740 The Fan \u2014 Edouard Julien hit a pinch hit, solo homer to start a five-run eighth inning and the Minnesota Twins went on to beat the Kansas City Royals 8-4 on Monday night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Carlos Correa tied a career-high with four hits from the leadoff spot and Byron Buxton drove in a pair of runs with sacrifice flies for Minnesota, which beat Kansas City for the seventh time in eight games this season.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Julien, the Canadian rookie second baseman, hit for Kyle Farmer to lead off the eighth and sent the first pitch he saw from Royals reliever Taylor Clarke for a no-doubt homer to right field. It was the first pinch hit for Julien, who was told he was pinch-hitting but didn\u2019t realize it was leading off the inning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI was sitting on the couch and they yelled, \u2018Eddie, you\u2019re leading off,\u2019\u201d Julien said. \u201cI rushed back to the dugout and I couldn\u2019t find my elbow guard. It was not there. I just picked a random elbow guard, put it on and had no idea what the pitcher had. I just swung.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kansas City had tied the game in the top of the inning on a solo homer by Nick Pratto.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Clarke (1-3) surrendered five runs on five hits and retired just one of the seven batters he faced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe have confidence in him,\u201d Royals manager Matt Quatraro said of Clarke. \u201cWe\u2019re going to keep putting him out there in leverage, or any situation we feel good about. He\u2019s in a little bit of a rough patch right now, but we\u2019ve seen what he can do on the positive side and we\u2019re going to keep working with him.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Clarke held a 2.70 ERA through his first 30 innings this season, but he\u2019s given up 15 earned runs in 5 2\/3 over his last seven appearances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt was going so good for awhile, and then the wheels completely fell off,\u201d Clarke said. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t even gradual. I don\u2019t know. I wish I had more of an answer for you. I feel like I\u2019m doing everything the same, just the results aren\u2019t there. I have to scrap it over and start from (scratch), from the beginning.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Minnesota\u2019s Brent Headrick (2-0) allowed Pratto, the first batter he faced Monday, to homer to lead off the eighth. He retired the next three batters he faced, with two strikeouts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Michael A. Taylor drove in the second run in the eighth as his bunt was fielded by Clarke with nowhere to throw. Max Kepler, Correa and Alex Kirilloff followed with three straight RBI singles for the Twins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe did a good job of adjusting in some of these at-bats, of hitting balls in different spots in the zone,\u201d Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said. \u201cWe\u2019ve talked about those things for a little while this year and you can see, that\u2019s what it looks like when you mix in some good swings and just some tough at-bats.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Royals rookie Maikel Garcia reached base four times and hit the first pitch of the game off Joe Ryan for a homer. Kansas City, which had won two straight against the Los Angeles Dodgers over the weekend, have lost 11 of their last 12 games in Minnesota.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
740 The Fan \u2014 Edouard Julien hit a pinch hit, solo homer to start a five-run eighth inning and the Minnesota Twins went on to beat the Kansas City Royals 8-4 on Monday night. Carlos Correa tied a career-high with four hits from the leadoff spot and Byron Buxton drove […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":272399,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-273574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=273574"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273574\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":273584,"href":"https:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273574\/revisions\/273584"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/272399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=273574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=273574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=273574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}