August 13, 2020

Harmonic convergence: Twins hitting, pitching align to blast Brewers

Kenta Maeda gave the Twins six strong innings and the offense followed suit to blast the Milwaukee Brewers and win the series 12-2 on Wednesday.

This felt like the team’s most complete win so far this season.

Maeda breezed through the early part of the game and the hits appeared to come easily as every batter in the starting lineup had at least one knock. Perhaps most important: Mitch Garver and Luis Arraez, two players who have struggled this season, had five of the Twins’ 15 hits. And Byron Buxton is suddenly the hottest player on the team after he had three more hits, including two home runs. He’s now hitting .298.

And if Buxton finally plays like this for the remainder of the season, nobody is going to miss Josh Donaldson.

The Twins now head home to play the Kansas City Royals and Brewers all over again. Jake Odorizzi gets the ball Friday.

Extra innings…

-Maeda is now 3-0 with a 2.66 ERA after Wednesday’s win. He allowed two runs and five hits over six-plus innings on 85 pitches. He also walked one and struck out five. It was his 50th win in the majors. Before coming to the states in 2016, Maeda won 97 games for Japan’s Hiroshima Carp.

-Minnesota native and reliever, Caleb Thielbar, got one out in the seventh, then turned the ball over to Aussie lefty, Lewis Thorpe, who pitched two innings of scoreless ball.

-The Twins had five extra-base hits in Wednesday’s game: Two doubles and three home runs, including the fourth of the season for Miguel Sano. Sano hit a tape measure shot that appeared to disappear. Statcast clocked it at 113.8 miles per hour off the bat with a distance of 442 feet.

“I don’t know if anyone’s seen it land,” Twins manager Rocco Baldelli told MLB.com. “I have no idea where it went. It might have just disappeared, for all we know. I don’t know how a ball can get hit much harder and farther than that one.”

COMMENTS

Hi, I’m Rolf Boone, Twins fan.

I became a fan of the Minnesota Twins after a friendly wager in the early 1980s. I survived Ron Davis, the meltdown in Cleveland, Phil Bradley at the Kingdome and then marveled at a rising generation of stars and two World Series wins in 1987 and 1991. Brad Radke made the 1990s bearable, while Kirby Puckett’s eye injury, exit from the game and eventual death made it almost too much to bear. The new century ushered in more talent — Joe Mauer, Johan Santana, Joe Nathan, Torii Hunter, Justin Morneau — and consecutive seasons of playoff baseball, followed by consecutive seasons of losing baseball. A winning season returned in 2015. So here we are. Go Twins.