Carlos Correa Visits New York And Enjoys A Minnesota Twins Laugher

Carlos Correa was in New York and perhaps being at Yankee Stadium on the third Thursday of the new season was not what many envisioned a few months ago.

Not when Correa was seemingly headed to the Mets on a 12-year contract and not when his signing that deal was a mere formality after billionaire owner Steve Cohen made the move while on vacation in Hawaii.

Instead the deal fell through and so did a similar pact with the San Francisco Giants, which is what Correa to engage with the Mets. Ultimately the collapse of both deals led Correa back to Minnesota on a six-year deal a year after he signed a three-year contract last spring with the opt-out clause that seemingly set it up for a bigger deal.

By about an hour after one of the more enjoyable innings any team can experience, Correa was enjoying discussing the rare feat of hitting three homers in a row. Even in a time when teams hit more homers than ever, three homers are rare regardless of the spot in the lineup.

“ I mean, that was crazy,” Correa said. “We had a blast doing that. It was a lot of fun.”

Fun is not a word often associated with the Twins and the Yankees, especially when it comes to postseason games in October. It is a narrative that will continue to persist until the Twins actually do something about It, but those moments are potentially a ways away and may seem even further away since the Twins play their game against the Yankees on April 26.

In the meantime, Correa could enjoy being the third player to homer in a span of 10 pitches.

He was in the dugout when Michael A. Taylor lofted a fly ball to center field as Aaron Judge attempted a leap that went nowhere. Then he was in the on-deck moment when Julien experienced the memorable moment of lining a pitch into the first row of the left field seats and eventually getting it bad due to the eagerness of throwing back visiting home runs in the New York baseball scene.

In his second game Julien learned that hitting your first career homer in Yankee Stadium has a benefit of almost automatically getting the ball back from those in the stands all too willing to maintain possession and work out of a trade for memorabilia. He received that fun lesson after singling to open the inning making him the eighth player since 1974, whose first two hits occurred in the same inning.

“You kind of have pressure to get the first one out of the way,” Julien said. “And then right after, just to get a homer. I couldn’t write a better script. It was an unforgettable moment.”

To put into context what was achieved Thursday is to merely look at the Twins record in New York. They lost 11 of the first 13 regular season games Rocco Baldelli presided over since becoming manager following the 2017 season, which ended Paul Molitor’s tenure in the wild-card game when the Twins scored three times in the first only to lose 8-4.

And to find a time when the Twins scored at least 11 runs in New York would be to good back to May 17, 2002 and that was a time when the Twins scored 12 only to lose by one on Jason Giambi’s grand slam in the fourth. To find a game where the Twins scored at least 11 and won by at least nine in New York requires revisiting the events of July 31, 1991 when Shane Mack hit two of their four homers and Kent Hrbek drove in five runs in a 12-3 rout.

No wonder Baldelli was gushing during his roughly 10-minute postgame discussion on the rare events he just witnessed in a game that took two hours, 20 minutes (one hour, 52 minutes if you do not include the 28-minute nine-run inning.

“I’ve never been a part of an inning especially right at the beginning of a game like that,” Baldelli said. “That’s beyond setting the tone. It’s just a great inning and a memorable one, too.”

It was so memorable for the Twins that there was hardly any energy in the stadium to boo Correa other than occasional random comments about his not winding up with the Mets.