Twins’ Sano cares not about whiff milestone

The pitch was traveling 99 miles per hour, letter-high but too close to take on an 0-2 count. Miguel Sano took a cut at Blue Jays closer

Jordan Romano’s four-seam fastball Saturday night, but it was on him, then past him, before the barrel of his bat could come around, writes Phil Miller of the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Sano grimaced, then trudged straight ahead to the Twins dugout, a walk of frustration he has made many times before. In fact, one that he’s made more frequently, this early in his career, than anyone. The strikeout was Sano’s 1,000th and came in his 661st major league game, by far the fewest that any major leaguer had ever needed to reach four figures.

Which probably came as little surprise to Twins fans who have watched the slugger epitomize the storm surge of strikeouts that has gradually flooded baseball over the past two decades. More than one of every three times Sano has stood in the batter’s box over his career, 36.6 percent to be precise, he has trudged to the dugout without putting a ball in play.

“The game is what the game is — it’s difficult,” Sano said. “I know fans don’t like strikeouts. But when I go to the box, I’m trying to hit the ball hard. That’s my job. I can’t worry about anything else.”

That’s the crazy dynamic, one that both amazes and annoys the paying customers, of Sano’s career: He succeeds at crushing the ball at a rate that few others can.

“He’s been a very impactful, almost destructive force. He pulverizes the baseball. He’s gotten on base in his career at a pretty decent clip. He’s a guy that pitchers don’t want to face a lot of the time,” Twins manager

Rocco Baldelli said. “Along with that does come some strikeouts, and that’s always going to be the case.”

It’s more than a little swing and miss, of course. Sano has missed with 311 swings this season, among the top 20 in the major leagues. Though he has led the league in strikeouts only once, last season’s 90 whiffs in 53 games, he has racked up at least 115 every other season of his career, even in seasons when he has played fewer than half the games.

He’s already the Twins’ all-time leader in two-strikeout games (325), three-strikeout games (106) and four-strikeout games (18), and ranks third in franchise history in career strikeouts behind Harmon Killebrew (1,314) and Joe Mauer (1,034), each of whom played more than three times as many Twins games as Sano has.

“When I was younger, I worried about people booing because I strike out,” Sano said. “I try to get over it and learn from it. I don’t let it get in my mind.”