Rookie Prospect! Classic.
In my newest groundbreaking feature, I scour the most reliable internet sites to try to determine whether or not a former Minnesota Twin is forgotten or not. I use all the best sites – Wikipedia, Google, Bing, Alta Vista, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and BaseballReference.com. If the player isn’t featured to my liking, they are officially forgotten. The entire first paragraph will come from my own memory though. No guarantees for accuracy or insight. At the very end, I will ask one random person if they remember the player. Let’s start with a fun player from the 90s.
Hey! Does everyone remember Pedro Munoz? I know I do. Pedro Munoz was an outfielder during the ’90s. Munoz was good? I think I remember him being pretty good at least. Maybe I just remember his name because it is fun. Regardless, I can confirm that Munoz was a baseball player for the Twins for roughly 4 years? I am pretty sure he played left field after Dan Gladden. I think he had some power, but he might have just been fat. I can distinctly picture his 1991 Score baseball card. It had a white border and he had his bat on his shoulder (see image, I was partially right). Pedro Munoz had a mustache.
Let’s do some research!
Pedro Munoz is a municipality in the autonomous community named Castile-La Mancha, Spain. Wait, wrong entry. According to the real Wikipedia page for Pedro Munoz, he was born on September 19, 1968 in Ponce, Puerto Rico. His full name is Pedro Javier Munoz Gonzalez. He made his MLB debut on September 1, 1990 for the Twins. Which, if I am good at math, made him 21 years old. Not bad. His Wikipedia entry is a paltry 34 words long. And yes, I did copy and paste and do a word count instead of counting, thank you.
According to BaseballReference.com, I was very wrong about Munoz being a power hitter. His career high was 18 home runs, and his highest slugging percentage was .508. Not bad, but not really a power hitter either. Using their WAR metric, Munoz was a career -2.1 WAR player, meaning he actually hurt the Twins by being alive. His best season was 1992, when he posted a slick 1.2 WAR. During that memorable season, Munoz was 5th in outfield assists as a RF with 5. He was also 18th in the AL with 9 double plays grounded into. For his career, he did not walk much at all, so Moneyball, right? His most similar active player is Seth Smith. I’ve often said that Pedro Munoz is like a non-alliterative Seth Smith. Just for fun, his most similar player at age 25 is Torii Hunter, and we’ve all heard of him.
Surprisingly, Munoz does not meet the JAWS standards for Hall of Fame enshrinement. In the finance section, he made about 2.4 million dollars in his career. Munoz was signed to play professional baseball as a 16 year old, so clearly there was something there. When I was 16, I worked at the Taco Bell/Pizza Hut inside Target and wore a hat that was just blue. No logo, no other colors, just blue. It was really tall too. While working there, my friend and I would always throw the beans away a half hour early and we invented “old people food” which was a cut up hot dog mixed with ice cream and popcorn. No one bought it. Needless to say, Munoz wins this round of Brad vs. Pedro.
If you type Pedro Munoz into Google, then hit the space bar, you will learn that there must be another Pedro Munoz who designs stallion boots. In fact, Bolero Magazine deemed him “King of Cowboy Boots”. I really want it to be the same person, but I have no proof. This is more popular than Pedro Munoz baseball, which is unfortunate. Switching to the images, there is a signed Pedro Munoz picture in the #1 spot but the guy in the #3 spot is the winner for having an outstanding mustache and an extremely confident smile. The image search did bring up a 1991 Fleer Ultra baseball card of Munoz that proves without a shadow of a doubt that Pedro Munoz and I shared the same affinity for really tall hats. His knuckles are lined up nicely on the bat; my dad would be proud.
Bing seems to be less interested in Pedro Munoz the baseball player. In fact, you don’t get to Munoz’s ESPN page until like the 15th result. ESPN lists him as a DH, which is clearly an east-coast bias. Funny, he has fielding stats. Explain that, four letter network!!! Off track. Bing images are even more anti-Munoz, as you have to search nearly halfway down the page to find that same Fleer Ultra card I found right away on Google. Mustache man appears before Munoz in this case. But, the related topics section lists Pedro Guerrero as the first baseball player that is most related. That seems mildly racist, but maybe people search for their players solely by first names. For some reason, there are roughly the same amount of Homer Simpson pictures in the Bing image search than pictures of Twins’ Pedro Munoz. Confusing, but I refuse to investigate.
I was joking about AltaVista but apparently it still exists. The search results are mostly the same (odd!) but Pedro Munoz the place is the Wikipedia entry of choice. A clear slap in Pedro Munoz’s tall hatted face. But, if you add a space after his name, boots appears below baseball. Perhaps the slap should be directed toward Pedro Munoz, the King of Cowboy Boots.
Twitter in the U.S. must be preoccupied with other things, as all the Pedro Munoz related Tweets are in Spanish and not about baseball. There was one exception, from this clown who is probably looking for attention. I was able to find a different Pedro Munoz, and while he is not our Pedro Munoz, I think we should all give him a follow. I know, it’s not Friday, but we could really confuse this person and that might just make it worth it. There was no Pedro Munoz related discussion found and I went through roughly 40 years of Tweets.
Facebook does have a Pedro Munoz page, but it is just 94% of his Wikipedia entry. Two words are left out, which really seems odd considering 34 words is not a lot of words to begin with. His page does have 39 likes (quite a few from people named Pedro Munoz), although when you click that number, only about 15 names appear. I don’t get internet. Other things we can learn from his Facebook page:
Pedro Munoz is a white flag with a blue background.
Sports played – baseball.
Related page – Outfielder.
Outfielder has 528 likes. Life is unfair. Unfair to Pedro Munoz.
A crude YouTube search of Pedro Munoz returns a lot of Spanish. I took nearly 7 years of Spanish and I can still only tell you what I see in the pictures. I see dancing, singing and tennis. It all looks very enjoyable. I added Minnesota to the search and the exact same results came up. Something tells me YouTube considers Minnesota to be flyover country as well. Adding Twins after Minnesota just brings us more musical acts. So, because I am a searching genius, I added 1991 at the end and found this gem. It is a 58 second clip and I swear it is still somehow looped. I am pretty sure Willie Banks and Denny Neagle are prominently featured. If Pedro Munoz only existed to remind me of this video, then I’d say he is one of the most influential people in my life. Also, you can watch this “musical” tribute to the ’91 Twins. People, these videos were created in 1991. 1991 is the same year Nevermind and Ten came out. Just sayin’.
Last test. Does a random person remember Pedro Munoz? Well, the guy at the Davanni’s in Coon Rapids certainly didn’t. He wasn’t very pleasant or amused with my question either. In summary, he said, “no, not really” with his lips, but his eyes said “take five steps back from my pizza and hot hoagie.” What does “not really” mean anyway? He was also wearing a fairly tall hat, which was why I sought his opinion. I’m sure it didn’t help that I was wearing this shirt (callback!).
Verdict! – Pedro Munoz, Forgotten Twin
I had to work very hard to learn more about Pedro Munoz. Now, I know that many of you are thinking “wait dummy, I remember Pedro Munoz,” but do you really remember him, or do you remember the name? Be honest. Pedro Munoz wears his hat poorly, was not a power hitter, and played on a World Series team. He helped me find a fun video and reunited me with my biological grandfather. All in all, not bad.
FYI, I now have a folder in my bookmarks labeled “Munoz” and that just warms my heart. Do you adequately remember Pedro Munoz? Share your Munoz stories in the comments below.