MLB.com reports:
Nelson Cruz is making his home runs seem so routine that some players in the Twins’ dugout don’t exactly know how to handle it.
“Do we just celebrate every single time, or do we just treat this as a normal at-bat every time and pat him on the back a little bit?” starter Kyle Gibson said.
The answer?
"Yeah, you celebrate it!” Jonathan Schoop said. “Every homer, you celebrate. You score runs. It's fun to hit home runs and score runs.”
Cruz has given his teammates plenty of chances to contemplate that question in the last two weeks.
The 39-year-old slugger smashed three more homers, including a 466-foot blast to the third deck in left-center field, in the Twins’ 11-3 victory over the Royals on Saturday at Target Field to notch his second three-homer game in 10 days and his second consecutive game with five RBIs.
Cruz, the reigning American League Player of the Week, has 11 homers and 23 RBIs in his last nine starts.
“Well, my vocabulary is not good enough to really do the guy justice,” Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said. “He continues to impress even us. We get to see a lot of really interesting and exceptional performances in this game. If you’re around long enough, you see a lot of impressive things, but what we’re watching right now is something that the likes of it, I haven’t seen anything like it before.”
“I mean, he's not missing,” Royals manager Ned Yost said. “You throw something that's got a little too much of the plate, and he's gonna ride it.”
The three blasts pushed Cruz’s season homer total to 30, tying him with Max Kepler for the team lead and giving him 30 or more homers in each of the last six seasons. All 30 of Cruz’s homers have come as a designated hitter, breaking Chili Davis’ 1991 record for most single-season homers hit by a designated hitter in club history.
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