Twins are now off to the best start in franchise history. In an interview with MPR’s Lorna Benson, baseball analyst Kevin Hennessy attributes most of the team's early success to good pitching.
As an example of the success of 2001 season thus far, Brad Radke became the major league's first seven-game winner, as Minnesota Twins beat the visiting Boston Red Sox 5-3. The right-hander improved to 7-1.
SPEAKER 1: They're getting real solid starting pitching. Their frontline relief pitching has been really good, and they haven't even had to go into their last three guys in the bullpen. And everyone else seems to keep improving somewhat like we talked about in the preseason interview, that the team seems to be maturing, and they seem to be maturing together.
And in the Twins small market situation, that's what they're after. They want all these guys to mature at the same time. They want to have some of them under contract. And all of a sudden, they've got a good product on the field.
SPEAKER 2: What's the atmosphere like in the Dome?
SPEAKER 1: Well, the attendance has been rising substantially. I mean, they're not selling out every night. But I think last night, there were 22,000. The night before, 15,000. And a year ago, the crowds were maybe 9,000. And that's on paper. That's not counting the season ticket buyers who paid $1 a seat out in the outfield.
That's one piece. There's more people there. I think the second piece is that the fans are coming out, they're expecting a win, or they're not expecting the Twins to lie down and just lose, like in the past. There's a certain underlying hope going on at this point, where they might get behind. But everyone's not panicking or worrying. I think there's a certain amount of that with some of us that have watched him over the last few years.
On Saturday night, after I watched him actually get beat pretty bad, well, in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, here we go. This is the real team is coming to the forefront. But since then, they've played well. Even in their loss the other night against Boston, they played well in that game. And they seem to play well a lot more than they're playing poorly.
SPEAKER 2: So how far can the team go this season?
SPEAKER 1: Well, we all want to say that they're going to go all the way. Realistically, earlier in the season, I was thinking, at best, they'd be over .500. If they just played .500 ball the rest of the season, it would be an excellent season for them, considering what they've done in the last nine years.
But if they actually did keep playing like, they're playing, this could be a season somewhat like the Chicago White Sox put on last year, where they had the same situation. They had a lot of good players. They had a lot of young players that had matured to the place where they had a lot of good players on the same team at the same time.
I think the Twins might even have some advantages over the White Sox in that they have good pitching maturing at the right time. And pitching is, I think, a bigger part of the game, some say 90%. I wouldn't go that far. But a bigger part of the game than hitting. Whereas, I think what the Twins are missing from what that White Sox team had is a solid veteran leader.
And even in the case of the White Sox, their solid veteran leader let them down in the playoffs. So who knows? Maybe a young team, inexperienced team that is maturing at the right time might be better. We don't know. It's an exciting story, though. We're hoping it'll keep going like that.
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