FINLEY'S BRAINS PUT HAMMER ON TWINS' BRAWN : ANGELS 4, MINNESOTA 1.Byline: Eric Noland Daily News Staff Writer The Minnesota Twins The Minnesota Twins are a professional baseball team based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Twins are a member of the Central Division of Major League Baseball's American League. From to the present, the Twins have played in the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. hit town Friday wielding surprising pop. Their .300 team batting average batting average n. Baseball A measure of a batter's performance obtained by dividing the total of base hits by the number of times at bat, not including walks. Noun 1. and 181 runs were major-league highs. And they'd been particularly hot lately, averaging better than 10 runs per game over their past nine. It followed that rickety rick·et·y adj. rick·et·i·er, rick·et·i·est 1. Likely to break or fall apart; shaky. 2. Feeble with age; infirm. 3. Of, having, or resembling rickets. , ol' Chuck Finley But Finley hasn't won 118 games in this sport on power and forkballs alone. A bit of guile has served him well, too, and he used all he could muster in silencing the Twins for a 4-1 victory before 24,505 fans at Anaheim Stadium. It secured for the Angels their 11th win in the past 15 games. They are 10-2 at home. Finley (4-2) hasn't registered a shutout in nearly a year, and his earned-run average entering this start was a gaudy 7.44. But he held Minnesota scoreless on four hits through seven innings. The left-hander's bid for his 12th career shutout ended when Pat Meares Patrick James Meares (born September 6, 1968 in Salina, Kansas) is a former Major League Baseball shortstop. Meares was the 12th round draft pick of the 1990 amateur draft by the Minnesota Twins, from Wichita State University. led off the eighth with a home run to left. That issue dispensed with, manager Marcel Lachemann Marcel Ernest Lachemann (born June 13, 1941 in Los Angeles, California) is a baseball pitching coach and a former relief pitcher for the Oakland Athletics. After a three-year stint (1969 - 1971 in the majors, he became the pitching coach for the California Angels in 1984. turned the ninth inning over to a youngster who is emerging as one of the most dominant closers around. Troy Percival Troy Eugene Percival (born August 9, 1969 in Fontana, California) is a Major League Baseball reliever on the St. Louis Cardinals. Percival came out of retirement on June 8, 2007 when he signed a minor league deal with the Cardinals[1]. didn't disappoint, either. The right-hander retired the side in order to earn his 11th save, which kept him in a tie with Philadelphia's Ricky Bottalico Throughout this game, meanwhile, Finley offered a clinic in troubleshooting. In five of his eight innings, he failed in his bid to retire the leadoff batter, but he repeatedly worked out of jams, stranding a runner at second to end the first, third, fifth and eighth innings. The last of those was particularly dramatic. After the home run to Meares, Finley yielded a single to No. 9 batter Mike Durant, who eventually moved over to second on a wild pitch. But with two out and Paul Molitor standing in with his .361 batting average, Finley ended the threat (and his outing) with a strikeout, his seventh of the night. The Angels struck for just enough offense against Twins left-hander Rich Robertson (0-5), but didn't go by the book in doing so. Lachemann stacked his lineup with seven right-side bats, only to see the two lefties do most of the damage. Garret Anderson, the second-year left fielder out of Kennedy High School, doubled in the Angels' first run, in the second inning, and later scored after his infield single opened the third. Jim Edmonds, meanwhile, whacked a solo home run to center in the seventh - Edmonds' 10th homer of the season but first against a lefty. Also: Randy Velarde was out of the lineup for the third straight game. |
|
||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion