LOS ANGELES — Sometimes the hitting goes bad and costs you a game. Sometimes, the pitching is the culprit. And sometimes, the paperwork gets screwed up.
Jose Berrios allowed four runs in an ugly fourth inning, and the Twins once again failed to capitalize when they put runners in scoring position. But the enduring image of the Twins' third straight loss, 6-2 to the steamrolling Dodgers, will be umpires Lance Barrett and Bill Welke putting Paul Molitor through a lengthy mid-game tax audit.
With the Twins trying to keep their sixth-inning deficit at a manageable two runs, Molitor decided to execute a double-switch, inserting utility infielder Ehire Adrianza at shortstop, batting ninth, and reliever Ryan Pressly in the seventh slot, replacing shortstop Jorge Polanco. But as soon as Pressly threw a pitch, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts emerged with a complaint for Barrett: This isn't the switch you told us about.
"What I think I said [to Barrett] and what he heard were two different things," Molitor said.
Specifically, when Molitor explained what he called "a pretty obvious double-switch," Barrett wrote down something completely different: Pitcher Matt Belisle was going to left field, replacing Eddie Rosario as the fifth batter, and Ryan Pressly was pitching and batting seventh. No, it didn't make sense to Molitor, either, but "that's what he wrote down" and relayed to Roberts. "I don't know if I said a wrong name, or what I possibly might have said. I can't imagine I said Belisle for Rosario, but he heard what he heard," the manager said. "And if I didn't make it clear, that was my responsibility."
The umpires insisted that Rosario was out of the game, and Molitor eventually send Adrianza out to left field to explain it to Rosario and send him in. Even though Polanco was not in the game when it resumed, the umpires allowed him to return to the field, and he took his spot against at shortstop. "They looked at that as a correctable mistake," Molitor said. Was Belisle then disqualified from a game he never actually entered? "They didn't clarify that," Molitor said. "If I needed Belisle, I would have had to go see what his status was, if that was also a correctable mistake."
Even after Molitor gave up on his argument and made the changed insisted upon, Barrett and Welke put on headphones to communicate with MLB's replay office in New York, a discussion that added another 10 minutes to the delay. Finally, after an 18-minute interruption that had the rapidly thinning Dodger Stadium crowd chanting, "Let's play baseball!" the game resumed — and Pressly, who warmed up three times while waiting to pitch, surrendered three hits in quick succession to Yasiel Puig, Logan Forsythe and Chris Taylor, the latter two run-scoring hits that extended the Dodgers' lead and helped drop the Twins below .500 for the first time since they were 10-11 on April 27.
"If something was miscommunciated, that's my issue," the manager said. "I told my team, I put them in a bad spot by not making it clear, and we had to play the game out from there."
