Yankees Suffer Shutout as Twins Take Series Lead
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Johan Santana and the Minnesota Twins escaped trouble with the help of a record-setting five double plays, Jacque Jones homered, and the Twins beat the Yankees 2-0 last night to win their eighth straight opener in a postseason series.
Minnesota’s outfield twice denied the Yankees with jumping catches – left fielder Shannon Stewart saved one run and possibly two on Ruben Sierra’s shot in the second, and center fielder Torii Hunter pulled in an eighth-inning drive by Alex Rodriguez at the top of the wall.
Hunter also threw out John Olerud at the plate in the second, completing one of the double plays by the Twins, who set a record for twin killings in a nine-inning postseason game.
Brad Radke starts for the AL Central champions tonight, trying to take a 2-0 lead in the best-of-five series, which shifts to the noisy Metrodome in Minneapolis starting Friday.
The Yankees, who lost the first game of all three postseason series they played last year, are in a familiar position: They have dropped the first round opener in three of the last four seasons – winning the series each time, but losing to Anaheim two years ago after leading 1-0.
Santana, unbeaten in 16 starts since the All-Star break, allowed eight hits in seven innings, the most off him since May 23. Four of the Yankees’ first six batters reached safely and 10 of the first 24, but Santana kept escaping.
Juan Rincon pitched the eighth and Joe Nathan finished for the save with the Twins’ only 1-2-3 inning of the game. The Yankees, shut out for the second straight time in postseason play, went 0-for-6 with runners in scoring position.
The closest the Yankees came to scoring was in the seventh. Sierra hit a drive past the left-field foul pole – leftfield umpire Jerry Crawford signaled a home run, but after a huddle by several umpires, the call was correctly reversed to foul, drawing boos from the sellout crowd of 55,749.
Mike Mussina, the most dependable starter on the weakest Yankees’ rotation in years, allowed his first run in the third on an RBI single by Stewart, who was 3-for-3 with two RBIs against Mussina this summer in the pitcher’s first start off the disabled list.
Minnesota had lost 20 of its previous 23 games against the Yankees, including last year’s playoff series, and New York repeatedly appeared to be on the verge of breaking ahead in this one.
Bernie Williams took a called third strike on an off-speed pitch with two on in the first, the ninth pitch of his at-bat, and Rodriguez easily was caught stealing at third.
Then in the second, after Jorge Posada and Hideki Matsui singled to start the inning, the outfield Gardenhire calls the Soul Patrol took over. Sierra hit a drive to deep left that Stewart jumped and caught just in front of the wall. Olerud then flied to center, and Hunter threw out Posada trying to score.
Also yesterday, Major League Baseball announced that it would not punish Yankees outfielder Gary Sheffield for his admission that he had used a steroid cream provided by the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative.