Minnesota Twins Opening Day Countdown: Carew’s 1977 Adjusted Runs

The Minnesota Twins are just 69 days away from opening day in Baltimore. As we near that day, we will tap into Twins history related to each number as we get closer!

The Minnesota Twins are preparing for a 2018 season with expectations after making the playoffs in 2017 as a Wild Card. We will have bring out numbers from team history that represent the number of days until opening day on March 29th in Baltimore.

There have been a number of “new numbers” in the game in recent years that attempt to measure the contribution that a player makes to the offense or as a pitcher. One of those statistics is adjusted batting runs.

From Baseball-Reference’s leaderboard page:

Adjusted Batting Runs A set of formulas developed by Gary Gillette, Pete Palmer and others that estimates a player’s total contributions to a team’s runs total via linear weights. 0.0 is an avg performance, 0 is better than avg

So, anything over 0 is above-average. For Twins history, the single-season leader is Rod Carew, who in 1977 posted 69 adjusted batting runs.

Carew’s 1977

Carew won just one MVP in his career, and it was his 1977 performance. Carew was by far the best player in the league in 1977, but he was far from a unanimous MVP winner, and a big part of that had to do with the Twins’ 4th place finish that season.

Carew had a large collection of “black ink” that season, leading the American League in triples and intentional walks. He led all of the major leagues in runs scored, hits, batting average, on base percentage, OPS, and OPS+.

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Carew would only score 100+ runs in a season once and drive in 100+ runs in a season once, and those both occurred in 1977. He had career highs in hits, doubles, triples, home runs (tie), runs, and RBI.

He would finish the 1977 season with a line of .388/.449/.570/1.019, 128 runs, 239 hits, 38 doubles, 16 triples, 14 home runs, 100 RBI, 23 stolen bases, 178 OPS+, and a 69/55 BB/K ratio.

It would be Carew’s second-to-last season with the Twins as he was traded after the 1978 season in a package that brought back four players for the Twins.

Next: Twins need to avoid becoming Pirates

Carew had many great seasons with the Minnesota Twins, and the Twins have had many great offensive seasons in their franchise history, but none has been better than the year that Carew had in 1977.

We look forward to that first day of the season against Baltimore!