BRADENTON, FLA. — Everyone keeps telling Delmon Young to pull the ball.

Well, today he did, and here were the results: A home run down the left-field line and four double plays, all to the left side of the infield.

“Be careful what you wish for,” Young said, jokingly, in the Twins’ clubhouse after their 4-3, 10-inning loss to the Pirates.

Young grounded into a 5-4-3 double play in the first inning, then lined his homer just inside the foul pole in the fourth. He said he was consciously trying to pull the ball the whole game, since the wind was blowing out to left, and he wasn’t surprised with the outcomes.

“If I go up there looking to pull, I beat it into the ground,” he said. “I roll over. Even the homer, I was looking to pull. It still got up, but it had top-spin on it.”

With an off day Thursday, Manager Ron Gardenhire let Young play the whole game.

He grounded into a 5-4-3 double play in the sixth, a 6-4-3 double play in the eighth and a 6-3 double play in the 10th.

“We yelled there that last inning, ‘Someone get on, so Delmon can hit into another one,’” Gardenhire said. “And he did. Good stuff.”

If it had been the regular season, it would have been a Twins record. Three players have grounded into three double plays in the same game, with the last being Jose Morales in 1980. (No relation to the Twins’ current catcher by that same name.)

“Three of them were bullets,” Gardenhire said of Young’s double plays. “He hit rockets on the ground, but the good thing is it’s spring training. We can smile about this a little bit. He’s putting good swings on the ball and been swinging good, so you can laugh about that stuff.”

Young is batting .382 (13-for-34) for the spring with two home runs.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 at 2:25 pm and is filed under Twins thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.