The Minnesota Twins had some great players during their run. After reading about Justin Morneau, it might be hard to imagine that someone might be better on those teams but there was someone. Joe Mauer was the Twins’ best player for a long time. He played his entire 15 years career with the Twins and was great in almost all of them. The Twins never had any playoff success with this dynamic duo but they surely were great in the regular season a lot of the time.
Mauer played for the Twins from 2004 to 2018. He started his career as a catcher but as he got older he started to make his transition to first base. Joe Mauer has a very decorated resume with the Twins as he did basically everything there is to do as far as regular-season accolades. He won the MVP in 2009. In that year, he led the league in batting average, OBP, SLG, and OPS. He also hit 28 home runs and had 96 that year which is incredible for a catcher.
He won the batting title in that 2009 season and it was one of three times he took home that title. He also won five Silver Slugger Awards, three Gold Gloves, and was an all-star six times out of 15 years. With Mauer, we start to get into the conversations of all-time great division rivals and not just since 2000. He is without question one of the best players to play baseball this century and he did it all with the division rival Minnesota Twins.