Twins Drop A's 5-4, Advance to ALCS

OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) - Not only are the Minnesota Twins here to stay, now they're going home - to open a most unlikely AL championship series. <br><br>Brad Radke pitched 6 2-3 dominant innings to beat

Monday, October 7th 2002, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) - Not only are the Minnesota Twins here to stay, now they're going home - to open a most unlikely AL championship series.

Brad Radke pitched 6 2-3 dominant innings to beat Oakland again, and the Twins survived a late rally to top the Athletics 5-4 Sunday in the decisive Game 5 of their division series.

The Twins made their first playoff appearance in 11 years despite a tiny payroll and baseball's offseason plan to eliminate them. But facing consecutive elimination games, the Contraction Kids won 11-2 at the Metrodome on Saturday, then crossed half the continent to win the tense clincher about 30 hours later.

Mark Ellis' three-run homer with one out in the ninth inning brought the A's within one, and Randy Velarde singled with two outs before Ray Durham fouled out to second baseman Denny Hocking.

The Twins, who ran away with the AL Central, will face Anaheim in the ALCS beginning Tuesday night in Minnesota. The wild-card Angels shocked the four-time defending AL champion New York Yankees in the division series.

Matthew LeCroy drove home one run and scored another as the Twins got two early runs to support Radke, who got two of Minnesota's three wins in the series. The Twins simply outpitched the A's, who won 103 games and the AL West with their peerless starting rotation.

A.J. Pierzynski hit a two-run homer against Billy Koch in the ninth to finally give Minnesota some breathing room and the Twins leaped out of their dugout to celebrate. They mobbed Pierzynski, their All-Star catcher, in front of the dugout. David Ortiz added an RBI double to make it 5-1.

With consecutive victories against star Oakland pitchers Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder, the Twins stuck around while big spenders like the Yankees and Arizona went home early this October.

Hocking also had a run-scoring single as Radke, who also won the series opener at the Coliseum on Tuesday, mesmerized the A's and outpitched 19-game winner Mulder.

LaTroy Hawkins dramatically struck out Miguel Tejada to end the eighth with a runner on, preserving a one-run lead.

During spring training, there probably wasn't a soul who would have predicted a meeting between the underfunded Twins and the overlooked Angels.

Oakland hoped the series would turn on its outstanding starting pitching. Instead, Mulder and Barry Zito were good but not great, while Hudson was terrible in two starts.

Radke, on the other hand, was phenomenal in his first postseason starts after eight seasons with Minnesota. He struck out four and didn't walk a batter Sunday.

Durham, who got three hits, had a solo homer in the third, but he was the only A's player to get to second base against Radke, who left with a runner on in the seventh. J.C. Romero then got an easy grounder from Terrence Long, who went 3-for-18 in the series.

But Long wasn't the only lousy Oakland batter. Tejada, the A's MVP candidate, went 0-for-4 - striking out against the hard-throwing Hawkins with two outs and a runner on base in the eighth - to finish 3-for-21 (.143) for the series. He also made several defensive blunders at shortstop, particularly in Oakland's Game 4 loss.

It was a disheartening end for the A's, who had an AL-record 20-game winning streak on the way to their second division title in three seasons. They lost Game 5 of the division series for the third straight year.

Oakland thought this would be the season when its young roster finally showed it was capable of great things. Instead, the A's showed they're still not capable of handling postseason pressure; their lineup managed just three runs in the final two games of the series after getting 20 in the first three games.

Mulder, the powerful left-hander who won 40 games in the past two seasons, was battered from the start by the Twins, who hit just .252 against lefties in the regular season.

Mulder, pitching on three days' rest, struck out nine in seven innings, but he also allowed nine hits and got into trouble in each of the first four innings. He stranded six runners during that span.

Minnesota scored one run during a lengthy rally in the second inning. Hocking singled home LeCroy for his first postseason RBI, but Jacque Jones struck out with the bases loaded.

The Twins added another run in the third when Cristian Guzman doubled and scored on LeCroy's single.

Radke was mostly dominant in the early innings, but Durham hit a solo homer in the third to keep it close.

The crowd of 32,146 seemed smaller than either of the gatherings at the series' previous mid-week games, with thousands of empty seats in the middle and upper decks, but it also was louder and more enthusiastic. Fans clapped thousands of the long noisemakers that made such a ruckus in Anaheim this weekend during the Angels' two victories over the Yankees.

Notes: Guzman, who homered against Mulder in Game 2, got two doubles - but he was easily thrown out at third base when he tried to stretch his double into a triple in the first inning. ... Former A's star Carney Lansford threw out the first pitch. ... A's catcher Ramon Hernandez went 0-for-2. He's 1-for-27 in the past two postseasons.