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TORONTO -- In the final few weeks of a forgettable season, Twins manager Paul Molitor doesnt want his players hanging their heads.Russell Martin and Justin Smoak each homered and drove in five runs as Toronto hammered Minnesota 15-8 Friday night, handing the Twins their eighth straight loss.Trevor Plouffe hit a solo homer for the last-place Twins. Minnesota has been tagged for at least eight runs in four straight games.The latest defeat came after Molitor took the tenor of his team with a pregame meeting.I told them its not a matter of me trying to convince them how many games we can win, Molitor said. I just talked about what was left on the table here over the last 35 games. Youre looking for guys to just step up and take the challenge head on.Even though the session didnt change Minnesotas fortunes, newly promoted pitcher Andrew Albers said he appreciated Molitors messageIts easy to get down when things arent going your way, Albers said. I thought the meeting was good. It was all about staying positive and trying to finish strong.Josh Donaldson, who drove in three runs, and Darwin Barney, who had three hits, also each homered for Toronto. The Blue Jays took a one-game lead in the AL East over Boston.The offense came to life and it was a big night, manager John Gibbons said.Francisco Liriano gave up four runs and two hits in five innings to win for the first time in four starts since Toronto got him a trade with Pittsburgh on Aug. 1. Liriano is 7-12 overall, and 3-1 in five career starts against Minnesota, his team from 2005 to 2012.Three of the four batters who walked against Liriano came around to score.I was a little bit wild today, Liriano said through a translator. Thank God that the offense hit the ball well today.Smoak connected off Pat Dean (1-4) in the second inning and Donaldson followed three batters later with his 30th.Starting in place of Hector Santiago (bruised left thumb), Dean allowed six runs and eight hits in three innings.Hes got to learn to continue to trust that he has to change speeds a little bit more, Molitor said. A lot of things coming in there around the same speed.Smoak also hit RBI singles in the third and seventh.He stepped up tonight, Gibbons said. A lot of the guys did.Barney homered off Albers to begin a four-run sixth for the Blue Jays. Martin capped the inning with a three-run double off Pat Light.Toronto batted around a second time in the seventh. Martin had the big blow again, a two-run homer off Ryan ORourke. Seven of Martins 15 home runs have come in his past 11 games.When those guys get hot, theyre tough, Albers said. You saw it all year last year. They can put up 12 or 15 against anybody. Before the game, Toronto got switch-hitting catcher Dioner Navarro in a trade with the Chicago White Sox, reacquiring a member of their 2015 AL East championship team.HOME AND NATIVE LANDAlbers, from Saskatchewan, made his first big league appearance in Canada. As a kid growing up, you always dream of pitching here one day, Albers said. Getting the opportunity to do that tonight was kind of a dream come true.TRAINERS ROOMTwins: 1B Joe Mauer (quadriceps) missed his third straight game. Hes expected to return Saturday. ... RHP Alex Wimmers was selected from Triple-A Rochester and made his major league debut with a scoreless eighth.UP NEXTTwins: RHP Ervin Santana (6-10, 3.39) struck out a season-high 10 batters in his previous start but took the loss against Kansas City.Blue Jays: RHP Marcus Stroman (9-5, 4.47) is 1-1 with a 2.10 ERA in four August starts, allowing six runs in 25 2/3 innings. 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Now Green and Plumlee are key cogs in the Suns surprising breakout season. Michael Kidd-Gilchrist Hornets Jersey .Y. -- Bills receiver Stevie Johnson has a bone to pick with the NFL schedule maker. Its a funny thing, historical memory. The match between Scotland and South Africa which took place 110 years ago this week, on 17 November 1906, should have an honoured place alongside Wales defeat of the All Blacks a year earlier and Englands triumph in Obolenskys match nearly three decades later.It was historic, whatever the outcome had been, as the first international played by the Springboks on British soil. That it was against Scotland -- beginning a sequence during the inaugural Boks tour in which all four home nations were played on consecutive weekends -- was no fluke since the invitation to visit had followed the Lions tour, led by the great Scottish forward Mark Morrison, to South Africa three years earlier.Maybe it is something to do with the comparatively limited literature on the Scottish game -- it merits only a couple of lines in RJ Phillipss 1925 history, paling rather into insignificance alongside the epic chapter which Welsh writers Dai Smith and Gareth Williams devote to the 1905 match in their Fields of Praise. And for some reason the Boks have never weighed quite as heavy as the All Blacks in the collective memory of the British game.But by the time they pitched up at Hampden Park -- a venue permitting a Scottish record attendance of 32,500 -- in mid-November, the Boks were looking every bit as formidable as the All Blacks had done a year earlier. They had carved through a succession of English opponents and only been checked to any extent when they entered Wales and were flummoxed by the local methods -- under the then rules of the scrum -- for securing both loose head and put-in.Even then it did not take them long to grasp what was happening -- and to respond in kind. Both Glamorgan and Newport gave the tourists tough games and held them to single figures, a distinction shared with only Middlesex among their first 15 opponents. But they could not beat the Boks, who retained a 100 per cent record from those 15 matches, with a points difference of 354 against 21 and only three tries conceded, when they arrived at Hampden.They had the mutual understanding built up by touring teams -- and it doubtless did no harm that their centres, Japie Krige and Boy de Villiers were also cousins. But they were inevitably lacking in international experience, since it was South Africas first Test since the Lions had departed three years earlier, and fielded 10 debutants. Tour captain Paul Roos, a formidable figure on and off the field, was out with a knee injury, so they were led by his deputy Paddy Carolin.The Scots, recuperating from a disappointing 1906 championship campaign during which they beat only Ireland, contented themselves with four newcomers, all in a pack which also included three medical men. Their threequarter line included two 18-year-olds, the wing Lewis MacLeod and Yokohama-born centre Maurice Walter, who a year earlier had turned down selection for England to opt for the Scots.But their real weapon was the weather. It had rained for two days before the match. The ground was in a terrible condition, Carolin was to recall. And we scarcely enjoyed our first experience of trying to play football in mud up to our ankles with a ball as heavy as lead and as slippery as an eel.Scotland, by contrast, enjoyed themselves hugely in conditions perfect for the rampaging feet, Scotland, feet style of forward play. As Carolin admitted, We were beaten to a frazzle by a wonderful set of forwards. Driven on by David Bedell-Sivright, arguably the hardest of Scotlands many notable hard men, they took no prisoners -- three Boks spent time off the field injured. Forward Dietlof Mare, later the author of the first rugby book in Afrikaans, ended his only international match with two broken fingers.Yet there was no score in the first half, and it took a moment of opportunistic brilliance to break the deadlock soon after the restart. Half-back Pat Munro kicked across the field to the right wing where the prodigious MacLeod took a superb catch and strode past a series of tacklers to the line. Centre Tennant Sloan was to say many years later that, I saw it all right, and ran for it, but couldnt get near it. It was only MacLeods tremendous pace that allowed him to get under the ball and he caught it safely at full pace.Even then the outcome remained in doubt until wing Alexander Purves, one of three London Scottish players in the line-up, touched down after a foot rush by the Scottish pack, although Krige claimed ever after to have got theere first.ddddddddddddFor the Scots, the 6-0 victory was the prelude to one of their best ever seasons, with 1907 delivering a Triple Crown and championship. Purves followed his try against the Boks with another in each of the championship matches, part of a run of six consecutive scoring appearances.Yet neither of their teenage prodigies enjoyed the long international careers that had seemed in store for them. Walter died of meningitis at 22. MacLeod, a truly extraordinary all-round ballplayer who might have played for Scotland at 15 if his head teacher at Fettes had allowed it and also played cricket for Lancashire and football for Manchester City, quit at 20 following the death of his elder brother George, a team-mate on his debut against the All Blacks a year earlier.But at least three of the other backs were to attain off-field distinction. Munro joined the Sudan Civil Service, returned after a distinguished career to become a Conservative MP and died on a Home Guard exercise in 1942. Sloan too joined the imperial civil service and was knighted for his achievements in India.None, though, managed anything as colourful as their captain Louis Greig, a naval doctor who earned the undying regard of the royal family by diagnosing and treating the duodenal ulcer afflicting Prince Albert. That regard transmuted into a lifetime as father-figure, adviser and confidant to the prince, destined to become George VI. When Greig died in 1953, the range and influence of his acquaintances was reflected at a funeral which his grandson and biographer Geordie -- editor of the Mail on Sunday -- has recorded was attended by the five senior members of the royal family, Winston Churchill, J Arthur Rank, representatives of Catford dog track, the All-England tennis club and the Scotland rugby team, along with six waiters from the Dorchester Hotel who took the morning off to be there.The Boks rebounded from their initial set-back, seeing off Ireland 15-12 in a seesawing struggle in Belfast highlighted by a superb long-range try by mercurial Irish centre Basil MacLear, Wales -- who would go down to the Boks again in 1912, but not lose at home to any other opponent between 1899 and 1913 -- 11-0 at Swansea and drawing 3-3 with England at Crystal Palace.The Welsh writer WJ Townsend Collins, comparing the two great pioneering touring teams, would conclude that: The All Blacks were professors convinced of the correctness of their theories, satisfied with themselves, confident of their mission and their ability to teach. The Springboks were students anxious to learn, and at the end they were a very great team. The Springboks conception of combination was better than the All Blacks, their passing was better.And their successors remembered those lessons. The next four Springbok teams -- in 1912, 1931, 1951 and 1960 -- recorded clean sweeps of the home nations. It was not until 1965, on a short tour of Ireland and Scotland riven by the politics endemic to the South African game under apartheid, that they lost again to any of the home nations, going down first 9-6 to a late penalty by Irish full-back Tom Kiernan and then, a week later, 8-5 to an even later drop-goal by Scotlands outside-half Davie Chisholm.Here perhaps is the real clue to the way the 1906 match has faded from history. It was the falsest of false dawns, a defeat on their first outing that was not to be repeated for 59 years and 19 matches (22 if you add in the defeats handed to Scotland, Ireland and Wales when single-country tours of South Africa began in the 1960s). Nor were the Lions to win a series in South Africa until 1974, with six teams between 1910 and 1969 achieving only four victories in 22 tests. The nilling inflicted on the Boks in their first Test on British and Irish soil has yet to be repeated in 83 matches (including 12 World Cup ties) spread over 110 years since.It is time, perhaps, that the memory should be revived. The victory in 1906 deserves to be remembered as one of the great days in Scottish rugby history and the achievements of that seasons team to rank alongside those of 1925, 1933, 1938, 1984, 1990 and 1999. Greater, perhaps, given that none of those teams also managed to beat a major touring team (although the 1984 team came desperately close, drawing 25-25 with the All Blacks), never mind one that would then go unscathed for another 59 years. ' ' '