CLEVELAND 12, MINNESOTA 5 IN CLEVELAND
Date: Friday, September 13.
Batting stars: Matthew LeCroy was 2-for-3 with two two-run homers, his sixth and seventh. Jacque Jones was 2-for-5 with a home run, his twenty-sixth. Cristian Guzman was 2-for-5 with a double.
Pitching stars: Johan Santana struck out three in 2.1 scoreless innings, giving up two hits and no walks. Tony Fiore pitched a perfect inning and struck out one. Mike Jackson pitched a scoreless inning, giving up one hit and striking out one.
Opposition stars: Jim Thome was 3-for-4 with a home run (his forty-fifth) and four RBIs. Travis Fryman was 3-for-5 with a home run (his tenth) and two doubles. Terry Mulholland pitched seven innings, giving up two runs on six hits and two walks and striking out five.
The game: The Indians jumped on Eric Milton in the first inning, scoring five runs. Ellis Burks had an RBI single, Thome hit a three-run homer, and Fryman hit a solo home run. Cleveland didn't let up in the second, scoring four more as Thome had an RBI single and Karim Garcia hit a three-run homer. It stayed 9-0 until the sixth, when Garcia had a run-scoring ground out, Fryman hit an RBI double, and Josh Bard drove in a run with a single, making the score 12-0. The Twins finally got on the board in the seventh, as LeCroy hit a two-run homer. They got their final three runs in the ninth, as LeCroy hit another two-run homer and Jones hit a solo home run to make it look like a slightly better game than it was.
WP: Mulholland (3-1). LP: Milton (13-9). S: None.
Notes: Bobby Kielty was in center field, with Torii Hunter not in the lineup. Kielty went 1-for-4.
A. J. Pierzynski started the game at catcher, with LeCroy replacing him in the fifth inning. Pierzynski was back in the lineup the next day, so presumably he was just given the rest of the day off in a blowout.
This was, as one might guess, the worst game Milton had this season. He pitched 1.2 innings, allowing nine runs on eight hits and a walk and striking out one, giving him a game score of three. It was the fifth time he'd had a game score below twenty. One might say that when he was bad, he was really bad.
Fiore got his ERA below three at 2.96.
Mulholland had started the season with the Dodgers. He was traded in late July with two other players for Paul Shuey.
This game featured the major league debut of reliever Alex Herrera. He pitched in five games, worked 5.1 innings, and had an ERA of zero. I don't know whether, had his career ended then, that would've been a record. As it turned out, however, he was with the Indians for about three weeks in July of 2003. He was unscored upon in his first seven appearances, giving him a career ERA of zero through eleven innings, but then gave up seven runs in his next three games, covering just 1.1 innings. Those next three games were his last three games, as he went back to AAA and never made it back to the majors. He kept pitching for a long time, though, as he was active in the Venezuelan Winter League through the 2014-2015 season. For his big league career, his ERA was 5.11 in 12.1 innings (fifteen games). But I suspect Cleveland fans were pretty excited about him for a little while.
Record: The Twins were 85-63, in first place, leading Chicago by twelve games.