Nearly every Twins player has made a significant contribution to the great season the club has had so far. But on Friday, they needed only two: Kyle Gibson and Mitch Garver.
Gibson pitched eight scoreless innings and catcher Garver hit a two-run home run and that was enough for the Twins to beat the lowly Kansas City Royals, 2-0.
Gibson was especially good. He allowed two hits over eight innings with no walks and six strikeouts. He is now 7-3 with a 3.70 ERA.
Jake Odorizzi, already looking for his 10th win of the season, gets the ball Saturday.
Extra innings…
-Taylor Rogers, the Twins best reliever, earned his seventh save of the season.
-Friday’s win was one of the lowest scoring games of the season, a season that has been more about the blowout win than the close victory. Other low-scoring games: The Twins beat Cleveland 2-0 on opening day and beat Houston, 1-0, on April 29.
-About 38,000 fans attended Friday’s game. That’s good to see and it has the Twins moving up the rankings in total attendance. The Twins are now sixth in attendance in the American League, according to Baseball-Reference.com.
-Gibson was very efficient. He needed only 88 pitches to get through eight innings, or a little more than 10 pitches per inning. Nice job, Gibby.
-The Twins took two of three games from the Seattle Mariners, including Thursday’s 10-5 win. The Twins were leading 10-1 going into the eighth inning when the bullpen, a sore subject for this blogger, coughed up four more runs in the eighth and ninth innings. That has the Twins playing musical chairs again with the bullpen. Fernando Romero has been sent back to Triple-A Rochester and in his place the Twins have called up Zack Littell, according to MLB.com.
-If only the Twins had played this well against the New York Yankees on Friday, but no, it was the Royals. They are terrible at 22-47.