MINNEAPOLIS -Twins- The Twins were one pitch away from effectively burying the Guardians in the American League Central with a series victory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Instead, they\u2019ve done just enough to leave the door open.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All the pieces were there for the Twins to extend their divisional lead back to seven games, courtesy of seven shutout innings by Sonny Gray<\/a> and a two-run, go-ahead single by Jorge Polanco. But the back end of the Minnesota bullpen ceded a two-run lead, and a three-run blast by Kole Calhoun in the 10th inning sent the Twins to a 5-2 defeat<\/a> — one made all the more painful by the big picture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s tough, all around,\u201d Gray said. \u201cI don\u2019t think anybody in that locker room feels good about it. For the most part, we played a good game. It just got away from us at the end. This is a tough one.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead of a seven-game buffer for the Twins, their lead in the AL Central is down to five games with 28 to play, including three head-to-head matchups remaining next Monday through Wednesday at Progressive Field. The Guardians hold the tiebreaker with their 6-4 lead in the season series.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Seemingly all season long, the Twins have felt on the cusp of pulling away from the Guardians at various points — and they\u2019ve been unable to follow through. And on a more granular level, that\u2019s what happened on Wednesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMissed opportunity? I mean, no, there’s always games that — I’m sure other teams say that when we come back and win those games,\u201d Royce Lewis said. \u201cIt’s both ways. I think, obviously, of course you want to win any time you can win.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the formula the Twins wanted — a lead handed to their back-end bullpen core of Griffin Jax, Caleb Thielbar and Jhoan Duran — but they fell short.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After Jax and Thielbar yielded a run in the eighth, Duran put runners on first and second with one out in the ninth and induced what could have been a game-ending double play grounder back to the mound, but he fumbled the comebacker and had to settle for the second out at first base.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Duran then got two strikes on pinch-hitter Bo Naylor but yanked a curveball behind his feet, resulting in a game-tying wild pitch. Though Naylor\u2019s bat head appeared to do a full revolution, no umpire ruled that he\u2019d offered at the pitch, and a replay review ruled that the pitch had not hit Naylor, preserving the run.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI felt great. The only pitch that went wrong was the curveball,\u201d Duran said through interpreter Mauricio Ortiz. \u201cIt\u2019s difficult especially because Sonny did a great job. Yeah, it\u2019s difficult.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the 10th, the Twins summoned Kody Funderburk for his second career MLB appearance to pitch a left-on-left matchup against Calhoun in a tie game with runners on the corners — and Calhoun lifted a 3-0 fastball to the right-center field bleachers to give Cleveland\u2019s season life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe gave Kody an opportunity that we might give him again at some point,\u201d manager Rocco Baldelli said. \u201cLast time he pitched for us, he mowed \u2019em down and looked great. So, I hope he\u2019s not being too hard on himself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In contrast to another tough day from the bullpen, the Twins had flexed their starting advantage over the usually rotation-driven Guardians with a dominant Gray, who completed seven scoreless for the first time since April 24 and made his seventh quality start in his last eight outings. He was efficient through six innings, facing two over the minimum, but allowing a runner to third before he finished off the seventh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The math remains overwhelmingly in the Twins\u2019 favor, with Baseball-Reference having put the Twins at a\u00a096% chance of winning the division<\/a>\u00a0before the game and FanGraphs having put them at\u00a094.6%<\/a>. But there was acknowledgement in the postgame clubhouse that this was absolutely an important series, with a challenging result.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI feel pretty confident,\u201d Duran said. \u201cWe lost this series, which was very important, especially with one month left, but I\u2019m confident in everyone, and we\u2019ll eventually overcome this.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nothing has come easy for these Twins this season — and these battles against Cleveland over the years haven\u2019t been easy, either. It\u2019s looking like that could continue to the end of this season\u2019s matchups between the rivals, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Yeah, it does [feel like an important series],\u201d Polanco said. \u201cBut like I said, we take it day by day. Today wasn’t our day. We lost, but we are ready for the next day.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" MINNEAPOLIS -Twins- The Twins were one pitch away from effectively burying the Guardians in the American League Central with a series victory. Instead, they\u2019ve done just enough to leave the door open. All the pieces were there for the Twins to extend their divisional lead back to seven games, courtesy […]<\/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-275265","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\/275265","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=275265"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275265\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":275266,"href":"https:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275265\/revisions\/275266"}],"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=275265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=275265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=275265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}