FanPost

Your Favorite Game

Tell the story of your favorite game you've ever attended.

Chad Moeller - Baseball Hero

The best game I ever attended wasn't even planned in advance - I was living with my aunt in St. Paul during an internship, and we decided spur-of-the-moment to head to the Twins game that evening because Roger Clemens was pitching against Eric Milton (as a bonus, when we got there we found it was Dairy Queen Hat Day).  This was in 2000, when the Twins weren't exactly good, but they were fun to watch, and you could see that the Koskie-Hunter-Guzman-Jones core was starting to come together.

The game started off as a pitcher's duel - Milton struck out 7 of the first 9 Yankees he faced, and the pitchers had dueling no-hitters until the fifth inning.  The Yankees scratched together a couple of runs in the sixth off Milton, and it was looking hopeless - the Twins couldn't get anything going against Clemens.

But this was 2000 Roger Clemens, on a pitch count, and the eighth inning brought with it a new pitcher, and new life in the Twins' offense.  The Twins strung together a series of hits to tie the game, and up to the plate, with runners at the corners and two out, came Chad Moeller.  Moeller was the latest in the Twins' Rotten-Hitting Catcher Patrol, following Matt LeCroy (who hit .174 that year) and Marcus Jensen (.209) and preceding Danny Ardoin (.125).  Moeller was hitting just under the Mendoza line at the time, and he had just one career extra base hit, a double.

Moeller proceeded to hit a low liner to left field, where Ryan Thompson was playing instead of David Justice.  Thompson charged the ball and tried to make a diving catch... but he missed (I suppose we now would refer to that as "pulling a Torii").  The ball rolled to the wall, and by the time Bernie Williams got it into the infield, Chad Moeller had crossed the plate standing up for a three-run inside-the-park homer - the first homerun of his career, and his only one of the season.  The Twins added another insurance run that inning, and LaTroy Hawkins finished off the Yankees in the 9th for a 6-2 win.

On that day, Chad Moeller cemented his place as one of my all-time favorite players. to the point that I was actually excited when he was the Brewers' starting catcher at a Twins-Brewers game I attended a couple years ago.  He struck out four times.