First the good news: Twins center fielder, Byron Buxton, the fastest man in baseball, hit an inside-the-park home run to score a run in the third inning of Tuesday’s game. The bad news: it was only one of two runs the Twins scored in a second consecutive loss to the Chicago White Sox.
The 6-2 loss dropped the Twins three games back of the Pale Hose with two games left in the series.
Once again the culprit was lack of hitting. The Twins scored two runs on only four hits and were 0-for-5 with runners in scoring position. And when you’re not hitting it’s going to be very hard to rally from behind. That’s where Randy Dobnak put them after he got into trouble early. He allowed a run in the first, three more in the third and was done after four-plus innings. He’s now 6-4 with a 4.05 ERA.
Jake Odorizzi, who is coming off the injured list, gets the ball Wednesday.
Extra innings…
-You can watch Buxton’s inside-the-park home run over and over and over again.
-Buxton almost had an inside-the-park home run on Monday, but the umps ruled it a ground-rule double which kept Buxton at second base, despite the ball appearing to be easily retrievable by the White Sox outfielder.
-The Dobber’s early success this season has been the feel-good story of 2020 for these Twins, but I think it’s time to acknowledge that he is not a long-term solution for the Twins’ rotation. A couple more bad starts and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Dobber found himself in the mix to relieve games.
-Twins manager Rocco Baldelli and superstar designated hitter, Nelson Cruz, were ejected from Tuesday’s game in the seventh inning.
Here’s what MLB.com had to say:
That (inside-the-park) overturn was just one of several contested plays in this series — including Matt Wisler’s sixth-inning balk on Monday and a strike-three call to catcher Ryan Jeffers that appeared to be well beneath the zone — that led to frustration in the Twins’ dugout, culminating in the ejections of the mild-mannered Baldelli and Cruz following that seventh-inning strikeout by Jeffers.
-The Twins can still even this series with two wins.