TORONTO _ Logan Morrison, ever mindful of a shift so extreme, the second baseman is an outfielder, had seen enough. When Jays left-hander Aaron Loup wound up to throw a 0-1 curveball, Morrison squared around and held out his bat, ready to bunt. But he pulled back when the pitch bounced in the dirt.
Then Morrison changed his mind. And he changed the direction of a Loup fastball, by about 410 feet to straightaway center field.
Morrison's opposite-of-a-bunt, his 12th home run of the season, was one of 13 Minnesota hits that carried the Twins to their first victory of this road trip, 8-3 over the Blue Jays.
The Twins, having left behind the wreckage of their Royals rout, arrived at Rogers Centre on Monday, a ballpark where the Twins have won only eight of 27 games since 2010, their worst record of any AL park. But if there were any lingering wounds from a weekend in Kansas City, they didn't show.
In fact, their luck appeared quite the opposite of their Missouri breaks. After Joe Mauer doubled on the second pitch of the game, Eduardo Escobar hit a soft liner into shallow left field, the same sort of ball that Jake Cave dove for and missed in Kansas City, resulting in a game-deciding inside-the-park home run. This time, the miscalculation went the Twins' way: Toronto left fielder Teoscar Hernandez threw himself at the ball, but missed it, and it bounded past him to the left-field wall.
Escobar didn't quite circle the bases, but he accepted the RBI triple, and the Twins had an early lead.
They added to it with some baserunning in the third inning. With runners on first and second and one out, Brian Dozier hit a double-play ball to shortstop. But Dozier hustled up the line, and when Jays second baseman Devon Travis didn't make the pivot quickly, Dozier beat the throw, extending the inning.
That brought up Morrison, and the infield again shifted far to the right _ except for third baseman Yangervis Solarte, who remained within 15 feet of third base, rather than assume a position near deep short, as he normally would. That's because the runner was Eddie Rosario, who has developed a reputation for jockeying up and down the line to distract the pitcher, a play that Dozier used to force a balk against Tampa Bay last week.
With their attention focused on Rosario, the Jays didn't even throw to second base when Dozier stole it. And when Morrison hit a ground ball near the shortstop position, there was no fielder to stop it from rolling to center field and driving two runs home.
Morrison and Max Kepler homered, and the Twins built an 8-1 lead that the Jays couldn't dent until a harmless two-run rally in the ninth against closer Fernando Rodney.
The recipient of all this offense was Adalberto Mejia, filling in as the Twins sort out their second-half rotation. The left-hander allowed eight hits over 5 1/3 innings, but only one run. By walking just two, and reaching the sixth inning while throwing only 97 pitches, Mejia fulfilled manager Paul Molitor's pregame prescription.
"We're hoping to see him trust his stuff in the zone, and not nitpick or try to strike everybody out all the time. Trust his defenders," Molitor said. "If he can learn to be more efficient, it'll go a long way, because last year he ran into pitch-count issues."
Ervin Santana is scheduled to rejoin the team and start Wednesday's game, so the Twins have six pitchers in the rotation right now. "Don't know what will happen," Molitor said. "We know where we're at in this part of the season, so we'll wait and see. With six (starters), you have to think about how you want to go forward."
