MINNEAPOLIS -- Before Tuesday’s game, Twins manager Rocco Baldelli had spoken at length about how he’d been thrilled with how his team had controlled the run game. He got into the fine details about the nuances of throwing out runners, because if there’s anything baseball lifers love, it’s to dig deep into the little things.

That proved prescient -- because a masterclass of those little things in a huge moment might have swung the outcome of Tuesday’s game.

The pesky Royals looked to have the Twins on the ropes with another ninth-inning rally -- but the Twins crushed their momentum by throwing out the potential tying run at second base in the ninth inning. Then, closer Jhoan Duran found his missing velocity in a huge sequence that secured the Twins’ 4-2 win over the Royals at Target Field, their sixth in seven games.

“The sequence at the end of the game, I thought, was baseball at a very high level,” Baldelli said. “Major League Baseball, kind of at its finest.”

Once Salvador Perez doubled and Adam Frazier singled to put runners on the corners with no outs in a 4-2 game, one would think that Duran would have been stressed about the runner on third base, but the Twins’ closer was actually ignoring Perez altogether.

He was more worried about pinch-runner Dairon Blanco at first base, representing the tying run -- because everyone knew Blanco would take off to put the tying run in scoring position.

This is the sort of situation catcher Christian Vázquez and shortstop Carlos Correa had been preparing for since Spring Training, especially under the newly instituted rules under which fielders are severely restricted in their ability to block bases with their bodies.

They started practicing a play in which Vázquez would throw offline and to the right of second base, where Correa could cut off the throw early and make a swipe tag.

“I took it more seriously in terms of, I couldn't block the base, so I had to look for ways to complete the out and make the out,” Correa said. “I came up with that in my mind, that it was the best way to go about it.”

But much of Baldelli’s pregame nitty-gritty hadn’t been about the fielders; it had been about the pitchers’ role in limiting stolen bases, including strategic uses of pickoff attempts, mixing up timings, and being abrupt in movements, among other things.

Duran has been working this season on using a slide step to get quicker to the plate, and that had actually come up as part of the discussion about his concerningly diminished velocity, with some 98 and 99 mph readings flaring up of late on a fastball that usually never dips below triple digits.

“I was clicking the slide steps [last week], and those were the fastest he had been,” bench coach Jayce Tingler said. “I was getting a lot of 1.1 [seconds], 1.15. A lot of times, he’s 1.3, 1.4.”

All that led to the game-changing play.

After a pickoff attempt earlier in the at-bat, Blanco took off on a 2-2 pitch, with Duran using the slide step that allows him to be quicker to the plate.

“He was really quick,” Correa said. “That was as quick as anybody to go to home plate.”

Vázquez made a throw that looked to the casual observer like it was off-target to the right, but that’s exactly where Correa wanted it. Correa made another one of those athletic, hard-to-believe tags while twisting his body in the air, and they got Blanco -- successful on 11 of 13 stolen-base attempts entering Tuesday -- by a mile.

“That's my money there, you know?” Vázquez said.

“For me, [Correa] lives on another planet,” Duran said. “He's great with his hands.”

Correa added: “It was a brilliant play started by Duran with quick time to home and then Vázquez with the release.”

With that out of the way, Duran finally turned his attention to Perez at third, and locked in.

“I got more angry because I didn’t want to allow that run to come in,” Duran said.

He’d been down to 98.2 mph with his four-seamer earlier in the inning, but he struck out MJ Melendez at 100.9.

Then, his final two pitches: 102.2 and 103.1 -- finally, his first 103 of the season, a relief for those concerned about Duran’s 1.5 mph fastball velocity dip from last year.

Apparently, with the little things taken care of, the fire came back.