Twins' minor-leaguers are a cut above the rest

By Andy Kent
Naples Daily News

ST. PETERSBURG — Experience in the postseason is a valuable commodity on the baseball diamond, no matter at what level it was gleaned.

For the Minnesota Twins, the depth of their minor league system is being well-illustrated this year with four of their six affiliates reaching the playoffs.

Only the Double-A New Britain Rock Cats and the rookie-level Gulf Coast League Twins failed to advance, meaning 100 Twins prospects are learning the differences between regular-season baseball and playoff baseball, something that cannot be taught on a practice field.

Five-time American League Gold Glove-winning center fielder Torii Hunter got his first taste of the postseason as a professional in 1995 as a member of the Class A Fort Myers Miracle. The 31-year-old Arkansas native was two years removed from playing for Pine Bluff High School, and he nearly won a Florida State League championship in Fort Myers’ first-ever trip under then-manager Al Newman.

“I remember that. It was exciting. That was my first time in pro ball going to any kind of playoffs,” Hunter said before Wednesday’s 4-2 loss to the Tampa Bay Devil Rays at Tropicana Field. “So it was exciting, a lot of intensity, but the Daytona Cubs wound up beating us. We beat the Tampa Yankees in the best-out-of-three division series, then we lost to Daytona in the fifth game of a best-of-five in Fort Myers. I’ll never forget that.”

With the Miracle having made the FSL playoffs this year for just the fourth time in the franchise’s 15-year history, Hunter wanted to remind the players to feed off the excitement and hold onto that feeling because it could prove useful later in their careers.

Hunter put that knowledge to use from 2002-04 when he helped Minnesota win three consecutive AL Central Division championships.

The Twins are again in the thick of the AL playoff race, leading the wild card by a half-game over the Chicago White Sox heading into Thursday night’s game against the division-leading Detroit Tigers. The Twins trail Detroit by four games, and as they were falling to the Devil Rays on Wednesday, the Miracle were losing to the Dunedin Blue Jays about 35 minutes to the north in Game 2 of their best-of-three West Division series.

Two of Hunter’s current teammates, right-handed starting pitcher Matt Garza and infielder Alexi Casilla, both 22, began the season in Fort Myers and became the first Twins players since David Ortiz in 1997 to make the jump from Class A to the majors in the same year. Both helped the Miracle to a first-half tie atop the division standings, but Dunedin won the tiebreaker to take the pennant.

“They’re a bunch of good guys, and I still talk to a lot of them,” said Garza, who has gone 1-4 with a 5.88 ERA and pitched 26 innings since being called up last month. “Actually, (catcher Korey) Feiner came up Monday when they had a day off and we went out and had some dinner and talked about how they’re doing down there. And I told them they’ve got to win a ring because I get one, too. So they’re trying. I’m kind of upset we didn’t win the division in the first half but I wish them the best.”

Garza never could have imagined back in spring training in March when he was sent down to minor league camp that he’d be pitching at Yankee Stadium in September. But there he was last Sunday, taking the mound against the Bronx Bombers — and getting rocked for five earned runs on seven hits over 4Ò innings in a 10-1 loss. Still, he chalked it up as a learning experience, just as he expects his Miracle teammates to do whenever this playoff run comes to an end.

Twins outfielder Jason Kubel was on the last Miracle team to reach the postseason in 2003, when catcher Joe Mauer and relief pitcher Jesse Crain were among his teammates the first half of the season. Fort Myers won the division that first half.

The next year, Kubel was in the batter’s box at Yankee Stadium facing future Hall-of-Fame closer Mariano Rivera in the late innings of a pivotal ALDS game, trying to lean on his experience against that same Dunedin team (the Blue Jays won that 2003 series in three games).

“I don’t remember much but I do remember a close play during one of the games that I think the umpire made the wrong call and we ended up losing,” Kubel said. “It was only three years ago but it seems like a lot longer than that.”

Kubel and Hunter were tested mentally this season along with the rest of the Twins after they got off to a slow start and fell far back in the division. Two months in, it looked like a two-team race in the AL Central between Detroit and Chicago, then Minnesota got hot and gained ground in the wild-card race.

It wasn’t until recently that manager Ron Gardenhire began to put the division back in his team’s sights, using the age-old “one game at a time” approach to keep his players motivated.

But just as the Miracle didn’t throw in the towel after losing that tiebreaker to Dunedin, Minnesota is hoping to put together another strong run, with hopes that the rest of the organization follows suit (Elizabethton already lost in the finals of the Appalachian Rookie League).

“We focused on something that was right there in our grasp, which was the wild card,” Hunter said. “We focused on getting that and once you get that, you see where Detroit is and we’re four games back. ... Yeah, we’ve got the wild card, of course, but we smell blood and we actually want to get the division, too.”

Perhaps Hunter still is harboring some anger from that 1995 FSL championship series.