June 27, 2009: Josh Kinney earns first major-league victory behind Pujols’ power

On a mercilessly hot, mid-afternoon day at Busch Stadium, the St. Louis Cardinals, behind the prodigious power of star first baseman Albert Pujols, defeated the Minnesota Twins 5-3 on June 27, 2009. Pujols’ two home runs accounted for four of the five Cardinals runs and put reliever Josh Kinney, recently recalled from Triple-A Memphis, in position to earn his first major-league victory. “It wasn’t the easiest day to play,” remarked Kinney, acknowledging the high temperature, although Pujols might have begged to differ.1 “I just try to be consistent,” he said matter-of-factly after the game. “I went out there and executed today.”2

Pujols’ heroics were crucial to a team having lost four of its last five games and struggling to keep pace with the Milwaukee Brewers atop the National League Central Division. The Cardinals would eventually gain a commanding division lead with a 20-6 record in August en route to a playoff appearance against the Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League Division Series (where they were swept in three games). On June 27, however, the Cardinals were a struggling team in search of consistency.

One area of concern, the back end of the rotation, was on full display early in the game. Cardinals starter Todd Wellemeyer, who posted a 6.89 ERA in six June starts amid struggles with his pitching mechanics, was far from sharp.3 He gave up four hits, walked four batters, and threw a wild pitch in 2⅓ innings of work, allowing three runs along the way.

Even with his inconsistent performance, Wellemeyer almost escaped all three runs in the second inning when left fielder Chris Duncan made a valiant diving attempt to catch a fly ball for the third out. To Duncan’s chagrin, the ball glanced off his glove and rather than an out, Twins shortstop Brendan Harris ended up with a three-run single.

Wellemeyer managed to complete the second inning, but in the third, trailing 3-2 with two Twins on base and one out, he was yanked by manager Tony La Russa. As La Russa said after the game, “I just feel like if I hadn’t gone to the pen and tried to change something, the guys would think this game isn’t worth working for. [Wellemeyer] had it, lost it. He’s searching.”4

Besides earning the victory, Kinney added two “firsts” to his career résumé. After finishing the third inning for Wellemeyer, Kinney unexpectedly got his only major-league at-bat in the bottom half of the inning when La Russa let him hit for himself with two outs and the bases loaded. Kinney came out swinging, but failed to make contact, striking out on three pitches.

Kinney returned to the mound for the top of the fourth and recorded two more outs before leaving the game. However, thanks to three runs in the bottom of the third—two of them on Pujols’ go-ahead two-run homer, his second home run of the day—Kinney’s 1⅓ innings of work put him in position for the win. Solid relief from five more pitchers held the Twins in check the rest of the game and Kinney had his only regular-season major-league victory.

It was a satisfying milestone for a pitcher who had helped the Cardinals win the 2006 World Series by throwing 6⅓ scoreless innings in the postseason (including a victory in Game Two of the National League Championship Series), but whose career had since been derailed by injury. “Trever picked me up,” said Kinney, referring to reliever Trever Miller’s work to close out the fourth inning. “The rest is history.”5

Another pitcher in search of a significant win that day was Twins starter Kevin Slowey, who entered the game with a 10-2 record. A win would have given him the major-league lead in victories; instead, Slowey ran into Albert Pujols. “He’s great for the game,” Slowey said of Pujols after he allowed five runs in his three innings. “A tremendous hitter, a tremendous athlete, everything I’ve heard he’s a tremendous player. It doesn’t make it any easier giving up a couple of home runs to him.”6 Slowey was unable to add to his win total in 2009; his next start, on July 3, again lasted only three innings and subsequent wrist surgery ended his season prematurely.

While the Cardinals improved to 41-35 with their win and remained in a first-place tie with the Brewers atop the NL Central Division, the loss for the Twins left them holding third place in the AL Central Division with a record of 38-38. The disappointing performance came in spite of a superb season from catcher Joe Mauer, who appeared on the cover of the June 29 issue of Sports Illustrated. Mauer eventually won the American League Most Valuable Player Award, leading the league in batting average (.365), on-base percentage (.444), and slugging percentage (.587), while hitting a career-high 28 home runs. Said Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Jeff Karstens at the time: “He’s a special breed. He never seems tense up there. I’d say he’s the best hitter in the American League. You have [Albert] Pujols in the NL and Joe Mauer in the AL.”7

Mauer was an on-base machine during the three-game series with the Cardinals, reaching safely in five of 10 plate appearances. In the June 27 game, however, he did not start and received only a late-inning opportunity as a pinch-hitter, during which he grounded out to the first baseman.

The man who fielded Mauer’s groundball was Pujols, who won the Most Valuable Player Award in the National League at season’s end. Pujols was relatively quiet in the first and third games of the series (2-for-7 with a walk), but erupted in the second game to add to his league-leading home-run and RBI totals. He ended the season as the National League leader in multiple categories including runs (124), home runs (47), and total bases (374).

The Twins hovered around .500 for the rest of the summer, but eventually won 11 of 12 games in September to draw even with Detroit in the AL Central Division. Ultimately, they claimed the division crown after winning a dramatic one-game playoff against the Tigers—a wild 6-5 win in 12 innings in what was the final game ever played in the Metrodome. Mirroring the Cardinals’ eventual playoff fate, the Twins were swept by the New York Yankees in three games in the Division Series.

Fans who braved the heat and witnessed the Cardinals’ 5-3 victory over the Twins may not remember the inning-by-inning detail of the game. Still, they can find satisfaction knowing that they saw two eventual MVPs competing on opposing teams, two teams trying to gain traction on their paths to the playoffs, and two career firsts for a little-known Cardinals reliever who found himself in the right place at the right time for his only regular-season victory.

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Bruce Slutsky and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org for statistical data and game notes and YouTube.com for game footage.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/SLN/SLN200906270.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/2009/B06270SLN2009.htm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgNB6xLK9eo

Notes

1 Joe Strauss, “Cards Leave Twins Seeing Double—Cardinals 5, Twins 3,” St Louis Post-Dispatch, June 28, 2009: C1.

2 Strauss.

3 Strauss.

4 “Pujols Adds to Home Run Tally, Boosts Cardinals,” ESPN.com, June 27, 2009, https://www.espn.com/mlb/recap/_/gameId/290627124.

5 Strauss.

6 “Pujols Adds to Home Run Tally.”

7 Tom Verducci, “Joe Mauer Will Serenely, Politely Crush You,” Sports Illustrated, June 29, 2009: 41.