The Minnesota Twins have many moments that have shaped their franchise but sometimes a negative event can have just as big of an impact as a positive one.
Consider Justin Morneau to be in the former category. Morneau is a member of the Twins Hall of Fame and made a big impact in his 11 seasons in Minnesota. But a concussion during the 2010 season changed the trajectory of his career and altered the direction of the franchise.
Justin Morneau was on a Hall of Fame trajectory for the Minnesota Twins
Morneau was called up during the 2003 season but took a few years before becoming an impact player. After hitting .235/.295/.444 in the first 54 games of the 2006 season, Morneau was summoned into manager Ron Gardenhire’s office during a series with the Seattle Mariners.
According to the Minnesota Star Tribune, Morneau expected to be confronted by an angry manager after getting into Seattle late on Friday after hanging with some friends from his home province of British Colombia. Instead, Gardenhire gave him a message of encouragement that changed his career.
“Obviously the biggest thing for me was in 2006,” Morneau said when Gardenhire announced his retirement in 2020. “He sat me down in Seattle and, instead of turning me [downward], he kind of built me up. He told me…we expect a lot of you … we expect you to have a big impact on this ballclub.”
Morneau received the message and immediately took it to the field, hitting .364/.414/.616 with 23 home runs and 92 RBI in his final 103 games to win the American League Most Valuable Player Award. Morneau also went on to make the All-Star team in each of the next four seasons and was a two-time Silver Slugger Award winner while hitting .298/.372/.528 with 136 homers (27 per season) and 526 RBI (105 per season) from 2006-10.
By comparison, nine players in major league history have posted a .298 batting average, a .372 on-base percentage and a .528 slugging percentage during their career. Seven of those players (Barry Bonds, Manny Ramírez, Frank Thomas Chipper Jones, Vladimir Guerrero, Mike Piazza, Larry Walker and Todd Helton) are in the Hall of Fame. Mike Trout and Yordan Alvarez are still playing but are on the same trajectory.
Justin Morneau’s 2010 concussion was one of the saddest moments in Minnesota Twins history
The 2010 season was an exciting time for Twins fans as Target Field opened. But it was also exciting because Morneau was having the best season of his career.
Hitting .345/.437/.618 with 18 home runs and 56 RBI in his first 81 games, Morneau was on pace to challenge for his second MVP award, but he was struck in the head while attempting to break up a double play in Toronto. The play resulted in a concussion and Morneau’s previous history of head injuries forced him to miss the remainder of the 2010 season.
Morneau returned for the 2011 season but he wasn’t the same player, hitting .227/.285/.333 with four home runs and 77 RBI in 69 games. Morneau rebounded to play 134 games the following season but was traded to the Pittsburgh Pirates in 2013 and spent the 2014 and 2015 seasons with the Colorado Rockies before concluding his career with the Chicago White Sox in 2016.
If Morneau continued to play at the level he did in the prime of his career, there’s a good chance he could make a case to join his teammate Joe Mauer in the Hall of Fame. There’s also a chance the Twins don’t fall into a rough decade where they lost an average of 94 games from 2011-16.
As MLB.com pointed out, his 2010 season remains one of the biggest ‘What ifs’ in baseball history and although he won a batting title with the Rockies in 2014, it’s hard not to wonder what could have been.