'Don’t give up': Twins' bats erupt to keep Wild Card hopes alive
MINNEAPOLIS -- It's not over yet.
It took four Miami errors and a successful two-strike bunt before -- finally -- some big swings in big moments. But there are no style points anymore. Wins are the only currency that matters, and the Twins found a big one on Wednesday night against the Marlins, pulling away for an 8-3 victory to snap a three-game losing streak and keep the door ajar in the Wild Card chase.
“We know that all these games are must-wins and we know that we've got to come alive and we know that we've got to score runs to give our pitchers a chance,” Carlos Correa said. “We just want to keep doing that for the next four games.”
The victory was needed because the Tigers, Royals and Mariners all won, meaning the Twins at least maintained the status quo entering the day: two games behind both Detroit and Kansas City for the final Wild Card slot and a half-game ahead of Seattle. The only problem is that there’s one fewer game for the Twins to make up that gap, with only four to go in the season.
In addition to all the help from Miami’s miscues, it also took all but two of the club’s position players and all but two of the Twins’ relievers to come together and pick up after Simeon Woods Richardson’s short start of one-plus inning and three early runs allowed -- but they found a way.
“We got this,” manager Rocco Baldelli said to Woods Richardson when he pulled the rookie from the game in the second inning.
“And we got it,” Woods Richardson said.
Of the eight Minnesota runs -- their highest output since Sept. 15 -- six were unearned. But that was also indicative of the Twins at last finding the clutch hits that had eluded them for so long in this offensive slump to take advantage of all those Marlins mistakes.
Trevor Larnach cracked the two-out, two-run single up the middle in the third inning to take advantage of an error by Miami starter Edward Cabrera. And crucially, the floodgates opened in the seventh inning after Christian Vázquez successfully laid down a bunt on a full count that was thrown away by Marlins reliever Declan Cronin to bring home the go-ahead run.
The Twins found the crack, and their veterans wrested it all the way open with Correa’s RBI double and Carlos Santana’s three-run double that gave Minnesota a five-run inning and its first meaningful cushion in 10 days, eight unanswered runs later.
“We needed a come-from-behind win like that and an inning like that to boost just the confidence of everyone and come alive,” Correa said. “It was a good inning to have.”
Similarly to how the struggling lineup finally got the clutch hits to fall, the beleaguered bullpen turned in one of its finer performances of late, with Louie Varland leading the charge with the first seven outs among the eight scoreless innings of relief that held down the Miami offense while the bats got to work.
“Louie coming in and doing what he does, being a bulldog, you could kind of feel that energy come back to the dugout and that’s kind of when we took off,” Byron Buxton said. “Him barking in the dugout, that gets you going. You know he’s ready because he wants to go back out there.”
One last time, the Twins have a chance to seize that momentum and energy to make one final push back into the AL Wild Card race -- and there, too, they need help, and lots of it.
Down two games with four to play, the Twins need to catch either the Tigers or Royals. The latter seems more likely, seeing as how Detroit finishes the season at home against the White Sox while the Royals finish up on the road against Atlanta, another team playing for its playoff life.
Baldelli said ahead of Wednesday’s game that the Twins likely needed to win out to give themselves a chance, and even that would require the Royals going 2-2 or worse in their remaining four games for Minnesota to sneak in.
They’re hanging on by a thread -- but they’re still in it.
“Just got to fight, put together quality at-bats, good at-bats and don’t give up,” Buxton said. “That’s one of our things of who we are all season. We stay resilient and just keep battling. It’s just one of those things where we took the punch and fought back.”