Twins Win First Playoff Game in 19 Years
A breakdown of all four wild-card games from yesterday.
Hi friends-
A few items of housekeeping before we dive in.
Our Game 2 Wild-Card chat is open early, so head on in whenever you’re ready:
Reader Dan Park wanted to celebrate the Orioles’ fabulous season by donating a few paid subscriptions to some of our readers who can’t afford them right now. (Trust me, we’re all broke.) If you would like to snap up one of these subs so you can join our community during the most wonderful time of the year, just email me at bestteambook@gmail.com ASAP and I’ll hook you up, thanks to Dan. Also, if you wanna gift a sub like Dan did and help someone out and support me, you can do so here:
Secondly, I still have a few copies of my Dodger book that I can sign and inscribe and mail to you for $35 (includes priority shipping). If you’re interested in buying this for yourself or for someone else (maybe knock out a holiday gift early this year!), hit me up at bestteambook@gmail.com.
OK. Wow. Yesterday. OMG. Thanks to everyone who joined us in the chat. We had so much fun!
As a reminder, playoff chats are for paid subscribers. You can join the fun by taking out a paid subscription now:
OK, now let’s dive in to what happened in the four wild-card games yesterday! A few hours before this round started, I did a podcast with Joe Posnanski, who mentioned that the Twins are THE three-true-outcome team. (For those of you who don’t know, the “three true outcomes” in baseball are: walk, strikeout and home run, because the fielders have no chance to change the outcomes of those plays).
I posited that the Twins actually have a fourth outcome: Royce Lewis hitting a grand slam. Lewis has five grand slams in just 66 career games. This is extraordinary. Miguel Cabrera, who just retired, hit six grand slams in 2,797 games.
When the Twins selected Lewis first overall in the 2017 draft, they hoped he would be a guy who would hit homers at this clip. But back-to-back ACL tears destroyed his progress through the minor leagues, and when he finally made it up to the bigs for a full season this year, he was nearly derailed by oblique and hamstring strains.
Some bodies are just built to break, and it’s probably foolish to count on Lewis to have the kind of longevity in this game that Cabrera did.
However, the Twins didn’t waste their pick here. The 2017 draft class was exceptionally weak: Only one player has made the All-Star team so far from that group, and that was reliever Trevor Rogers. (It’s possible Hunter Greene and MacKenzie Gore can figure out how to flourish, but I don’t think the Twins’ brass stays up nights sweating through their sheets with regret over picking Lewis above these two).
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