Seventh inning, Sunday afternoon. Twins down a run, men on second and third with two outs, Joe Mauer up. Result: Two-run single, Twins lead by one.

One at-bat. One clutch hit. One more small sample of why a common rap on Mauer is simply wrong.

An example from a reader’s e-mail early last week:

I heard (Ron Gardenhire) defend Joe M. today on the radio — great hitter, able to pull the ball if he wants, feared by pitchers in an RBI situation.

The reality? Seems almost impossible for him to hit a ball in the air to the right of center, and it is getting more pronounced. A good avg. hitter? Yes. A clutch hitter, rbi man? No.

But Mauer isn’t the problem in the Twins lineup. He’s not even a problem. If the Twins had nine guys who hit like Joe Mauer, they’d be at the top of the AL runs scored stats, not at the bottom, because they’d make far fewer outs.

Let’s start with the complaint that Mauer is not an “RBI man.” True, Mauer has a career high of 84 RBIs, which is an unimpressive figure for a No. 3 hitter in this era.

But RBI totals are a function of the lineup. Mauer doesn’t get as many RBI opportunities as you might expect, and has a strong track record of taking advantage of those he has.

Runners in scoring position:

BA OBP SLG

2007 .324 .447 .532

2006 .360 .497 .544

05-07 .339 .468 .513

Over the past three seasons, Mauer has hit better with men in scoring position than he has in other situations. The problem is that in that same time period, he has had just 357 at-bats with men in scoring position.

Justin Morneau, in contrast, had 470 such at-bats — as a reference, that’s four more than David Ortiz. Morneau’s rate of production was good, but still markedly lower than Mauer’s — .283, .372, .483. But nobody complains about Morneau’s “clutch” performance.