#MNTwins RHP Randy Dobnak has had a heckuva a season and a heckuva a career so far with the Minnesota Twins organization.
If you haven’t heard, he & his fiance scheduled their wedding 2 years ago to be held on September 28th, this coming Saturday, which is a strange date for a professional baseball player but read on to see why, at the time, it was completely understandable.
He signed a minor league contract on August 1st, 2017 out Alderson Broaddus College in Phillipi, WV and was assigned to the Rookie-League Elizabethton Twins the next day. He pitched in just 5 games (3 starts) before being promoted to the Low-A Cedar Rapids Kernels and pitched 1 game before the regular season ended.
He then began 2018 at Cedar Rapids again and ended up pitching the whole season there and he was 10-5 with a 3.14 ERA and a 1.264 WHIP in 129 innings. He allowed 138 hits, 45 earned runs (6 home runs) and 24 walks while striking out 84 batters so a lot of hits but low walks but also low strikeout numbers in 24 games & 20 starts.
That’s still a good showing & he was older than the average Low-A player so the Twins started his 2019 season at the High-A Fort Myers Miracle and in 4 starts (or April), he was 3-0 with a 0.40 ERA & a 0.985 WHIP allowing just 1 run on 18 hits & 4 walks with 14 strikeouts in 22.1 innings so after those 4 starts it was on to the AA Pensacola Blue Wahoos. WAHOOOOOO!!!
He pitched in just 4 games there before he was promoted to the AAA @Rochester Red Wings just 23 days after getting to Pensacola. He pitched in 4 games and was sent back down to AA on May 25th. He then pitched in 7 games through July 18th before he was summoned back to AAA for 3 games and sometime between the end of his start on August 2nd and August 8th, he was called into the office of AAA Manager Joel Skinner and, maybe he thinks he’s going back down to AA again but, he’s told he’s going to The Show!!! Man, that must’ve been awesome! Just 2 years and 1 week or so before that, he had just signed a minor-league contract. In his Wildest Dreams, he couldn’t have imagined this happening so quickly.
Well, this was at the time where the Twins were shuffling pitchers up and down because of the wear on the bullpen so he pitched 4 innings and allowed 6 hits but no runs & no walks and he struck out 3. He was optioned back down to AAA a week later when the Twins activated RHP Michael Pineda from the 10-Day Injured List. He made 2 starts and was called up again on August 27th and has been pitching very well since then.
So…you can easily see why, at the time in 2017, Randy and his wife-to-be, Aerial, thought there would be no problem with scheduling the wedding on the 28th of September. All minor-league teams are done by then so it was a relatively safe pick but….Pitch Happens!!!
Maybe the Twins should put him in their marketing department, too He’s had 3 big promotions already this season, 5 if you count all of them.
I tried to find out if the Twins did anything to help his development because he’s been a better pitcher this year compared to 2018 and that’s hard to do, pitch better against better competition. All I could find was a tweet about them simplifying his repertoire:
If they’re wondering what to be for Halloween, that Dobnak mustache seems to work well with a Wedding Pitcher theme, don’t you think?
CONGRATS, Randy & Aerial! This is an Awesome story!
Since they are getting so much publicity including some of the things on their gift registry, Aerial posted about it and created a donation site to St. Jude Hospital.
Do you have to have the Twins game on at all times somewhere during the wedding and the reception? Haha!
Here are the pages I used to research & write this article if you’re interested:
2019 Pitching Log
Randy Dobnak’s College & Minor League Stats
Randy’s MLB Player Page for all of his Transactions or, as I like to call them, Twinsactions
