This weird Twins team will face the Red Sox on Thursday afternoon with a chance to sweep them in a three game series. They also swept Boston at Target Field in 2006 and 2015.
It's a weird team because it can battle a Corey Kluber, Chris Sale and David Price and win but are four games under .500 and 5.5 games in back of Cleveland in the AL Central. They can be tough to play at times and perplexing to watch at others.
But what games like Thursday's do is keep the Twins believing they can get hot and make things interesting. Especially after the run of starters they have faced.
“Yeah, after the game when you acknowledge who’s on the mound," outfielder Max Kepler said. "I feel like we go into games and we’re kind of blind to who’s on the mound and we grind together, which is awesome about this team. You can’t be hitting. You can be hot, cold. You can be throwing gems or blowing gems, it doesn't’t change the aspect on each other’s perspective on the teammates in this room. We just go out there and give it our all.”
Twins manager Paul Molitor joked that it's the Blaine Hardys and the Shane Biebers of baseball that are giving them the most trouble. They have won games started by some accomplished pitchers, but now they have to - as Molitor says - get greedy. They will be taken more seriously if they can put their throat on the Red Sox on Thursday, score some runs of another good pitcher in Rick Porcello, and take the series.
Robbie Grossman (.308), Logan Morrison (.294) and Bobby Wilson (.364) are among Twins players who have had success against Porcello.
"We’ve got another (big game) tomorrow to finish out the series, and we need to start finishing out series," Twins righthander Lance Lynn said. "So far we’ve won two in a row and it would be nice to have a sweep tomorrow. It’s a good team over there and we’ve just got to come in ready to play tomorrow."
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La Velle E. Neal III has covered baseball for the Star Tribune since 1998 (the post-Knoblauch era). Born and raised in Chicago, he grew up following the White Sox and hating the Cubs. He attended both the University of Illinois and Illinois-Chicago and began his baseball writing career at the Kansas City Star. He can be heard occasionally on KFAN radio, lending his great baseball mind to Paul Allen and other hosts.
Phil Miller covered three seasons of Twins baseball, but that was at a different ballpark for a different newspaper. Now Miller returns to the baseball beat after joining the Star Tribune as the Gopher football writer in 2010, and he won't miss the dingy dome for a minute. In addition to the Twins and Gophers, Miller covered the Utah Jazz and the NBA for six years at The Salt Lake Tribune.
