Balks will haunt.
The Twins are just seven games into their season and, already, two balks from their starting pitchers have proven costly.
The second, which was called on Joe Ryan on Thursday, moved runners to second and third in the fourth inning. With the infield drawn in, they both came around to score as a Brendan Rodgers single got past a diving Carlos Correa to break a 2-all tie.
The Twins would never lead after that, dropping their home opener 5-2 to the Houston Astros in front of announced crowd of 36,783 fans at Target Field on Thursday afternoon.
The game couldn’t have started much better for the Twins — Ryan struck out all three batters he faced in the first and the Twins jumped out to a two-run lead — but the Astros wound up scoring five unanswered runs and the Twins managed just two hits after the first.
Minnesota’s only runs of the game came in the first. Matt Wallner jump-started the offense, tripling off the wall in center field. He scored on a Correa ground ball. After Byron Buxton beat out an infield hit and stole second, he scored the second run of the game on a Trevor Larnach RBI knock.
But the Twins couldn’t do much else off Astros starter Hunter Brown, who lasted six innings and struck out eight in his outing. At one point in the game, Houston pitchers retired 15 straight Twins batters, a streak that was broken up by an eighth-inning error.
The Astros, meanwhile, erased the Twins’ lead almost immediately with Ryan surrendering back-to-back home runs to Christian Walker and Jeremy Peña to begin the second. Two more runs scored in the fourth after the costly balk and a fifth came around in the sixth on consecutive doubles off reliever Louie Varland.
Houston scored its five runs without the help of nine-time All-Star Jose Altuve. The veteran, now playing left field for the Astros, struck out five times, the last coming in the ninth with the crowd on its feet cheering.
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