The Twins had already scored five runs and batted around once by the time Miguel Sanó stepped to the plate in the third inning and might very well have vaporized a baseball. By the time Minnesota batted around again two innings later, the game had long since gotten out of hand.

The Bomba Squad entered Wednesday night’s game against the Brewers at Miller Park having dropped five of its previous six games. The offense, expected to be the best in the league, had struggled to string good at-bats together outside of some early eruptions.

Finally, things clicked. Finally, the offense sustained over a full game. Finally, three of the most prominent hitters in the lineup showed signs of life. Finally, the bats came alive in a 12-2 blowout of the Brewers that secured a series win and gave the Twins some needed positive momentum heading into an off-day.

• Box score

“You look at the lineup from top to bottom, it was an explosive night,” Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said. “The at-bats were unrelenting, and that’s what we’re looking for. It wasn’t about just a couple of big swings that got us where we needed to be. It was a complete team effort in its entirety. It was just a good night all the way around.”

Every member of the Twins’ starting lineup had a hit by the time Brewers left-hander Eric Lauer was chased in the fourth inning, as Minnesota never let up en route to a season-high 15 hits. Byron Buxton continued his torrid road trip with a pair of solo homers, Sanó added a 442-foot clout and reached base three times, and Mitch Garver and Luis Arraez chipped in with multi-hit games.

That’s more of what these guys expected from themselves in 2020. It might not be a coincidence that it’s been roughly six weeks since the start of organized baseball activity in Summer Camp. In other words: the length of a normal Spring Training.

“Everybody across the league is going through something at this point,” Garver said. “Averages are way down. Guys aren’t hitting the ball the way they normally do. I think everybody is adjusting to what we call the new normal for 2020. We’re all getting there.”

Buxton’s two blasts gave him five in seven games. He has hit safely in eight of nine games after starting the season 1-for-15.

“He's scalding balls every day,” Baldelli said. “You go out there and you see just how hard he's hitting the ball, it's great to see. But it's how he's doing it. He's going up there and he's seeing the off-speed pitches and putting good swings on them, and then he gets fastballs and he's also putting good swings on fastballs. So those are great signs.”

It also proved a sign of great things to come when Sanó took a one-out walk in the second inning, Arraez later followed with a single and Garver tacked on a hit as the Twins sent nine men to the plate and plated five. The Twins needed some production from those three to help sustain rallies and to rely less on homers, as had been the case for most of this road trip.

Garver finished 3-for-6 with his first multihit game since July 25. He had been 4-for-36 in 2020, with 18 strikeouts. Arraez went 2-for-4 with a walk. He’d entered the game on a 4-for-33 slide, and his last multihit game had been July 26. Sanó added a pair of walks to his prodigious blast. He’d opened his season 6-for-48 with 25 strikeouts.

“Garv could have, in a different world, had about six hits tonight, the way he was swinging the bat,” Baldelli said. “I think almost every ball he hit was on the screws. He seemed like he was getting the pitches that he wanted to and laying off the others. It was a very, very good night all the way around for him.”

Thanks to that sustained production, the Twins scored in each inning from the second to the sixth, bucking another unexpected trend this season of scoring early but falling later in games. Entering the game, the Twins had scored 47 of their 86 runs in the first three innings.

On Wednesday, the Twins sent 10 men to the plate and tacked on four more runs in the fifth.

Twins starter Kenta Maeda was frequently seen in the dugout during those long half-innings, trying to keep his arm loose by swinging a towel in his pitching motion. He still didn’t seem bothered at all by the extended layoffs as he earned the 50th win of his Major League career.

The veteran right-hander continued his dominant start to 2020 by retiring 17 of the first 18 batters he faced as he scattered five hits and two runs over 6 2/3 frames on 85 pitches, marking the Twins’ longest start of the season. He had also been Minnesota’s first starting pitcher to enter the sixth and fifth innings earlier this season. He improved to 3-0 with a 2.66 ERA.

Frankly, Maeda might just have been in a hurry to get off the mound to keep the offense in rhythm. He didn’t mind watching.

“When our offense is long, it's a good thing because we’re getting runs, so I try not to overthink it,” Maeda said. “But I like to keep our defense out shorter, so my intent was to keep it efficient so our guys could stay fresh.”