Riley Greene fought through an eight-pitch plate appearance against Jorge Alcala before finally being awarded first base. Spencer Torkelson saw 11 more pitches — two which he almost took out of the ballpark on long foul balls — before he, too, drew a walk and wound up on first base.
Those two walks set the stage for a big sixth inning for the Detroit Tigers, one in which they erased the Twins’ three-run lead and grabbed ahold of one of their own for good in Friday night’s 7-6 win over Minnesota in the series opener at Target Field.
A softly hit groundball — it was tapped at just 38.7 miles per hour — preceded Zach McKinstry’s two-run single, a hit which sliced the Twins’ lead to just one and spelled the end of Alcala’s night.
Alcala made way for Justin Topa, who allowed a game-tying single. Another run scored on Trey Sweeney’s groundout, giving the Tigers the lead before Topa could extract the Twins from the mess.
All told, it was a four-run inning, one that completely wiped out the three-run lead the Twins had scrapped for an inning prior.
“We can’t obviously walk guys and give them free baserunners and think they’re not going to score some runs,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “That’s on us.”
Three of the first four batters Alcala faced in the sixth inning were left-handed, but after getting the last out of the fifth inning, southpaw Danny Coulombe did not come back out. That, Baldelli said, was because of his recent usage.
Coulombe, the only lefty in the Twins’ bullpen, had thrown in three of the Twins’ last five games heading into Friday, including Thursday’s game in Kansas City.
“These are things that are things you have to work through in Major League Baseball,” Baldelli said. “You’ve got to be able to adjust and adapt on the fly. You’re not going to have every guy available for every prime run because we play a lot of games.”
Byron Buxton, back after a two-day absence because of a personal matter, was in the middle of it all for the Twins’ offense, scoring their first run in the second inning after a walk and a stolen base. Another run scored in the fifth on Buxton’s groundout, and he scored later that inning on a mad dash home. Buxton would also hit a home run.
Ty France also drove in a pair of runs as part of a three-hit day for him, and Edouard Julien also collected three hits. But their efforts weren’t enough on a night when the bullpen gave up six runs and the defense made a pair of errors that led to two unearned runs.
The first came in the fifth inning, spelling the end of David Festa’s start. Festa, called up from Triple-A on Friday, turned in a promising performance, one of the positives for the Twins on Friday night.
“I felt, overall, it was a solid job,” Festa said. “I thought I made a couple big pitches when I needed to.”
The right-hander pitched around a bases-loaded situation in the third inning and had held the Tigers scoreless heading into the fifth inning. It would have remained that way had Matt Wallner’s throw back to third base not ended up in the dugout after deflecting off Detroit’s third base coach’s foot, allowing Dillon Dingler, the runner he was attempting to throw out, to score. That play tied the game.
Festa took a no-decision in the loss, one that dropped the Twins to 4-10 on the season and was their fifth in their past six games.
“We’ve got to play crisper in the field. We’ve got to play more and better fundamental baseball. It can’t come and go. We’ve had it,” Baldelli said. “We’ve done a good job in some games of playing pretty good baseball and in other games, it hasn’t been what you want to see and it’s not one culprit. We have to do better as a ...
