Twins vs. White Sox one-game playoff
For the second straight year, Major League Baseball has a one-game playoff to fill out the postseason field, with both the Minnesota Twins and Chicago White Sox hoping to accomplish Tuesday night what the Colorado Rockies did in 2007.
Last year the Rockies beat the Padres 9-8 in 13 innings in one of the classic games in recent memory and kept rolling all the way to the World Series. Well, either the Twins or Sox would be the biggest underdog in the American League this year, but once you’re in, anything can happen.
Chicago has beaten two different AL Central foes in the previous two days to get here, while the Twins had to get on a plane for Chicago instead of Tampa Bay once the White Sox rallied past Detroit on Monday. The winner tonight is the AL Central champ and opens the ALDS at Tampa Bay on Thursday.
The Twins just swept the White Sox last week in Minnesota, but Chicago can take comfort in the fact that Tuesday’ game won’t take place in the Metrodome, where it went 1-8 this season. On the South Side, the Sox are a much more respectable 7-2 against the Twins, who are 35-46 overall on the road.
Chicago did not start left-hander John Danks (11-9, 3.47 ERA) in that recent sweep against the Twins, but he goes tonight. However, he is 1-2 with a 7.45 ERA in four starts versus the Twins at Chicago, and 2-3 with a 6.88 ERA in seven starts overall. He also is coming off his worst start of the season, allowing seven runs and seven hits in four innings as Chicago lost 11-8 to Cleveland on Friday night. The 23-year-old went 1-0 with a 0.98 ERA in his previous three starts.
He will be pitching on three days’ rest for the first time in a season that he has already pitched a career-high 187 innings. The Twins are hitting .349 off him this year, yet Chicago is a -151 betting favorite on WagerWeb.com.
Minnesota starts Nick Blackburn (11-10, 4.14 ERA), who held the Sox to two runs and eight hits in five innings for a 3-2 victory Wednesday. He and the Twins are +131 on WagerWeb.com.
”I’ll take my chances against him if he pitches the way he pitched against us last time,” Sox manager Ozzie Guillen said Monday. “He didn’t pitch well. When you’ve got the bullpen warming up in the second inning … we just don’t approach him in the right way.”
Blackburn is 0-2 with a 7.20 ERA in three career road starts versus the White Sox.
This will be the fourth one-game tiebreaker that has been played in the AL. The last such contest was in 1995, when Seattle beat the California Angels 9-1 for the AL West title.
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