MINNEAPOLIS -- The emphatic slam of the rosin bag from Tarik Skubal summed up his night as Josh Donaldson pummeled his 96 mph fastball and sent it to the left-field seats for a three-run homer. It was the Twins’ second home run off the Tigers' left-hander, and they added one more off Skubal before his season finale ended.

Asked how long it’ll take to put that behind him, Skubal smiled.

“Probably five months from now, whenever I get another outing,” he said.

In the process, they gave Skubal a reminder of his biggest point of improvement this offseason as he looks back on his rookie campaign. While he set a Tigers rookie record with 164 strikeouts, including one over 3 1/3 innings in Thursday night's 10-7 win at Target Field, he also yielded 35 home runs, one shy of Yusei Kikuchi’s Major League rookie record from 2019.

Skubal had defied the trend in September, helped by abbreviated starts, but he gave up more homers Thursday than he did in his previous four September starts combined (two). All three came on fastballs to right-handed hitters, and totaled 1,262 feet of distance as projected by Statcast. Byron Buxton and Donaldson turned on mid-90s fastballs on the inner half of the plate -- Buxton on Skubal’s third pitch of the night, Donaldson for a three-run homer on a 2-2 sinker with two outs in the third.

Both the situation and the sequencing made Donaldson’s home run particularly frustrating after Skubal had put a 2-1 sinker on the inside corner.

“The pitch prior was the pitch I was trying to do again,” Skubal said. “I was trying to emulate that pitch just because of the reaction that I got. I wanted to elevate it a little bit more than I did, and then it came back over the plate.

“Two outs, two strikes, I’m close to getting a zero that inning. I’ve worked really hard to getting a zero. And then that home run, there’s three on the board, so it completely changes the outing.”

While Skubal gave up damage, he was pitching efficiently, earning an extra inning from manager A.J. Hinch. He had Brent Rooker in an 0-2 hole with a pair of called strikes, but Rooker declined to chase his next two sliders down and in, leading to a 95 mph fastball over the plate and a drive to straightaway center. Add in a couple more balls in play, and the Twins averaged 102.7 mph in exit velocity off of Skubal’s fastball, and 97.5 mph off his pitches in general. His hardest pitch thrown Thursday was 97.3.

“It [stinks] for him that the season ends that way,” Hinch said, “because he pitched a lot better in September.”

Twenty-two homers off Skubal this year came on four-seam fastballs, as did six of his nine allowed last year, per Statcast. His .592 slugging percentage allowed off his fastball entering Thursday was the 12th-highest among Major Leaguers with at least 2,000 pitches thrown this year.

“I would love to look at the counts that the damage is being done in,” Skubal said. “Are those hitter's counts where fastballs are generally being thrown? Being able to throw sliders in those counts for strikes and stuff like that to be able to get back into my counts is another part [that] I can definitely work on.”

The homers tended to be early -- seven on the first pitch, seven in 1-1 counts, five on 0-1 and four on 1-0.

Skubal tried to change speeds throughout Thursday’s outing with a changeup that had been effective for him recently. However, the Twins swung at only one of nine changeups and took another for a called strike.

“The change-of-pace pitch is going to be important for him [going forward],” Hinch said before the game. “You can see the days [that] he feels really good about it and he uses it a lot. And you can see days where he’s not very comfortable using it and he shuts it down pretty quickly, becoming more fastball-slider [oriented].

"The game plan will dictate that, sometimes feel [for the pitch] will dictate that, but it’s important for him to have that in his arsenal for him to be a complete pitcher. He can’t just operate in the fastball-slider combo. He’s going to have to slow his breaking ball down on occasion, mixing in the changeup.”

Skubal ended his season with a no-decision for his trouble thanks to an equally formidable Tigers outburst on Twins rookie starter Joe Ryan, including a pair of home runs from former Twin Niko Goodrum. Buxton’s second homer of the night, this time off Kyle Funkhouser, put Minnesota ahead in the seventh, but Harold Castro’s game-tying double and Dustin Garneau’s go-ahead sacrifice fly turned the game again as part of a three-run eighth.