Kenta Maeda greeted his Twitter followers early Wednesday morning with the following:
“Throwing a no-hitter is not easy!” the Twins righthander wrote.
While true, he made his run at a no-no look easy, overwhelming Brewers hitters on Tuesday as he entered the ninth inning three outs away from joining Hideo Nomo and Hisashi Iwakuma as the only Japanese pitchers in Major League Baseball to achieve the feat.
The hit Maeda gave up, a soft liner by Eric Sogard to center, wasn’t struck well. The Brewers didn’t hit a single ball hard all night, the result of Maeda’s mastery. Sogard went down and got enough of Maeda’s changeup to help the Brewers avoid being no-hit for the fourth time in team history and for the second time by a Twins pitcher, after Scott Erickson did it in 1994.
“It’s his go-to pitch, and it’s a difficult pitch to pick up a lot of the time,” Sogard told the Milwaukee Journal of Maeda’s changeup. “I think he throws his fastball enough to keep us off of it. But at that point in the game, it’s like we almost have to sit on it 100 percent and stay on it, and I was able to get just enough of it to get it out in the outfield.”
Even that hit might have become out No. 25, as shortstop Jorge Polanco appeared to slightly overrun the ball and might have had a shot at catching it with a better line.
It was a magnificent outing for Maeda, who got a whopping 26 swings and misses with his arsenal. He had a total of 25 swings and misses in his previous two outings combined.
What’s scary to consider the a night like this might have been coming.
On Aug. 1, Maeda held the Indians to one hit over six innings, an soft ground ball to second base that Bradley Zimmer beat out by a hair. Maeda, who was lifted after 83 pitches that night, was asked after the 3-0 victory: What if that play had been ruled an out?
“If that were to be an out and if it [preserved a possible] no-hitter, then obviously I would have liked to have kept going in the game,” he said. “But then again, we’re talking big leagues. It’s not very easy to go with a no-no.”
Who knew then that would be the appetizer for Tuesday’s run at history? Maeda is 3-0 with a 2.27 ERA. He leads the majors with a 0.63 walks and hits per innings pitched and is second with a .128 opponents’ batting average. And he now owns the Twins record with eight consecutive strikeouts.
“He’s a consummate adjustment-maker,” Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said Wednesday. “A guy that’s able to take things, ideas, thoughts, bring them into a game and use them to his advantage continuously. He’s not a one-trick pony. He does so many different things to beat you and to get you out that he’s always getting better. I think it was just all on display [Tuesday] night; I think we get to see everything he can do.”
Arraez out
Second baseman Luis Arraez was not in the starting lineup as he deals with patella tendinitis in his left knee. Arraez had to come out of Tuesday’s game after the eighth inning when the knee began to give him problems. An magnetic resonance imaging exam didn’t reveal any structural damage.
It’s an injury that flared up earlier in the year, and the Twins want to keep it from being a season-long issue. There was no talk of him being placed on the injured list, but the Twins training staff spent Wednesday trying to take care of Arraez’s discomfort.
“It’s something we’d like to find a way to knock out so it isn’t something that holds him back in any way,” Baldelli said. “I don’t know if chronic is the right term. It’s something that we just want to get rid of so he’s not continually dealing with it.”
Donaldson sighting
Third baseman Josh Donaldson, out since July 31 because of a right calf strain, took ground balls and got some running in before the game. It’s a sign that he’s made progress in his recovery but he’s likely several days away from being ready to return to the lineup.
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August 20, 2020 at 08:26AM
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Twins' Kenta Maeda: 'Throwing a no-hitter is not easy!' - Minneapolis Star Tribune
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