The Ten Best DH Seasons in Twins History

And it's worth noting that in 43 seasons with the DH, only 13 times has a Twins player put up more than 1 win above replacement during a season in which he spent 50% or more of his time as the DH.

I didn't have a great sense of what that means either, but the Yankees have had 21 such seasons, the Royals 18, and the Rangers 23, to take the first three I checked. I'm pretty comfortable saying 13 times is not great.

At the same time, though, there have been some good performances, and maybe more than you remember. Here are the ten best, ranked by Baseball-Reference's batting runs component of WAR (since WAR itself would include credit or demerits for time spent in the field, which I don't particularly care about here):

10.) Jose Morales, 1980: No relation to the late-last-decade backup catcher, this Morales was a journeyman first baseman who appears to have been viewed as a strict platoon player, getting almost twice as many plate appearances against lefties as against righties--a bit strange, since his splits are hardly overwhelming (744 OPS against LHP, 733 against RHP). In 1980, he was used almost exclusively as a designated hitter against lefties, or as a pinch hitter when a lefty came into the game, hitting .303/.361/.490 in 269 PA, 212 of them against southpaws, even though he fared at least equally well in his 57 PA against same-sided pitching. He gets held down a bit (9 batting runs) due to his low playing time; the 125 OPS+ is 8th among Twins DHs with at least 200 PA in a season.

9.) David Ortiz, 2002: Ortiz owns the seasons with the 5th, 11th, 12th, 26th, 28th, 34th, 46th, 60th, 66th, 78th, 110th and 198th most batting runs all-time for a DH, but all of those seasons came with some other team, because Doug Mientkiewicz's defense was just that good. He's also got the third-most batting runs for a DH all-time, behind Edgar Martinez and Frank Thomas. He's only on this list the once, though: he played in 125 games for Minnesota in '02, 95 of those as the DH, and hit .272/.339/.500 (120 OPS+), good for 10.1 batting runs, with 20 homers. That represented a huge step forward from 2001, but the Twins must've figured the 26-year-old had peaked. Whoops!

8.) Craig Kusick, 1976: Quick, click that link and check out those shades and that 'stache. Then guess where he was born, and look below and see if you were right! Wasn't that fun?

Anyway, Kusick filled a similar role in 1976 and '77 to the one Morales filled a couple of years later. The plate appearance difference wasn't quite as stark, but maybe it should have been, as Kusick hit just .223/.264/.379 against right-handed pitching in '76 and .193/.282/.339 against them in his career. Kusick still got most of his PA against lefties in '76, and crushed them, winding up with a .259/.344/.432 overall line in 306 PA. He did about the same thing in '77, but quickly fell off after that.

7.) Glenn Adams, 1977: Brought over from the GIants to serve as Kusick's platoon partner that second year, Adams faced a lefty only 7 times, going 0-for-5 with two walks, but hit an eye-popping .345/.378/.477 in 283 plate appearances against righties to give him a 130 overall OPS+. He'd never approach that kind of success again, putting up an 88 OPS+ in his five remaining seasons.

6.) Chili Davis, 1992: Thanks mostly to the 60% drop in home runs from the previous season, Davis's year, like so many other things about 1992, felt like a huge disappointment--and it was disappointing, a little. Still, though, Davis hit .288/.386/.439, good for a 130 OPS+--third on the team behind Puckett and Mack--and 17.5 batting runs.

5.) Miguel Sano, 2015: Only 80 games, 335 PA, and with 18.4 batting runs, it was still the fifth-most productive DH season in Twins history. He also holds the Twins DH strikeout record, with two more than Jim Thome's 117, but never mind that. That was fun.

4.) Paul Molitor, 1996: With the benefit of park factors and normalization, it's not quite as amazing as it seemed at the time that Molitor could come home at age 39 and bat .341. The park-adjusted league average line that year was .278/.352/.447, so Molitor's .341/.390/.468, which would've generated MVP talk 20 years later, was good for "just" a 118 OPS+. Still a great season, though, and Molitor played all but one of the team's games, leading the league with 225 hits and the team with 113 RBI. That was about all he had left in him, as it turned out, but Molitor and Knoblauch provided a good deal of excitement on what otherwise was a pretty depressing '96 team.

3.) Jason Kubel, 2009: Oh man, oh man. Remember this? Former top prospect busts out at age 27, hitting .300/.369/.539 (137 OPS+) with 28 homers and 35 doubles, appears poised for a six-to-eight-year run of dominance.

That was as good as it got, of course; he'd never play in as many as 146 games again, and never came particularly close to that level of production again. But that was a helluva year. Kubel was a special kind of terror against right-handed pitching, batting .322/.396/.617 with 26 of his 28 homers when he had the platoon advantage.

2.) Chili Davis, 1991: You knew this would be here, right? Davis is one of only two players on this list who played as few as two seasons in Minnesota (see #1), and is the only player who appears twice on this list. It turns out I had another homer-related prejudice against Davis; I had always thought he tailed off badly that season, since he had 19 homers at the All-Star break but finished with "just" 29. But it turns out he was probably even better in the second half, just different: .269/.366/.521 before the break, .287/.407/.492 after it. It was an all-around great year at a really tough time to be a hitter, and of course, helping to lead the team to a world championship helps, too.

1.) Jim Thome, 2010: There have been a few hitters in my time as a Twins fan who I felt like I had to drop everything to watch: Mauer, Puckett, Knoblauch, and Shane Mack for me, at various times in their careers, each for his own idiosyncratic reasons. But Thome is the only one that gave you the feeling that at any time the next pitch might just suddenly disappear somewhere over a neighboring county. He turned 40 in August of 2010, and he played in only 109 games, with only 340 plate appearances (and is the only one on this list not to take the field with a glove even once all season), but every one of them was An Event. I can't write responsibly about it, because his time with the Twins was just so great. Just

Thome's 31.7 batting runs top Davis's by nearly three runs in just over half the number of PAs, and his 182 OPS+ is second in Twins history (minimum 250 PA) to Justin Morneau, from that same 2010 season. He was just. I mean. I need some time here.

So there's a lot of fun there at the top, but overall, it's a pretty underwhelming list. The Twins had the first DH, kind of, but have never quite found the right guy to take the job, or at least not for long. It will be interesting (I hope!) to look back at this at the end of the year to see where Byung-ho Park fits in, if he makes the cut at all. His ZiPS and Steamer projections would almost certainly put him somewhere in the top five, for whatever that's worth.