LIFE'S A pitch
LEWIS THORPE sits in the suite-level video room of the Minnesota Twins’ Triple-A affiliate in Rochester, New York, gazing out at the skyline through a panoramic window. “It’s a nice city,” he says. “It’s a smaller city, but there’s stuff to do. Niagara Falls is pretty close, and they’ve got the Genesee River. The team has been around forever. They have a lot of fans who just love baseball.”
Last night, the left-handed pitcher from Victoria dazzled those loyal fans by holding the Gwinnett Stripers hitless through four and a third innings, and scoreless for his six-inning stint. “The assistant GM [Rob Antony] was in town and came up to me after the game and said, ‘Well done, you looked good,’” he says. “It’s always comforting to perform well when the bosses are in town.”
Forty-one days have passed since he was called up to the big leagues, becoming the 34th Aussie to do it, and the eighth to do it for the Twins. Thirty-nine days have passed since he made his big-league debut, starting against the Chicago White Sox, holding them to two runs in five innings and striking out seven – just one short of the team record for a debut set by Boof Bonser (yes, that’s his legal name). Seventeen days have passed since his first big-league victory, when he entered as a relief pitcher in the sixth inning and shut down a power-packed Yankees lineup – leading one exuberant Twins fan to tweet that the Twins should “erect a statue” in his honour, and another to wonder if Thorpe is “related to the Aussie Olympic
