August 29, 1995: Brad Radke’s first career shutout provides glimmer of hope for Twins

As the rebuilding Minnesota Twins limped through the dog days of summer in 1995, future Hall of Famer Kirby Puckett, a 12-year veteran unknowingly in his final season,1 knew the young players on the roster would watch how he handled adversity. So even as the basement-dwelling Twins toiled more than 30 games out of first place in the American League Central Division, Puckett refused to give up on the campaign.

“I can’t speak for anybody else, but every game means a lot to me,” the 35-year-old right fielder said in mid-August, about 10 days before the team enjoyed a revival over the final five weeks of the season. “I don’t care if we’re a hundred [games] out, you’ve got to play to win. … We understand the games don’t mean nothing, but we’re still professionals; we still have to play the same.”2

One of the franchise’s many young players was Brad Radke, a 22-year-old rookie pitcher who had become Minnesota’s number-one starter as the season progressed. On August 29 it became clear that Radke had embraced his place atop the rotation and taken Puckett’s lead – he had not given up on the campaign either.

That day, Radke, who earned an Opening Day roster spot as the Twins’ fifth starter despite never pitching in Triple A, fired his first career shutout in a 2-0 win over the playoff-hopeful Texas Rangers in front of 9,811 fans at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome.

“To shut the Rangers lineup down, you have to pitch a whale of a ballgame,” Twins manager Tom Kelly said of Texas. “It’d be hard to call [Radke] an ace just a year out of Double-A ball, but he did pitch a magnificent game.”3

The Rangers, led by respected veteran hitters like future Hall of Famer Iván Rodríguez, Juan González, Will Clark, and Rusty Greer,4 never mounted a rally against Radke, who came into the start with a non-intimidating 9-12 record, a 5.48 ERA, and an AL-leading 25 home runs allowed.

Radke’s teammates supported him offensively from the get-go. Two-time All-Star second baseman Chuck Knoblauch led off the bottom of the first with a double off Texas starter Kevin Gross. After Rich Becker struck out and Puckett popped out, Knoblauch went to third on a passed ball and scored when Pedro Muñoz poked a single to right-center. Knoblauch smacked a leadoff homer to left in the fourth, and he added his third hit of the game with a ground-rule double in the fifth to raise his batting average to .341.5

“I’m seeing the ball just as it’s coming out of the pitcher’s hand. It’s not as big as a watermelon, but I am seeing the ball extremely well. My first few years, I did what I had to do to stay in the big leagues,” said Knoblauch, the 1991 AL Rookie of the Year who hit better than .300 from 1994 to ’96 but had only 17 career homers coming into the game. “But by now, I’m able to do different things with different pitches. It starts in batting practice, and if you stay with your approach, it doesn’t go away.”6

Gross, who after the game jokingly compared Knoblauch to AL power hitters Mo Vaughn and José Canseco,7 took the loss and fell to 7-13.8 He was also on the wrong end of Minnesota’s only other shutout in 1995 – Kevin Tapani’s 4-0 win in Arlington on June 3 – but played a key role in helping the Rangers secure the first postseason berth in franchise history, a year later in 1996.9

Light-hitting Texas rookie shortstop Benji Gil singled with one out in the fifth,10 but Radke retired the next 14 batters to complete the shutout. His dominance aided Minnesota’s bullpen, which had allowed 14 runs over 13⅔ innings during a four-game series with the Milwaukee Brewers just before the Texas series.

Greer’s second-inning double and Clark’s fourth-inning single were Texas’s only other hits, while Otis Nixon and Mark McLemore drew harmless walks. Nixon suggested that the offensive struggles may have come from overlooking a last-place team,11 but others on the roster thought Radke deserved the credit.

“He threw fastballs over the dish, and we just missed them,” Clark said. “Other days you hit them and every one ends up in the seats.”12

Coupled with a 4-3 walk-off win the night before, Minnesota won back-to-back games for only the 10th time in the season. Radke became just the seventh Twins rookie ever to reach 10 wins.13

“Ten wins is great for a rookie on a team that’s lost a lot more than it’s won,” Knoblauch said, in reference to Minnesota’s 41-72 record. “I’m excited for him. He was throwing everything for strikes and was in complete control of the game. It wasn’t a fluke.”14

Radke needed 101 pitches to finish his first career complete game.15 He struck out three and induced 13 fly outs from a team that had roughed him up twice earlier in the season.16 Texas, despite dropping to 59-56 with its sixth loss in eight games, maintained a half-game lead over the Brewers and Seattle Mariners and a 1½-game cushion over the Kansas City Royals in the AL wild-card race.

Mike Trombley followed Radke’s effort with 7⅔ innings of work the next night, and Minnesota’s 6-2 victory secured its first three-game series sweep of the season. The Twins won 17 of their final 33 games, spoiling Milwaukee’s17 and Kansas City’s18 playoff aspirations as they heated up in September. At 56-88, the Twins tied with the Toronto Blue Jays for the worst record in the majors and sat 44 games behind the pennant-winning Cleveland Indians, but players were encouraged by the team’s play down the stretch.19

“The last two months we played really good baseball,” said outfielder Marty Cordova, the AL Rookie of the Year. “Some teams came in and thought they could walk all over us, and we kind of embarrassed them. I think that maybe now some of the guys have more confidence and realize that we can play together and win some games.”20

Having a confident starter like Radke helped, too.

Radke was described as “efficient” and “nondescript” by executives before the season,21 but Kelly saw a potential star with strong command and suggested that Radke “has more stuff than many of the pitchers on our staff.”22 The Twins opened the year with veterans Scott Erickson, Kevin Tapani, and Pat Mahomes and rookies LaTroy Hawkins and Radke in the rotation, but through attrition and trades, the pitching lineup had a different look by season’s end.

Radke won two of his first four starts to overtake Mahomes and Hawkins in the rotation.23 In July Minnesota began dismantling what was left of the pitching staff that helped win the 1991 World Series. On July 6 the Twins traded closer Rick Aguilera to the Boston Red Sox for 22-year-old rookie Frankie Rodríguez,24 who immediately slotted into the rotation spot vacated a day later when Minnesota sent Erickson to the Baltimore Orioles.25 On July 31 the Twins shipped Tapani to the Los Angeles Dodgers26 – a move that completed Radke’s ascension to the top of the rotation.

Radke made 11 starts after the trade deadline, and the August 29 shutout helped him post a 4.73 ERA in that span – an improvement over his season-long mark of 5.32. His outing on August 29 was Minnesota’s first shutout at the Metrodome since June 11, 1994.27

For the season, Twins pitchers posted a major-league-worst 5.76 ERA, allowing 6.2 runs per game – the highest per-game total for an American or National League team since 1939.28 Of the 46 players who appeared in a game, 19 were rookies. Minnesota used a league-high-tying 13 starting pitchers throughout the season – including rookies Radke, Hawkins, Rodríguez, José Parra, Scott Klingenbeck, Rich Robertson, and Oscar Muñoz.

“I know I’m on a long-range plan, but the one thing I’m trying to address is the pitching depth,” said general manager Terry Ryan, a former Twins draft pick who assumed his post in September 1994. “If we have a strength in the minor-league system, it’s the pitching at Class Double A and Triple A. We do have some people we think will be good. That’s the one thing I’m counting on for ’96 and ’97. We can put together a pitching staff where we have some depth, and who knows, if we add someone with experience for stability. …”29

Radke played a significant role on Ryan’s rebuilt Twins – though it took them longer than hoped to return to the winning ways that produced three 90-win seasons and two World Series titles between 1987 and ’92. Minnesota endured five more losing seasons from 1996 to 2000 before getting over .500 with an 85-77 mark in 2001.30 The Twins won four AL Central titles between 2002 and ’06 – the final five seasons of Radke’s career.31

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Joseph Wancho and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted the Baseball-Reference.com, Stathead.com, and Retrosheet.org websites for pertinent material and box scores. He also used information obtained from news coverage by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Dallas Morning News, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and The Sporting News. Special thanks to the Dallas Public Library for research assistance.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/MIN/MIN199508290.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1995/B08290MIN1995.htm

Photo credit: Brad Radke, Trading Card Database.

Notes

1 Puckett was forced to retire after developing vision problems at the end of spring training in 1996. He announced his retirement in a tearful ceremony on July 12, 1996.

2 Jim Souhan, “Sparky: Youth No Excuse for Losing,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, August 20, 1995: 12C.

3 Associated Press, “Rangers Shut Out by Twins, 2-0,” Marshall (Texas) News Messenger, August 29, 1995: 2B.

4 Leading power threat Mickey Tettleton, who hit a team-high 32 home runs for the Rangers in 1995, missed the game with an injured knee.

5 Knoblauch’s average ranked third in the AL behind Seattle’s Edgar Martínez (.364) and Milwaukee’s B.J. Surhoff (.356). By season’s end, Martínez won the batting crown (.356), while Knoblauch finished as the runner-up (.333). Surhoff struggled down the stretch and finished sixth (.320).

6 Associated Press, “Chuck Who? Not Now,” St. Cloud (Minnesota) Times, August 30, 1995: 3C.

7 Gerry Fraley, “Twins Silence Rangers,” Dallas Morning News, August 30, 1995: 1B.

8 Only Tigers veteran Mike Moore (14) had more losses than Gross. Gross finished the season at 9-15, leaving him tied with Moore and Chicago White Sox starter Jason Bere for the most losses in the AL. Paul Wagner of the Pittsburgh Pirates led the National League with 16 losses.

9 Gross, who had posted only three winning records in his first 13 seasons, went 11-8 in 1996 as the Rangers won the AL West Division and broke a 35-year postseason drought since their inception as the expansion Washington Senators in 1961.

10 Coming into the game, Gil had the lowest batting average among qualified AL hitters (.216) and had the second-most strikeouts (114).

11 T.R. Sullivan, “Twins’ Knoblauch, Rookie Stifle Rangers,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, August 30, 1995: C1.

12 Fraley.

13 Prior to the franchise’s relocation to Minneapolis, 16 rookie pitchers for the Washington Senators had reached 10 wins. Other Twins rookies to reach 10 wins were Bert Blyleven (10 in 1970), Jim Hughes (16 in 1975), Paul Thormodsgard (11 in 1977), Roger Erickson (14 in 1978), Ken Schrom (15 in 1983), and Kevin Tapani (12 in 1990).

14 “Rangers Shut Out by Twins, 2-0.”

15 Only Baltimore Orioles ace Mike Mussina had completed a game with fewer pitches earlier in the 1995 season, needing 100 pitches to beat the Cleveland Indians on May 17.

16 In back-to-back starts on May 29 and June 1, Radke allowed a combined 10 runs on 19 hits in a pair of losses to the Rangers.

17 Minnesota took three of four games from Milwaukee in the first series of September, sending the Brewers below .500. That series marked the start of a 6-21 month for the Brewers, who finished the season at 65-79.

18 In a five-game series September 18-21, the Twins beat the Royals four times. Kansas City fell four games behind in the wild-card race with only nine games to play. The Royals finished the season at 70-74.

19 The only other season the Minnesota Twins had finished last in the majors was 1982, when they finished 60-102 – one game worse than the Cincinnati Reds.

20 Ron Lesko (Associated Press), “New Players, Same Results,” St. Cloud Times, October 3, 1995: 1C.

21 Jim Souhan, “Radke Is Poised for Debut,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, April 25, 1995: 1C.

22 Sid Hartman, “Laettner Optimistic About Next Season,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, April 24, 1995: 2C.

23 Hawkins, who enjoyed a 20-year career, was shelled in his first taste of major-league action. After he posted a 13.50 ERA in three starts, the Twins sent him back to Triple A on May 11 and went to a four-man rotation. Mahomes, who had heightened expectations after going 9-5 in 21 starts in 1994, also struggled out of the gate. Mahomes pitched less than three innings in four of his five starts. He had a 0-3 record and a 14.29 ERA after allowing 27 earned runs over 17 innings. He surrendered eight home runs and walked 12 batters.

24 The Red Sox also sent Minnesota minor-league left fielder J.J. Johnson as a player to be named later to complete the deal. Aguilera returned to the Twins on a free-agent contract in 1996 and started for the first time since 1989. He returned to the closer’s role in ’97 and remained in Minnesota until the Chicago Cubs acquired him in a midseason trade in 1999.

25 The Twins received Scott Klingenbeck, who pitched in 18 games in 1995, and Kimera Bartee, who arrived in late-September as the player to be named later.

26 In return, Minnesota received José Parra, who joined the rotation down the stretch, Ron Coomer, Greg Hansell, and Chris Latham, who arrived in October as the player to be named later. The Twins also sent reliever Mark Guthrie to the Dodgers in the deal.

27 Tapani and the Twins beat the White Sox, 6-0.

28 The Philadelphia Athletics surrendered 6.7 runs per game, while the St. Louis Browns gave up 6.6 rpg.

29 Jim Souhan, “Twins Looking Ahead to 1997,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, August 8, 1995: 1C.

30 Even during those trying seasons, Radke still found success. In 1997 he won 20 games as the Twins finished 68-94, and he earned the only All-Star selection of his career in 1998 after piling up nine wins by the All-Star break.

31 Radke matched Puckett by retiring after playing 12 seasons exclusively with the Twins.