After a year where the Twins played .500 baseball for most of the season, the team won 17 of their last 21 games to tie the Detroit Tigers for the lead in the Central Division. The Twins were able to use the play-in game rule to their advantage when they won the AL Central at the end of the regular season by way of a 6–5 tiebreaker game that concluded with a 12th-inning walk-off hit by Alexi Casilla to right field, that scored Carlos Gómez. However, they failed to advance to the American League Championship Series as they lost the American League Divisional Series in three straight games to the eventual World Series champion New York Yankees. That year, Joe Mauer became only the second catcher in 33 years to win the AL MVP award. Iván Rodríguez won for the Texas Rangers in 1999, previous to that, the last catcher to win an AL MVP was the New York Yankees Thurman Munson in 1976.