07/17/2026
ON THIS DAY IN GARY GAETTI HISTORY:
In a game played on July 17th, 1990 before a Fenway Park crowd of 34,113, the Minnesota Twins turned two triple plays against the Boston Red Sox, a feat that had never happened before in the major leagues.
The first defensive gem came in the bottom of the fourth inning. Erickson was facing the top of the Red Sox order, after retiring the first nine batters in order. Wade Boggs walked and Jody Reed doubled to deep right-center field. Boggs stopped at third base. Carlos Quintana walked, and suddenly the bases were loaded with nobody out. Tom Brunansky hit a hard groundball down the line at third base. Gaetti gloved it, stepped on third, and fired to second baseman Newman, who pivoted and fired to Hrbek at first, completing the triple play.
“Wade was on third,” said Gaetti after the game, “and I said to him, ‘Wade, a 5-4-3 triple play is coming up right here.’ Go ahead … ask the umpires … ask Wade. Wade even tipped his hat to me when he came out the next inning.” Boggs acknowledged the prediction. “I guess that puts Gaetti right up there with Nostradamus, the Amazing Kreskin, and Karnak the Magnificent,” Boggs said later. Twins second baseman Newman corroborated the story. “Gary looked at me right before the play and said, ‘We’re getting three.’ But he always says that. What was weird is I told Jody Reed that we were going to get a triple play. He said, ‘The way things are going for us, you’re probably right.’ When we walked off the field, we just looked at each other. It was spooky-like.”
In the eighth inning, defensive lightning struck again. Naehring led off with a double to left-center field. Boggs drew a walk. With the runners going, Reed hit a sharp grounder to Gaetti at third, who again stepped on third base and threw to second. Newman made the catch and force out and threw to first, completing the triple play and getting Reed by several steps.
“It’s kind of like landing on the moon, huh?” said Reed, the Red Sox second baseman. “We’re the first.”4 Red Sox manager Joe Morgan added an interesting point: “I put the hit-and run on so we wouldn’t hit into a double play. So we hit into a triple play.”5
Jeff Lenihan of the Star Tribune wrote that “in their effort, the Twins nominated the Gaetti-to-Newman-Hrbek triumvirate to a place alongside Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance in baseball lore.” No one remembered to collect either of the baseballs as artifacts. However, the Baseball Hall of Fame asked Gaetti to donate his glove. He told reporters, “Maybe. … I need that glove. I really do.”
Dr. Dave Abrahamson, a professor at Rhode Island College at the time, calculated the odds of turning two triple plays in the same game to be approximately 370,000 to 1, meaning that fans should see it happen “once every 175 years.”
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On July 17, 1990, the Twins turn two triple plays in one game, sett...
