free agent in late 1985, but before he got to the majors he was traded in 1989 to Cleveland along with Sandy Alomar in a deal for Joe Carter. He came up to the Indians in 1990 and became a regular in 1991. He became a star in 1992, posting the first of four seasons with an average of over .300 and an OPS of over .800. He was an all-star in three of those seasons, with no apparent reason why he did not make the team in 1994. He was twenty-six in the 1995 season and appeared destined for many more star years. Instead, he went backward. He had a sub-par 1996 and was traded to the Mets at the July deadline. He stayed with the Mets through 1998, but simply wasn't the same player. His batting average was decent--.267 as a Met--but he had never drawn many walks and he stopped hitting for power. After averaging nearly twenty homers a season with Cleveland, he hit in single digits each year for the Mets. 1998 was his last year as a regular, but he hung around as a reserve for several more seasons. He was with San Diego and Cleveland in 1999, missed the 2000 season, played in Korea and in the Atlantic League in 2001, was with Boston in 2002, with Arizona in 2003-2004, and finished his major league career with Washington in 2005. He actually was pretty good with Arizona in 2003, batting .343/.396/.464 in 207 at-bats. For his career, he batted .291/.332/.423 in fourteen seasons. At last report, Carlos Baerga was an assistant baseball coach with the University of Northwestern Ohio in Lima.
Record: The Twins were 72-51, in first place, leading Chicago by thirteen and a half games.