Twins starting pitcher Chris Archer hasn’t exactly been terrible this season — he has an earned run average slightly above 4.00 after nine starts — but he also hasn’t been very good. And he made another underwhelming appearance on Saturday in a 7-3 loss to the Kansas City Royals.
Archer has struggled to go deep into games and has yet to make a quality start. His longest outing of the season has been four-plus innings and he turned in another four-inning performance on Saturday. He allowed five runs on seven hits and a wild pitch, but only three of those runs were earned because of a Jorge Polanco throwing error.
So far this season, Archer has seven no-decision efforts and two losses. He is 0-2 with a 4.19 ERA.
“I could have executed better,” Archer told MLB.com. “I made maybe the right pitch, I just didn’t throw it in the right spot. They’re a contact-oriented team and they put the ball in play. And it sucks. I wish I could have made better pitches in those spots.”
Meanwhile, the Royals and Twins both had 11 hits, but the Royals pushed across seven runs compared to just three for the Twins. Although they had the same number of total hits, nearly half of them went for extra bases for Kansas City, while the Twins had just two extra-base hits. Minnesota also was 1-for-8 with runners in scoring position and left 11 men on base.
The Twins go for the split of the four-game series on Sunday. Sonny Gray gets the ball.
Extra innings…
-One of those extra-base hits for the Twins was a Trevor Larnach home run, his second of the season.
-On May 31, 1980, Ken Landreaux’s 31-game hitting streak came to an end during an 11-1 loss to the Baltimore Orioles before about 8,000 fans at the Met.
“The remarkable thing about this was that he hit so many left-handers,” said Twins manager Gene Mauch to the Minneapolis Tribune.
The paper pointed out that Landreaux faced 18 left-handed pitchers during the streak.
“I only know two left-handed hitters consistently as good as Landreaux against left-handed pitchers,” Mauch said. “One is Stan Musial. The other is Ted Williams.”