Twins don't look much like themselves in sweep

MINNEAPOLIS -- The New York Yankees very much played like the better team in this series. The results in all three of the games at Target Field this week left little doubt of that, capped by another uncompetitive 5-0 Minnesota loss on Thursday that brought a merciful end to a listless sweep.

Getting beaten by a better team will happen over the course of a long season, especially considering how well these fortified Yankees have been playing to start this campaign. But the Twins also helped too much by beating themselves with miscues, even beyond their 26-inning scoreless streak to finish the series.

“We came into this series off of a month of pretty spectacular play all the way around,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “I didn’t kind of recognize much of what I was watching over the last three days.”

It should help a good deal -- on the defensive side, at least -- that Byron Buxton could rejoin the team this weekend following the expected completion of a rehab assignment with Triple-A St. Paul on Thursday.

That’s because Minnesota’s outfield play in particular produced about as messy of a three-game stretch as has been seen in the Baldelli era -- and another mishap impacted Thursday’s game in the first inning, when left fielder Alex Kirilloff couldn’t handle a fly ball that hit his glove at the warning track in left-center field.

The Yankees scored three runs in that first frame to seize a lead before the Twins stepped into the batter’s box. Two of those came as a result of Kirilloff’s misplay -- ruled an RBI double for Gleyber Torres -- that happened as he drifted over for what would have been the second out of the inning.

That’s far from the only reason why the Twins lost on Thursday. But after two games in which Minnesota already appeared “stale-ish,” in the words of Baldelli, an immediate misplay perhaps stopped the Twins from turning around that energy in any meaningful way.

“We didn't play good baseball at all, and you've got to be able to, as a team, take accountability in a lot of things we did wrong and fix them for the next series,” Carlos Correa said.

It was a particularly rough series for interim center fielder Willi Castro, who not only lost a ball in the sun and botched the transfer in Tuesday’s first inning but also made two mental errors when he threw to the wrong base on a sacrifice fly Tuesday, then lost track of the number of outs during Wednesday’s second inning, allowing an easy Yankees run to score on another sac fly.

Austin Martin also had a tough game in left field on Tuesday. And several rough routes in center by Castro perhaps led to some catchable balls dropping through the series -- and his frustration was palpable after he forgot the number of outs in the second inning Wednesday, when he threw the ball over the right-field upper deck in frustration after the final out of the inning.

“[Baldelli] obviously told me he was thinking about taking me out, but he said he wasn't going to do that,” Castro said. “It's the first time that's happened to me. … Next time, I know that's not going to happen again.”

Baldelli isn’t the type of manager to issue punitive benchings, especially for one of his most valuable players of late in Castro -- but those sorts of things are being addressed within the clubhouse, its leader said.

“The mental [game] is the most important thing,” Correa said. “Doesn't matter if you're struggling at the plate or defensively -- you've just got to be in the game all the time, and that's something that we address and we're going to fix and it won't happen again.”

The 26 scoreless frames are another matter, one that Baldelli didn’t think was indicative of the quality of contact his team had on Tuesday and Wednesday (but not Thursday, when a masterful Clarke Schmidt threw eight scoreless innings).

With the Twins having entered the series with a 16-3 record in their previous 19 games while playing crisp baseball, they’re confident they’re not too far off -- and they’re preaching the importance of regrouping quickly ahead of an important series in Cleveland.

“That's the beauty of baseball, right?” Correa said. “You can go from being the best team in baseball for two weeks and then you can absolutely suck for three days. You've just got to go out there and find a way to move on and perform the next day.”