SO close! Varsho gets glove on both of Twins' back-to-back HRs

MINNEAPOLIS -- Baseball is a team sport -- and sometimes, the help doesn’t even come from your own team.

The Twins found that out during the fifth inning of their 9-7 win over the Blue Jays at Target Field on Saturday afternoon, when they got back-to-back homers from Willi Castro and Matt Wallner -- both of which went off the glove of Toronto center fielder Daulton Varsho, who was unfortunate to figure prominently into both blasts while playing three hours away from his home in Wisconsin.

“It was in my glove and then I hit the wall and it bounced out -- both times,” Varsho said. “It’s one of those things where you live and die by it. It is what it is at the end of the day. Sometimes, you come up with it. Sometimes, you don’t.”

Castro’s deep drive to center field off Blue Jays starter Chris Bassitt wasn’t going to leave the yard, but when Varsho made a leaping attempt at the warning track, the ball bounced off his outstretched glove and onto the grass berm over the center-field fence for a go-ahead, two-run blast that put the Twins up, 6-4.

Wallner, the Minnesota native, then drove a deep blast that Varsho chased to the fence in front of the visitors’ bullpen in left-center field, where he made a leap and stretched his glove over the wall. He briefly appeared to have the ball in his glove on its way down before it, too, fell for a homer that stretched the lead to 7-4 -- but this one would have been gone regardless.

“He’s a heck of a player; he’s trying to make plays out there,” Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said. “Anyone who’s played in the outfield for a while has had plays like that that are just out of your grasp. I’m glad as hell he missed them.”

The toughest part for Toronto is that the Jays didn’t even intend to have Varsho in center field; they began the game with three-time Gold Glove winner Kevin Kiermaier, one of the game’s elite defenders, at that position before he exited the game with right lower back discomfort after the second inning.

The Twins were more than happy to take the lucky break, considering how their offense has struggled to take advantage of scoring opportunities in losing six of their last eight games, a stretch during which they’ve averaged only 3.4 runs per game.

And on Saturday, it’s not exactly like they needed the help, as their young talent thrived to post the Twins’ highest offensive output since their blowout 16-3 win over the Cubs on May 14. Wallner, the club’s No. 7 prospect, notched his first career four-hit game with the homer and three singles, and he even added a 94.6 mph outfield assist, while No. 4 prospect Edouard Julien crushed his fourth career homer as part of a three-hit game.

Varsho’s outfield adventures also helped Castro collect his first career multi-homer game, a needed showcase of how, on the position side as much as on the pitching side, the depth also lends plenty of promise to the future -- and to the present, while the Twins wait for the returns of Max Kepler, Jorge Polanco, Royce Lewis and Trevor Larnach.

“When you call guys up, you’re looking for them to help you win a game -- and when they just take over the game and do that, it’s a bonus,” Baldelli said. “These guys, they’re good players. We know that. We knew we were going to rely on them at some point in the year. That time is now.”

Wallner is up because of the injuries to Kepler and Larnach, and though he has struggled with swing-and-miss in his power-oriented game, he showed improved discipline in not only his ability to knock the homer in and out of Varsho’s glove in the fifth, but also to sit back on an 0-2 curveball for a two-out, two-run single in the first.

Julien is only playing because of Polanco’s hamstring strain, but he’s showing off his increased comfort in the big leagues by getting to what he does best -- walking and hitting the ball the other way to his power alley in left-center -- as he crushed an RBI double off the wall there in the second inning and mashed an opposite-field blast off reliever Yimi García in the eighth.

If and when the Twins get healthy, these roster decisions will get tougher and tougher -- and glimpses of this kind of production from the depth are certainly only a good thing.