Twins 9, Cardinals 8: Game of the Year on a Random Friday Night

Box Score
Joe Ryan: 6 IP, 6 H, 3 ER, 0 BB, 8 K
Home Runs: Byron Buxton (21), Kody Clemens (10), Royce Lewis (5), Brooks Lee (11)
Top 3 WPA: Kody Clemens (.410), Royce Lewis (.320), Byron Buxton (.200)
Win Probability Chart (via FanGraphs)

1987. Michael Jackson returned from the biggest album ever with Bad. Guns N’ Roses debuted with Appetite for Destruction. The highest grossing film was… Three Men and a Baby? Ok. The music zeitgeist was clearly more stimulated than the film one. And in the midst—amongst the dramatic, modernic turns subtle in a decade often revered for its eccentricities—the Minnesota Twins defeated the St. Louis Cardinals to claim their first World Series victory since moving to the state in 1961. Oh, and Prince released Sign O’ The Times. Man, were the movie-makers even trying this year?

Back to the present. Though the men on the field laboring, working, fighting for their respective organizations were not alive during that critical World Series, they survive as living monuments to the legacy of that sequence of games. 

Joe Ryan took the mound. The ace of the Twins. Anointed and donning the lake-blue attire too reminiscent of a soccer kit for its own good. The maestro with fastball adroit and dangerous staggered out of the gate, perhaps in pre-anticipation of the rain delay soon to befall the game: he surrendered a truly gargantuan home run to Alec Burleson before returning to labor through a single-centric second inning. Two runs scored. The newly-minted 30-year-old appeared perplexed. 

Fortunately, he was not alone in his fight. Byron Buxton remained in a flow state. He found a first-pitch outside slider to his liking and blasted the offering deep to center, depositing the ball amongst where there once was shrubbery, but now only rests a tame and ordinary grass, and a green batters-eye wall. 

The run, while mighty, was merely a lone scratch for the Twins. A single etch. Their only blood drawn against starter Kyle Leahy as the innings blurred into each other, and as the rain—later to be an intermittent nuisance—delayed the game for some time. 

Rather than muddy the quagmire at hand, the weather evidently cleansed the Twins of whatever nagging ailment rendered them mediocre. Royce Lewis singled to start the fifth, and Victor Caratini slugged a double into right-center to send his teammate to third. A Brooks Lee flyball was a tad too short in Lewis’ estimation, but a Tristan Gray infield single one batter later did the deed instead. 

Though only one run, the effort pushed Minnesota’s offense even further in the sixth, as a Buxton double begat a Josh Bell double thudded off the jutted wall in right field, tying the game until Lewis broke his team into the lead with a sacrifice fly. 

Given the lead for the first time, the Twins found themselves unsure what to do with themselves, and so given the choice, they reverted back to their standard operating procedure: they squandered it. Taylor Rogers and Eric Orze danced around the conclusion, seeming for a moment to only allow the game to be tied again, before finalizing the sudden direness of matters when Jordan Walker cleared the bases with a solidly-stroked double down the left-field line.

A fraught day for pitchers indeed. Sullen-eyed and lethargic, any hurler who trudged to the mound looked; knowing their fate and the swollen ERAs that will soon follow with their entrance into the game. A rank curse. To see so clearly what awaits one yet to be helpless to stop the terribleness. At least they have a pile of money to cry into.

Gordon Graceffo and Ryne Stanek were the next two pitchers to find this out; the prior for walking two batters; the latter for hanging a splitter that Kody Clemens swatted into the right-field seats for a game-tying three-run homer. 

The Cardinals scored again in the eighth but did you think that would mean anything? What with how this game has gone? Have you paid any attention? Were you actually watching? The tenor of the moment and the shifts of the night spoke to a predictable outcome: a mammoth Lewis homer to tie the game. Though perhaps surprising was Brooks Lee’s go-ahead blast just two batters later. 

Somehow, that proved enough: Andrew Morris entered to lock down the game in the ninth and did exactly that, exterminating the St. Louis threat with shocking efficiency to quietly end what had been a chaotic and unruly game. All hail the over-the-top hurling righty from Texas Tech for taming this crazed beast, 

Notes:

Post-Game Interview:

What’s Next?
The Twins and Cardinals match up once for what may be a normal game of baseball on Saturday with first pitch coming at 1:10 PM. Connor Prielipp will start opposite Matthew Liberatore. 

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