ARLINGTON, Texas _ The Twins piled up 12 runs on Saturday, added a full game to their AL Central lead, and moved within one win of their first sweep in Texas in more than 20 years. Yet after watching Minnesota's 12-7 victory over the Rangers, it was hard to feel good about Minnesota's championship ambitions for 2019.
How far can they go, after all, if Jose Berrios isn't his All-Star self?
Berrios was staked to a 6-0 lead, handed three more runs to work with over the next four innings, and was facing a Texas offense that has scored the second-fewest runs in the AL this month. Yet the Twins right-hander was unable to complete even five innings, and now finds himself in the worst three-game stretch of his career.
Berrios surrendered a pair of two-run homers to former teammate Danny Santana in the first two innings alone, walked in a run in the fifth inning, and threw only 10 first-pitch strikes to the 24 batters he faced. He departed having allowed seven runs, and while only three were earned runs due to a Miguel Sano misplay in the second inning, it continued a disturbing trend for the Twins' putative ace.
Berrios has started three games in August, and allowed 19 runs in 16 innings, 15 of them earned. That's an 8.44 ERA for a pitcher who, his track record says, tends to pitch worse in August and September than early in the season. Berrios has a career ERA of 4.16, but it's 5.44 after Aug. 1.
Oddly, Saturday was the second time this season that Berrios had been unable to win a game after the Twins bequeathed him a large lead. The right-hander was pulled in the fifth inning in Seattle in May after the Twins took a 15-0 lead.
Berrios still has 17 quality starts this season, by far the most on the team, and he ranked among the top 10 ERAs in the American League as recently as three weeks ago. So working his way out of this slump is obviously possible.
And the Twins' offense seems to be hitting high gear once again. C.J. Cron and Miguel Sano each homered on Saturday, with Cron's first-inning drive into the right-field seats, capping a six-run first inning, a historic one. It was Cron's 20th home run of the season, giving the Twins six 20-homer hitters for the first time since 1963.
The weird part of that inning was that none of the runs should have scored. Eddie Rosario hit a double-play ball that would have ended the inning without a run, but Rangers starter Ariel Jurado didn't catch the relay throw from shortstop Elvis Andrus, allowing Sano to score. Then the Twins exploded: Mitch Garver walked, Luis Arraez singled, Marwin Gonzalez doubled, and Cron homered.
The Twins victimized Jurado again in the second inning, with a walk to Max Kepler and back-to-back singles by Sano and Jorge Polanco setting up Rosario's sacrifice fly and Garver's run-scoring slow roller, with the Twins' catcher beating out another double-play relay.
Tyler Duffey rescued Berrios when he allowed two fifth-inning singles and then walked Hunter Pence and Rougned Odor, forcing in a run to close the gap to 9-7. Duffey struck out Logan Forsythe and ended the inning with an Isiah Kiner-Falefa fly ball, preserving the lead and earning, for the second straight day, a win in relief.
The game had tempers as hot as the 97-degree temperatures, too. When Gonzalez _ 10 for 14 during this series _ slammed his bat to the ground after grounding out to end the eighth inning, Rangers right-hander Shawn Kelley yelled at him as he walked off the field. Gonzalez turned toward the pitcher and Kelley _ who hit Kepler with a 3-0 pitch two nights earlier, apparently in retaliation for Jake Cave swinging at a 3-0 pitch with a big lead _ did a U-turn, and both benches quickly emptied. But umpires separated the two before anything could boil over any further, and the game resumed without incident.
