Dozier’s 30 home runs puts him in rare club
With his 30th home run of the 2016 season, last night Brian Dozier joined a select group.
Dozier became the 13th Twins player to hit 30 home runs in a season, and it’s great company to be in from Hall of Famers like Harmon Killebrew, to recent fan favorites like Torii Hunter, but to only have 13 instances in 55 seasons of 30 home run seasons is pretty weak.
Of course, there would have been more if the franchise hadn’t gone without a 30-home run hitter between 1988 and 2006.
That’s correct. The Twins didn’t have a player hit 30 home runs in a season for basically the entirety of the steroid era.
Granted Twins Owner Carl Pohlad had less than zero interest in spending money on power-hitting free agents, and 1994–95 were only partial seasons, it’s pretty remarkable that a homegrown talent never got to such an attainable number considering that certainly many of them were on some performance-enhancing drug.
To me what’s never made enough about that era isn’t that guys like Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Bonds shattered records, but the amount of bad-to-mediocre players that made careers and millions of dollars hitting a lot of home runs. Here are some players that hit 30 home runs in a season from 1988–2005:
Glenn Davis
Nick Esasky
Howard Johnson
Kevin Mitchell
Kelly Gruber
Bobby Bonilla
Mickey Tettleton
Danny Tartabull
Rick Wilkins
Dean Palmer
Phil Plantier
Jay Buhner
Gary Gaetti
Eric Karros
Brady Anderson
Todd Hundley
Ellis Burks
Geronimo Berroa
Ed Sprague Jr.
Henry Rodriguez
John Jaha
Ryan Klesko
Steve Finley
Jeff King
Benito Santiago
Bernard Gilkey
Todd Zeile
Paul Sorrento
Ray Lankford
Javy Lopez
Jay Bell
Brian Giles
Fernando Tatis
Mike Lieberthal
Tony Batista
Richard Hidalgo
Carl Everett
Geoff Jenkins
Brad Fullmer
Charles Johnson
Luis Gonzalez
Preston Wilson
Jose Cruz Jr.
Bobby Higginson
Bret Boone
Rich Aurilia
Reggie Sanders
Aubrey Huff
Brad Wilkerson
Hank Blalock
Jose Valentin
J.D. Drew
Bell was drafted by the Twins; Gaetti of course played for the Twins; Sorento came up through the Twins organization and was seen as the heir apparent to Kent Hrbek; Batista, Phil Nevin, and Bret Boone eventually played for the Twins (poorly); and hell J.D. Drew started his career with the St. Paul Saints!
I left off several (dozens?) of players who hit several dozen home runs in a season, and I have no idea what it all means, but this list proves a point that hitting 30 home runs in a season wasn’t all that impressive.
Players from organizations with a low-budget/small market/cheap owner like the Expos, Marlins, and Brewers had power-hitting threats in the middle of the order so it makes me wonder if there is a legitimate reason behind the scenes that it didn’t happen with the Twins.
If there isn’t, I guess we can just blame it on Joe Mauer and be done with it.
