Tom Froemming

For baseball fans, February is all about looking ahead to the future. Pitchers and catchers are reporting to spring training soon, and before we know it baseball games are going to be played. Here at Twins Daily, we’re also looking a little further ahead. The site’s top 20 prospect countdown started Tuesday and will continue over the next week ahead.Let’s take a quick look back at all the articles from the front page in the order they were published. This edition of Twins Weekly covers Friday, Feb. 2 to Thursday, Feb. 8. 2018 Twins Super (Bowl) Predictions | Seth Stohs MLB Shift Driving Market Realities | Ted Schwerzler 1961: Welcome to the Big Leagues | mikelink45 The Twins Almanac for February 4–10 | Matt Johnson To the Victor Go the Spoils (and Special Sections) | Tom Froemming The Best Twins Team That Ever Was(n't) | Matthew Lenz Top 10 Twins World Series Performances Per WPA | Tom Froemming Top 10 Minnesota Twins Commercials | Tom Froemming Free Agent Starters By The Numbers Part II: WAR and Projections | Greg Logan Adalberto Mejia: High Floor or More? | Jamie Cameron The Secret to Ervin Santana’s Success | Andrew Thares In The Zone: Twins Among Best At Avoiding Bad Pitches | Cody Christie Seth's Twins On Deck Podcast (Episode 5) | Seth Stohs Twins Daily 2018 Top 20 Prospect Countdown: 16-20 | Seth Stohs Gleeman & The Geek, Ep 354: Super Bowl And PECOTA | John Bonnes Can The Twins Better Their Bench? | Ted Schwerzler No Such Thing as Too Much Pitching, Right? | Tom Froemming Twins Daily 2018 Top 20 Prospect Countdown: 11-15 | Nick Nelson Twins Daily 2018 Top Prospects: #10 Akil Baddoo | Cody Christie Darvish Down To The Studs | Ted Schwerzler Twins Daily 2018 Top Prospects: #9 Brusdar Graterol | Tom Froemming Calling All Bloggers You may have noticed some less familiar names on the rundown for this week. Well, those are all writers who’ve been active in the blog section over the past month or so. Reminder: Anyone can start a blog at Twins Daily. If you're interested in being a regular writer for the site, the blog section is how you get your foot in the door. The only reason you're reading my words right now is because I started my own blog at Twins Daily. Other Links With Ervin Santana's injury, the Twins' need for Yu Darvish is even more clear By Dan Hayes of The Athletic In his most recent ZiPS projection, Szymborski said the Twins currently are projected for 84 wins and have roughly a 48 percent chance to reach the postseason. But adding Darvish — who is likely to earn between $20-25 million over at least five seasons — would increase the team’s chances of making the playoffs to nearly 66 percent while also helping them survive the early part of the season with Santana sidelined. The Twins Really, Really Need Starting Pitching By Craig Edwards of FanGraphs There’s good news and bad news for the Twins. The bad is obvious. If the season started today, the Twins would have one of the worse rotations in baseball. When Santana got back, they would improve from a bottom-three rotation to merely a bottom-third. That’s the bad news. The good news is that this problem is pretty fixable — and, in the event that the club can fix it, they will have greatly increased their chances for returning to the playoffs this season. MLB free agency: Where the eight elite unsigned players will land By Bob Nightengale of USA Today Darvish has several teams who have offered five-year deals, and he would like to at least get the six-year, $130 million contract that Johnny Cueto received two years ago with the San Francisco Giants. Three teams badly need him - the Chicago Cubs, Minnesota Twins and Milwaukee Brewers - but he continues to wait to see if the New York Yankees or Los Angeles Dodgers can move some contracts to make it work. Jose Berrios should be full-fledged ace for Twins this year By Evan Davis of FanRag Sports Berrios has good building blocks on which to grow, and has demonstrated that he can mature with time. He couldn’t control his offerings in his first pass through the majors, and then he dropped his walk rate nearly five points to beat the league average. He began to trade four-seam fastballs for sinkers, and now he splits his usage between the two pitches. It was a smart choice. Berrios threw his four-seamer half the time in 2016 and was consistently shelled. Adding the sinker allowed him to change eye levels without constantly relying on the breaking ball, and the results followed. Berrios was able to increase his curveball usage, since he was no longer used it exclusively as an out pitch to play off the four-seamer. Berrios, in other words, adapted. Elizabethton Twins City Council set to approve one-year extension By John Thompson of the Johnson City Press City Manager Jerome Kitchens said “both the city of Elizabethton and the Minnesota Twins will continue their efforts to work towards a long-term solution to keep Minor League Baseball in Elizabethton.” Video of the WeekThe recent flare up of labor issues has brought back some painful memories from the disputes in 2002 that nearly resulted in a strike, but one fan shared a positive Twins-related experience from that time. Liz Melahn, who must be a Rockies fan based on her Twitter handle (@rockieslizard), shared a handwritten letter she received from Twins player rep at the time, Denny Hocking. What was so special about the letter? Melahn, a 15-year-old at the time, wrote a letter to every team in baseball. The only response she got was from Hocking. Here’s the original Tweet:

I would endorse that adjustment. There's a bit more effort in his delivery right now than I'm comfortable with.

Well Graterol threw plenty in EST before making his official stateside debut with the GCL Twins in late June, so I still think the same theory applies.

Ace. It’s the card the Twins have so desperately needed over the course of much of their history. There’s always a lot of debate over exactly who deserves that title, but most agree it’s probably fewer than 20 pitchers in all of baseball at any given time. Could Brusdar Graterol some day earn that title? Sure, but remember that some people also say there is also no such thing as a pitching prospect.Age: 19 (DOB: 8/26/1998) 2017 Stats (Rookie): 40.0 IP, 2.70 ERA, 45 K, 13 BB, 0.96 WHIP ETA: 2021 2017 Ranking: NA National Top 100 Rankings BA: NA | MLB: NA | ESPN: NA | BP: NA What’s To Like? How about a 100 mph fastball? That do anything for you? Graterol’s also got an impressive slider and his curveball is already turning some into believers. With everything else he already has in his arsenal, it’s going to make it that much easier for his changeup to play. That combination of eye-popping velocity and secondary offerings has several outlets listing him as an “honorable mention” or a “just missed” in their top 100 prospect rankings. Graterol struck out 28.7 percent of the hitters he faced last season, averaging 10.1 K/9, but he also gets a ton of ground balls. When batters managed to put a ball in play against him last year, it was on the ground 58.1 percent of the time. Another big plus for Graterol is his physique. He may have lost a year of development on the field thanks to a torn UCL, but he made sure that didn’t mean it was completely a lost year. In a piece for Baseball America, Phil Miller reported that Graterol has added 60 pounds of muscle since the Twins signed him as a 16-year-old. Most online profiles still list Graterol at 180 pounds, but Baseball America has him down as 225 in their Prospect Handbook. What’s Left To Work On? Graterol needs innings. He needs to show that he can stay healthy and handle a starter’s workload over a full season. Tommy John surgery cost him all of 2016, but even his 2017 debut was delayed due to a broken hand. Since he’s only pitched 51 innings in his professional career, we haven’t really seen enough from Graterol to know what else needs work. It’s a bit of a red flag that his walk rate increased from the GCL (1.9 BB/9) to Elizabethton (3.9 BB/9), but everything we can look at from a statistical angle has such a small sample size. Other than the health concerns, it’s just all the usual stuff you’d expect to worry about with any young pitcher. Can he develop a useful third pitch? Will the changeup be good enough to keep lefties off balance? How is he going to handle facing more advanced hitters? Where is he going to find room for all the Cy Young Awards he’s going to win. You know, stuff like that. What’s Next? Since he only threw 40 innings last season, it seems likely the Twins will want to limit Graterol’s innings to a certain extent. A pessimist would point out the fact that the Twins prospect who logged the most innings in his age 19 season last year (Fredderi Soto in the Dominican Summer League) only reached 53.2 frames. Teams are being a lot more careful with their pitchers these days, and that triple-digit heat may put extra stress on Graterol’s body. The optimist, however, would say that Jose Berrios increased his innings from just 30.2 to 103.2 between his ages 18 and 19 seasons. Graterol will likely stay back in Fort Myers, starting the year working in extended spring training, but he should surface in Cedar Rapids at some point in 2018. So what are we left with here? Well, Graterol is one of the highest ceiling/lowest floor prospects in all of baseball, let alone the Twins’ system. He definitely has true ace potential, already possessing two plus pitches. The questions that remain are 1) will he be able to command those pitches and, 2) can he stay healthy? TD Top Prospects: 16-20 TD Top Prospects: 11-15 TD Top Prospect: #10 Akil Baddoo TD Top Prospects: #8 (Coming Soon) Get to know more about Graterol and much more in the 2018 Minnesota Twins Prospect Handbook. ORDER NOW: 2018 Minnesota Twins Prospect Handbook (paperback, $15.99) ORDER NOW: 2018 Minnesota Twins Prospect Handbook (eBook, $10.99) The 2018 Minnesota Twins Prospect Handbook goes in-depth and provides player bios, scouting reports, statistics and much more on almost 160 Twins minor leaguers. Click here to view the article

The guys on the 40-man roster (everyone listed except Myles Jaye), are going to be using up an option year when they get sent to the minors anyway.

Both Kaat and Mudcat made the list.

The Twins were already in pursuit of pitching this offseason, but the news that Ervin Santana will miss 10-12 weeks really emphasizes the team’s need to add to its staff. The number of pitchers in the rotation at any given time is obviously five, but how many starting pitchers can a team expect to rely on over the course of a season?Last season, the Twins used an insane number of starting pitchers. Injuries in addition to some performance issues and odd roster shuffling (the Jaime Garcia game) all made for the perfect storm, and the 2017 Twins started 16 different pitchers. Ugh. That’s an abnormally high number, but over the past five seasons the Twins have averaged 11.8 different starting pitchers, 9.8 of whom made at least three starts. Some teams are a little more fortunate. Cleveland, for example, has only averaged 8.8 different starting pitchers per season over the past five years, 7.8 of whom made at least three starts. Not everyone’s so lucky. There were 315 pitchers who started at least one game in 2017, an average of 10.5 per team. Why so many? Well, the workhorse has become a dying breed. There were only 46 pitchers in all of baseball who made at least 30 starts. If you go back just to even 2012 and look at some of these same numbers, the differences are dramatic. There were 286 pitchers to start a game that year, 9.5 per team, and 65 hurlers made 30 or more starts. Shifting gears to the Twins, let’s take a look at who’s currently in the org, keeping in mind that the team will more than likely need to depend on 10 or 11 of these guys. This isn’t a power ranking of starting pitching options per se, I’ve broken them up into categories instead. Locks Ervin Santana Jose Berrios Kyle Gibson Adalberto Mejia No, Ervin won’t be ready for Opening Day, but the good news is that it sounds like he’ll be back with the Twins sometime in May. So I’m still going to include him as a lock. Extra Depth Aaron Slegers Dietrich Enns Felix Jorge Myles Jaye Slegers is really close to being a lock to make at least a few starts. His status will have a great deal to do with who/how many free agent starters are signed. All four of these guys made their major league debuts last season, Jaye as a member of the Tigers. The Twins signed him to a minor league deal in late November. New Role/In Recovery Tyler Duffey Trevor May Phil Hughes Michael Pineda Duffey is going to get the chance to stretch out in spring training, but if the injury bug hits the bullpen it would be no surprise to see him shifted back there. You could say the same thing about May, Hughes and Pineda, who are all in various stages of recovering from injuries. The plan for now is to prepare May to come back as a starter, but he of all people should know that plans can change. Rookies Stephen Gonsalves Fernando Romero Zack Littell Gonsalves has made a handful of starts at Triple-A, and is a good bet to debut sometime in the second half. But Romero (23 starts in Double-A) and Littell (14 starts in Double-A) are less experienced in the high minors. OK, so that gives us 15 pitchers currently inside the Twins organization who could realistically start at some point in 2018. That sounds like a lot, right? Sure, but there are a whole lot of question marks surrounding several of those players. Some of these names are not guys you’d trust right now to be successful at the major league level. It’d be fun to watch a couple of those rookies come up, but those guys could be in for rough adjustment due to the (idiotic) differences in the major and minor league baseballs. Remember how bad Berrios was in 2016? There’s also the fact that there will certainly be more injuries, and probably ones that keep guys out more than 10-12 weeks. What are the odds that one of these guys suffers a torn UCL or major shoulder injury? Knowing what we know today, how many more starting pitchers should the Twins add? I'd say at least two who can be counted on to be in the rotation and one more on a minor league deal. How does Yu Darvish, Jaime Garcia and Drew Hutchison sound? Is that too much to ask? How about Alex Cobb, Jason Vargas and A.J. Griffin? Fine, I'll settle for Andrew Cashner, Ubaldo Jimenez and Jesse Chavez. OK, you're right, that's taking it a little too far. What do you think? Who would you like to see the Twins target? Would you rather see them be aggressive or leave room for some of the young guns to emerge? Click here to view the article

For those questioning Rortvedt, check out my Prospect Spotlight Series article on him. Here's a big takeaway: From the start of June to the end of the season (54 games), Rortvedt hit .273/.324/.397 (.721 OPS). To put that into perspective, Lewin Diaz hit .291/.328/.393 (.721) over that same stretch. Rortvedt got off to a terrible start at the plate, but you have to remember in 2016 he was hitting against Wisconsin high school pitchers. He was also coming off his first spring training and catchers get a lot of work down in Fort Myers. I think he may have come out of the gates already dragging a bit. Personally, I'm willing to give him a free pass on the ugly first two months he had with the Kernels.

My bad, it was actually the eighth inning where Kirby got the single and stole second. He was the leadoff hitter in the 11th. This has been updated, good eye.

I think this analysis can give us some hope that Kyle Gibson's late-season surge was real. Once Gibby started to trust his four-seamer, it was like he was a brand new pitcher. Unfortunately, Gibson doesn't have any one pitch that comes close to as good as Ervin's slider, so it's a bit like comparing apples to oranges, but here's hoping a tweak in his arsenal gives Gibby a similar bump. I'm not going to bet the house on it, but at least there's hope.

LONG LIVE THE PALMBALL

I found a couple guys that have him beat, but it took a lot of digging. The first performance that came to mind when thinking about who may have bested Morris was Don Larsen's perfecto in Game 5 of the 1956 series. Nope. That was a .586 WPA game. Larsen had a 1-0 lead by the fifth inning and then a two-run cushion over the final three frames. I'm guessing that's why his number isn't higher. Madison Bumgarner's crazy five-inning save in Game 7 of 2014 stands out. Nope. That was a .600 WPA game. I mentioned how incredible Koufax was in '65. His Game 7 performance was worth .581 WPA. How about Bill Mazeroski's walk-off homer in Game 7 of the 1960 series? Nope. He had a .414 WPA that game, not even the highest on his own team. The Pirates entered the eight inning of that game trailing 7-4. They scored two runs and then Hal Smith hit a go-ahead, pinch-hit homer to give him a WPA of .636. Joe Carter? Big Papi? Randy Johnson? Curt Schilling? Nope. Bob Gibson? Reggie Jackson? Lou Gehrig? Christy Mathewson? Nope. In Game 6 of 2011 David Freese had a .964 WPA game. With two outs in the bottom of the ninth, he delivered a game-tying two-run triple. He added a walk-off homer in the bottom of the 11th. Pretty incredible. Then there's Babe Ruth, but not how you may have expected.This was Ruth as a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox. In Game 2 of the 1916 World Series, Ruth pitched 14 innings. He surrendered an inside-the-park home run to the third batter he faced but shutout the Brooklyn Robins from there on. Boston won it in the 14th inning with the final score of 2-1. For his efforts on the mound, Ruth racked up 1.082 WPA. He also drove in Boston's first run on a fielder's choice, but was 0-for-5 with a pair of strikeouts, giving him -.191 WPA at the plate. So if you want to account for both his pitching and hitting that day, Ruth had a WPA of .891 -- above Morris but behind Freese. I'm sure there are some other players/performances I didn't check into, but those were all the ones that came to mind.

One of the articles I considered writing for Sunday, which I may circle back to at some point, was a piece that pointed out the most underappreciated players of the 2001-10 run. Juan Rincon was definitely going to be on that list. The only other Twins reliever to post multiple 2.0+ fWAR seasons in team history is Joe Nathan, who did it four times.

Glad to hear you enjoyed it. Championship celebrations sure have escalated, huh? The Twins fan for the main picture of this article only looks like he's stage diving from about six or seven feet high. Some of those idiots in Philly were diving off street lights.

That Knoblauch trade worked out incredibly well. Milton and Guzman were key players in getting the team back to contention. Then Milton turned into Carlos Silva and Nick Punto while Buchanan was flipped for Jason Bartlett, extending the team's window of competition. For a long, long time I had hoped the Johan Santana trade was going to work out the same way. That through some kind of crazy spiderweb of trades it would all work out in the end. Can't win 'em all, I guess.

Thanks for sharing all these memories. I'm disappointed that the Met Club is going away at Target Field. I appreciated the fact that there was a place inside the stadium that acknowledged that time in Twins history.

Diehard football fans may disagree, but to a lot of people the best part of the Super Bowl is the commercials. I'm sure there will be some great ones tonight, but in the meantime I figured it’d be a good time to take a look back at my all-time favorite commercials featuring Twins players. The team has had some great ad campaigns over the years, but there's one that'll always have a special place in my heart.This list is obviously subjective, but I’d love to hear from you. What are your favorite ads produced by the Twins or featuring Twins players? Laurel Krahn (@wintwins on Twitter) has a wonderful playlist on YouTube with more than 100 Twins commercials. But even the Internet has its limitations. I’m sure there are some great older ones that aren’t out there on YouTube. 10. Joe Mauer Mean Joe Green Tribute 9. Sorta Deep Thoughts With Bert Blyleven and Carl Pavano 8. Ron Gardenhire on TC’s Natural Habitat 7. Kent Hrbek’s First Base Lessons for Joe Mauer 6. Get to Know Em: Cristian Guzman 5. Sorta Deep Thoughts With Justin Morneau and TC 4. Johan Santana/Joe Nathan Carpool 3. Torii Hunter Birthday party pinata 2. Michael Cuddyer’s Magic Show 1, Get to Know Em: Corey Koskie There were some tough choices, and I shared another 10 spots I really enjoyed on Twitter outside of this batch. A few of these are from the same ad campaigns, but they were so good I couldn’t narrow down to just one per year. The Twins renaissance in the early 2000s had more to do with the players on the field and their success than any ad campaign, but the Get to Know ‘Em commercials were brilliant. The Twins were a developing club packed with young talent, but the players were still mostly anonymous even in a lot of parts of Twins Territory. The team had been an afterthought for several years. In 2000, they averaged just 12,355 fans per game, topping only the Montreal Expos in attendance that season. To put that into some more perspective, the Tampa Bay Rays were dead last in attendance in 2017, but they drew 15,477 fans on average. Hunt Adkins was the agency behind those Get to Know ‘Em commercials that put the focus on the players, their stories and their backgrounds. They had a great four-year relationship with the Twins. The team has has been partnered with Periscope the past 13 years — I especially appreciated their Sorta Deep Thoughts commercials — but a new agency will be at the helm in 2018: Carmichael Lynch. Here’s a link to some of the agency’s work, which includes the Jack Link’s Beef Jerky Messin’ With Sasquatch ads. OK, now it’s your turn. What are your favorite Twins commercials? Click here to view the article

With the Super Bowl in town, it feels like as good a time as ever to revisit some of the greatest World Series performances by Twins players. There are a lot of ways someone could attempt to compile such a list, but I’m going to be using a stat called Win Probability Added.WPA tries to put into context an individual play’s impact on a team's odds of winning. So while Kent Hrbek’s grand slam in Game 6 of the 1987 World Series was a great accomplishment, his performance in that game doesn’t crack the top 10. The slam was Hrbek’s only hit in that game, it came in the sixth inning and the Twins were already ahead by a run. That was no doubt a massive play, but the Twins have had some huge performances among their 21 World Series contests. For more on WPA, check out the FanGraphs glossary. I also like MLB.com’s one-sentence explanation: "Its best use is for deciphering the impact of a specific player or play on a game's outcome." It’s a fun stat, but it has its limitations. For example, fielders don’t get any credit for WPA from key defensive plays. 10. Chili Davis, 1991 Game 3, .303 WPA Chili only had one plate appearance in this game, but it was a big one. With the Twins trailing 4-2 in the top of the eighth inning, Brian Harper led things off by reaching on an error. Davis came off the bench to pinch hit for the pitcher and Atlanta countered by bringing in Alejandro Pena to face him. Davis swatted a laser beam for an opposite-field homer to tie the game. Unfortunately, the Twins would eventually fall in the 12th inning. 9. Carl Willis, 1991 Game 6, .334 WPA Willis became the third Twins pitcher to appear in the seventh inning of this game after starter Scott Erickson was lifted and Mark Guthrie, the first man out of the pen, got into some further trouble. The first man Willis faced hit into a force out that scored the tying run from third base. Willis then struck out David Justice to end the seventh and worked scoreless frames in both the eighth and ninth innings to keep the game tied, helping set the stage for ... we'll get to that in a minute. 8. Kevin Tapani, 1991 Game 2, .335 WPA This was a great bend-but-don’t-break performance from Tapani. He gave up a pair of runs over eight innings, but got outs when he needed them most. He also may have gotten a little help from his first baseman. Wait, let me rephrase that, Tapani was bailed out by Ron Gant, who inexplicably just fell right off first base. Atlanta scratched across runs on sacrifice flies in the second and fifth innings. Scott Leius led off the eight with a go-ahead homer before Rick Aguilera nailed down the save in the ninth. 7. Les Straker, 1987 Game 3, .372 WPA Straker pitched six shutout innings before exiting this game with a 1-0 lead. He gave up four hits and two walks while tallying four strikeouts. Straker’s position on this list surprised me, but six shutout innings goes a long way toward helping a team win and this was a tight ballgame. Unfortunately, the Cardinals got to Juan Berenguer for three runs in the bottom of the seventh inning and cruised to victory from there. 6. Frank Viola, 1987 Game 7, .378 WPA Viola gave up a pair of runs in the second inning, but it was all sweet music from there. He struck out seven Cardinal batters over eight innings while limiting St. Louis to six hits and did not walk a batter. From the end of that shaky second frame forward, he retired 11 consecutive batters. Viola exited the game with a 4-2 lead and Jeff Reardon pitched a 1-2-3 ninth inning to close out the victory. 5. Jim Kaat, 1965 Game 2, .393 WPA Sandy Koufax was incredible in this series, but Kaat managed to outduel him in this one. It was 0-0 until the bottom of the sixth inning when the Twins tallied a pair of runs off Koufax. Kaat gave up his only run of the game in the top of the seventh, but the Twins scored three more runs against the Dodgers’ bullpen to win 5-1. Kaat pitched a complete game, giving up seven hits, all of them singles. He also had a two-out, two-run single in the bottom of the eighth inning to score the team’s final two runs. 4. Mike Pagliarulo, 1991 Game 4, .399 WPA This is the highest WPA game that came in a Twins loss. Pagliarulo opened the scoring with an RBI single off John Smoltz in the second inning. He added another base hit in the fourth before hitting a go-ahead solo homer in the seventh. So that’s a 3-for-3 day off a future Hall of Famer in which Pags drove in the team’s only two runs of the contest. He was pulled in the ninth inning to avoid a lefty-lefty matchup against Mike Stanton and the Braves won it on a walk-off sac fly in the bottom half of that inning. 3. Mudcat Grant, 1965 Game 6, .420 WPA (pitching + hitting) What a performance. Mudcat not only pitched a complete game, but he also socked a three-run dinger. Grant didn’t even give up a hit until the top of the fifth inning, after Bob Allison already secured him a two-run lead with a home run in the previous frame. Grant was just the seventh pitcher to homer in a World Series game and only six more hurlers have gone deep in the Fall Classic since. The last to do it was Joe Blanton (Phillies, 2008). 2. Kirby Puckett, 1991 Game 6, .593 WPA The big moment here was Kirby’s walk-off home run in the 11th inning, but he had an incredible game leading up to that moment. In his first at-bat, Puckett drove in Chuck Knoblauch on a triple. He later scored on a Shane Mack base hit. Puckett then made that incredible catch up against the plexiglass in the third inning (not accounted for by WPA), and delivered a game-tying sacrifice fly in the fifth. With the game still tied at 3-3 in the eighth inning, Puckett recorded a single and stole second base, though was stranded there. The next time he came up was in the 11th. And we will see you tomorrow night. Speaking of which ... 1. Jack Morris, 1991 Game 7, .845 WPA Of course it’s Morris, and it’s not even close. A 10-inning shutout in which the score was tied 0-0 the entire time he was on the mound? We’ll probably never see anything like it again. Atlanta got a runner to second base with one out in both the second and third innings. They got a man there with two down in the fourth. In the fifth, they had a runner at third with one out. In the eighth inning, they had a man on third with nobody out (hat tip to some Knoblauch deception on that one). Morris got out of every jam. When he needed a strikeout, he got one. The one moment when he desperately needed a double play, he got it. Morris would not be beaten on that day. Click here to view the article

A new NFL champion will be crowned in at US Bank Stadium later this evening, which will set off a massive celebration in the new champ’s home city. Parties, parades, more merchandise than you can imagine and, of course, commemorative souvenir special sections in their newspapers. Let’s take a quick look back at the Star Tribune’s special sections from the 1987 and 1991 World Series for old times’ sake.Game 7 of the 1987 World Series was Sunday, Oct. 25, and the special section was published that following Thursday. The cover was a giant picture from the parade with this box of text with the headline “Minnesota Magic.” Download attachment: 87FrontText.jpg That may be a little difficult to read, so I typed it up below. I get goosebumps every time I read it. “America, you gotta believe.” The banner hanging in the Metrodome outfield in Game 7 shouted the conviction of a baseball team and its fans. It’s finally Minnesota's turn to be No. 1. World Champions. They were a team of strugglers, overachievers, regular guys — long on heart, short on superstars. That was the best part because it was so Minnesota. A team considered so unlikely to win it all that Las Vegas took 150-1 odds against the Twins. It seemed magical. The Twins were unbeatable in the Dome, where fans created the ultimate home-field advantage. Commissioner Peter Ueberroth watched the World Series and declared, “These are the best baseball fans I have ever seen.” The Minnesota Twins made sports history this October. You helped make it happen. Now remember. This photo of Kent Hrbek losing his mind — arms up in celebration, dogpile already starting to form — is a classic. Download attachment: 87Hrbek.jpg You can’t talk about a Twins title without mentioning the Homer Hanky. Here’s a great ad from the paper: Download attachment: 87AdHanky.jpg Along with all the ring, special news coverage, merchandising and all that stuff, winning a title gives you the opportunity to do all sorts of other silly stuff, like make music videos. Here’s an ad for the Berenguer Boogie: Download attachment: 87AdBerenguer.jpg What was the Berenguer Boogie? Thankfully someone has uploaded it to YouTube, because words can’t do it justice: Game 7 of the 1991 World Series was on Sunday Oct. 27 and, again, the special section was released the following Thursday, which was Halloween. Hmmm, Halloween 1991 … why does that day seem to stick out for some reason? … Download attachment: 91Cover.jpg It was a series to savor, indeed. A variation of this iconic photo of Dan Gladden and an upended Greg Olsen made the cover of Sports Illustrated. Dazzle was tagged out on the play, which came in Game 1 of the series, but the Twins had already built a four-run lead by then. Download attachment: 91Dazzle.jpg Here’s another just incredible shot: The Catch. Download attachment: 91TheCatch.jpg Kirby looks like he must’ve found a trampoline hidden on the warning track to catapult himself that high off the ground. Twins fans looked on with bated breath, but we know Kirby wasn’t going to let the Twins lose that night. His walkoff homer later that evening went to nearly the same spot. Of course, Puckett’s blast cleared the 13-foot tall plexiglass wall and Jack Buck delivered one of the most famous home run calls of all time. Don't worry, we'll get to Jack Morris and Game 7 a little later today. Let’s get some good vibes flowing. What are some of your favorite memories from the Twins’ World Series championships? The Twin Cities are buzzing with the Super Bowl in town, but what was the aftermath of those championship seasons like? Click here to view the article