MINNESOTA 8, BALTIMORE 0 IN MINNESOTA

Date:  Friday, July 24.

Batting stars:  Frank Quilici was 2-for-3 with a walk.  Rick Renick was 2-for-4 with a home run, his seventh.  Leo Cardenas was 2-for-4 with a triple and a double.  Cesar Tovar was 2-for-5 with a double and two runs.  Rich Reese was 2-for-5.  Harmon Killebrew was 1-for-3 with a home run (his thirtieth), a walk, and two runs.  Tony Oliva was 1-for-4 with a three-run homer (his fourteenth) and two runs.

Pitching stars:  Jim Kaat pitched a complete game shutout, giving up seven hits and a walk and striking out five.

Opposition star:  Andy Etchebarren was 2-for-4.

The game:  Tovar led off the bottom of the first with a double and scored on a Reese single to give the Twins a 1-0 lead.  Renick led off the second with a homer to make it 2-0.

Neither team threatened again until the fifth, when Quilici singled, was bunted to second, and scored on a Tovar single.  Killebrew walked and Oliva followed with a three-run homer to make the score 6-0 Twins.  The Twins added two more in the seventh.  Killebrew led off with a home run.  Oliva reached on an error, Renick singled, and George Mitterwald singled to bring the score to 8-0.

Despite getting seven hits and a walk, the Orioles only once had a man in scoring position.  That was in the eighth, when Don Buford hit a one-out single and Paul Blair followed with a walk.  But the next two batters went out and it remained 8-0.

WP:  Kaat (9-7).

LP:  Mike Cuellar (13-6).

S:  None.

Notes:  Renick was in left field in place of Brant Alyea.  Quilici was at second base in place of Rod Carew.  Jim Holt pinch-ran for Renick in the seventh and stayed in the game in left field.  Danny Thompson replaced Killebrew at third base in the eighth.

Oliva was batting .319.  Tovar was batting .316.  Killebrew was batting .315.

The Twins continued to have success against Cuellar.  He had pitched a complete game victory against them eight days earlier.  Other than that game, though, he had posted game scores of fifty-one and forty-five, and in this game his score was twenty-seven.  For the season against the Twins he was 2-2, 4.88, 1.41 WHIP.  Against the entire league, Cuellar was 24-8, 3.48, 1.15 WHIP.

This was the only shutout for Kaat in 1970.

The Twins scored more runs in this game than they had in their previous three.

Record:  The Twins were 60-31, in first place in the American League West, six games ahead of California.  That's the biggest lead the Twins have had so far--they were also six games up on July 11.