Immediately after the Twins\u2019 7-4 victory over the San Diego Padres on Friday night, Byron Buxton walked into manager Rocco Baldelli\u2019s office with a smile on his face and ready to serve up high fives. <\/p>\n
Buxton, the All-Star center fielder and five-tool talent, did something he hadn\u2019t done in his previous 872 career games. He finally stole third base. <\/p>\n
\u201cJust seeing the smile on his face after the game, there\u2019s not too many things that he\u2019s still doing for the first time,\u201d Baldelli said. \u201cIt\u2019s Byron Buxton.\u201d <\/p>\n
There was a lot to celebrate as the Twins offense wore down Padres pitching in a three-hour, one-minute game. They stole four more bases, with Buxton stealing two. They notched a dozen hits. Trevor Larnach, batting ninth, had three hits against three lefthanded pitchers, the first Twins lefthanded hitter to accomplish that in the past three seasons. <\/p>\n
When Buxton swiped third in the third inning, after driving in a run on a fielder\u2019s choice grounder, it was his 20th stolen base of the season. Matched with his 27 homers, Buxton claimed his first 20-20 season. He is the seventh player in team history to achieve the feat and the first since Brian Dozier in 2014. <\/p>\n
Somehow, it was only the second time Buxton attempted to steal third in his career. He was thrown out by Atlanta\u2019s A.J. Pierzynski on July 26, 2016, one of the 12 times the most successful basestealer in MLB history has been caught. <\/p>\n
\u201cYou can\u2019t say enough about him,\u201d Larnach said. \u201cThe year he\u2019s had \u2014 and he\u2019s been healthy thankfully \u2014 I think he\u2019s the best center fielder in the game. Maybe biased, maybe not, I don\u2019t care. I think he is.\u201d <\/p>\n
Baldelli added: \u201cHe\u2019s not even close to done right now. He looks terrific. His legs, he\u2019s flying around the bases. He\u2019s doing everything he would like to do. Every day he could do something different and wow you.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Immediately after the Twins\u2019 7-4 victory over the San Diego Padres on Friday night, Byron Buxton walked into…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":107222,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[435],"tags":[49,48,462,82],"class_list":["post-107221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107221\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/107222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}