As part of our coverage not only for March Madness, which wraps up next week, but also the start of the season for the Minnesota Twins, we at Zone Coverage are doing a bracket to determine the best player in Twins history, as voted on by you, the fans.
On the pitching side of things, we kicked off the opening round with Bert Blyleven, Brad Radke, Johan Santana and Jim Kaat grabbing victories. Here’s the opening round for the hitters, with Round 2 for the pitchers to come later today.
As a reminder, these brackets are unseeded to avoid any bias of that sort. Here are the hitter matchups:
- Killebrew with Twins (14 seasons): .260/.383/.518 (148 OPS+), 475 home runs
- Hrbek with Twins (14 seasons): .282/.367/.481 (128 OPS+), 10 20-homer seasons
- Carew with Twins (12 seasons): .334/.393/.448 (137 OPS+), eight top-10 MVP finishes with one win
- Puckett with Twins (12 seasons): .318/.360/.477 (124 OPS+), seven top-10 MVP finishes
- Mauer with Twins (13 seasons): .308/.391/.446 (127 OPS+), four top-10 MVP finishes with one win
- Oliva with Twins (15 seasons): .304/.353/.476 (131 OPS+), five top-10 MVP finishes
- Hunter with Twins (12 seasons): .268/.321/.462 (103 OPS+), seven straight Gold Gloves
- Knoblauch with Twins (seven seasons): .304/.391/.416 (114 OPS+), 1991 Rookie of the Year