Brad Radke
| Brad Radke | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Pitcher | |||
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Born: October 27, 1972 Eau Claire, Wisconsin |
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| MLB debut | |||
| April 29, 1995, for the Minnesota Twins | |||
| Last MLB appearance | |||
| October 6, 2006, for the Minnesota Twins | |||
| MLB statistics | |||
| Win–loss record | 148–139 | ||
| Earned run average | 4.22 | ||
| Strikeouts | 1,467 | ||
| Teams | |||
| Career highlights and awards | |||
Brad William Radke (born October 27, 1972) is a former Major League Baseball right-handed pitcher who played his entire 12 season career with the Minnesota Twins. Radke won 148 career games and was one of the most consistent pitchers in the Twins organization during the late 1990s.
Radke was born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin and graduated from Jesuit High School of Tampa where he was known as a scholar-athlete.
Radke was not considered a top prospect before being drafted in the 8th round of the 1991 amateur draft by the Twins. Once he was in the majors though, he was valued highly and the Twins were offered a large amount of talent for him, but they never gave him up.
In his debut season (1995), he finished 11-14 with a 5.32 ERA. In 1997, he finished an excellent season with a 20-10 record and a 3.87 ERA in 239 innings. During the year, he won 12 consecutive games in 12 consecutive starts, becoming only the 3rd player since 1950 (along with Bob Gibson and Pat Dobson) to accomplish the feat.
From 1998-2001, Radke averaged 12 wins a year and 32 starts each season. He pitched over 210 innings a season for the Twins.
In 2002, for the first time in his big league career, he failed to pitch in 30 games and fell one win short from finishing with 10 wins for the eight straight season. His ERA for the first time since his rookie season in 1995 was over 4.50, finishing with a 4.72 ERA.
In 2003 and 2004, Radke came back to form, notching 14 and 11 wins in each season.
He was known for being one of the best control pitchers of the modern era, walking an average of only 41 batters a year, in an average of 34 games a year. He was, however, also known for giving up home runs, yielding as many as 40 in a single season, and he was often plagued by first-inning troubles. This had the effect of making his ERA totals sometimes seem deceptively high, as his first-inning ERA was sometimes more than a full run higher than his ERA's for the rest of the game. His susceptibility to home runs was lampooned in a commercial for 1995's Sega Sports World Series Baseball II, and featured Radke watching as home runs sailed out of the park.
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