MINNEAPOLIS -- Four batters into Monday night’s game, the Twins trailed the Giants by four runs.

Two hours later, in the bottom of the eighth, the Twins still trailed the Giants by four runs.

Kyle Garlick led off the eighth with a homer and two more runners reached base, but that was all Minnesota could muster in a 4-1 loss to San Francisco.

Twins starter Bailey Ober was uncharacteristically wild to start the game, walking both LaMonte Wade Jr. and Mike Yastrzemski. When Ober found the zone with a fastball, J.D. Davis crushed it for an RBI double. Then Michael Conforto blasted another fastball into the bullpen for a three-run homer.

Four batters, four runs. And one exasperated pitcher.

“It’s just a frustrating first inning -- frustrating first two guys, and then the three- and four-hole guys just jumped on some fastballs in the zone and put some damage on,” Ober said.

But Ober has shown enough over his brief career with the Twins that manager Rocco Baldelli was determined to ride it out.

“He’s not a guy that has trouble finding the zone very often. He's a good strike-thrower, so you know when you see something like that, he's not quite right,” Baldelli said. “We wanted to find a way to get him through that inning. I don't care if we use four visits in the first inning if we have to, to get him through it. We'll do a lot to make sure that he keeps pitching.”

And not only did Ober settle down, he settled into a nice groove, facing just one batter over the minimum in his last 16 hitters. He used his offspeed pitches to start getting ahead of hitters, and once he did that, he was back to his typical, effective self.

Which, in some ways, made the night even more frustrating.

“The expectations were to do what I did after the first inning, so I felt like I should have been able to do that the entire game,” Ober said. “Just the first inning got away from me a little bit, but I felt normal after that, felt like I was back to doing what I should be doing, attacking those guys, filling up the zone and getting early swings.”

Oh, but those first four at-bats.

“It's not the way you ever want to start a ballgame, both from his perspective and from a team perspective,” Baldelli said.

The early deficit, coupled with the Giants’ use of an opener instead of a traditional starting pitcher, led to some unusual moves within the Minnesota dugout. After right-hander John Brebbia pitched a 1-2-3 first inning, the Giants brought in lefty Sean Manaea. 

Baldelli countered by pinch-hitting right-hander Donovan Solano for lefty Edouard Julien, so even though Julien began the game as the Twins’ cleanup hitter, he never came up to bat. The next inning, Baldelli sent in Garlick to hit for Alex Kirilloff, who began the game by striking out against Brebbia.

Baldelli acknowledged that replacing his leadoff and cleanup hitters before they had more than one at-bat between them was certainly “unorthodox,” but there wasn’t much about this game that was ordinary, up to and including the 16 strikeouts posted by Twins hitters.

“In my opinion, when you’re facing a situation like that, [you have] to be willing to make moves and get guys in there,” Baldelli said. “When you go down 4-0 early in the game, it really affects a lot of things. If you’re battling along or you have a lead or you’re playing a really tight ballgame, you can leave your lineup out there, let them grind through a few at-bats, stay competitive, or even be in the lead.”

The closest the Twins came to a rally was in the eighth, when Byron Buxton was hit by a pitch and Solano drew a walk after Garlick’s leadoff homer. That put the tying run at the plate with one out, but submarining Giants reliever Tyler Rogers struck out Kyle Farmer and Willi Castro to end the threat.

“Going down early like that, when we’re not really scoring very many runs, can be tough. You can’t let that affect you going forward, though,” Baldelli said. “On the mental side of continuing to play nine innings and giving yourself a chance to come back in the game, we still have some work to do in that way.

“We can say, one hit or there, and all of a sudden we have two or three runs on the board. That’s actually true. But talking about it, that’s one thing. We have to go out there and execute it.”