Twins shut out Red Sox. Joe Ryan throws team's first complete game in five years

Byron Buxton homered twice, Carlos Correa once, and Michael A. Taylor contributed an RBI double. But the most astounding performance in the Twins' 6-0 victory over the Red Sox on Thursday was turned in by Joe Ryan, who retired three Red Sox hitters in order in the ninth inning to secure a split of the four-game series and the 10-game homestand.

Why was that quiet inning so notable? Because Ryan pitched the other eight innings, too, snapping the Twins' streak of 724 games — more than five years — without a nine-inning complete game.

Ryan allowed the hot-hitting Red Sox, who had scored 60 runs in their previous eight games, just three hits, all of them singles and never more than one an inning. He didn't walk a batter and struck out nine in winning for the eighth time this year.

"Quite impressive," said Buxton, more captivated by Ryan's near-perfection than his own 931 feet of home runs, a pair of upper-deck blasts. "You can't put into words — especially him — his mentality coming into today. He was locked in all day."

The Target Field matinee crowd of 28,553 cheered when Ryan jogged to the mound in the ninth inning, his walk-up music "Fire on the Mountain" playing as an encore over the loudspeakers. The cheers grew louder as he struck out Jarren Duran on an up-and-away fastball, then grew into roars when Justin Turner popped up to second baseman Kyle Farmer.

And the ovation hit a no-hitter-like zenith when Ryan finished off the best start of his MLB career by inducing Masataka Yoshida to fly out to left fielder Willi Castro.

"That was electric. That was awesome, getting the walkout [music] going again, then having their leadoff hitter up again," said Ryan, who lowered his ERA to 2.98 with the shutout. "It was like, 'Oh, we're in the first inning again.' I felt good. I felt like I was just getting, kinda, warmed up."

It looked like it. Ryan threw 112 pitches, the most by a Twin since Kenta Maeda in 2020, and stuck almost entirely with fastballs, 75 of them, and 35 splitters. Emilio Pagan threw in the bullpen just in case, but Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said he gave scant thought to pulling his starter.

"There was no way around letting him just finish that game, the way he was responding. He just kept getting more and more dialed in, more and more competitive as he got closer and wanted it more," Baldelli said. "He was not tiring, that we could tell. We couldn't see anything like that."

Still, Baldelli acknowledged that this was the first time in his five-year managing career that he had allowed a pitcher to go nine innings. The only words he had for Ryan as the pitcher jogged back onto the field was, "Just be efficient," Ryan said. "I said, 'I'll keep doing what I'm doing.' "

He wasn't kidding. Ryan threw 13 pitches in the ninth inning, 12 of them fastballs.

"Why not?" he said with a smile. "A lot of quick outs today, so I didn't really have the opportunity to go, 'Oh, let me try something else.' I just kind of stuck with what was working."

The Twins kept their one-game lead over Cleveland in the AL Central by winning and now start a road trip to Detroit, Atlanta and Baltimore.

The last Twins pitcher to complete a nine-inning game without bullpen help had been José Berríos, who beat the White Sox 7-2 on June 7, 2018. Berríos also pitched the Twins' most recent complete-game shutout, winning 7-0 in Baltimore on April 1, 2018.

"He kept attacking us with it up in the zone. We fouled off a lot of them and we missed a lot of them," Red Sox manager Alex Cora said of Ryan. "He's been doing that to everybody. He's one of the best in the big leagues."

Ryan's Twins teammates made the afternoon stress-free for the 27-year-old righthander, scoring two runs in the first inning, two more in the second and another in the third. Correa and Buxton hit solo home runs into the upper deck in the first inning, and Buxton added another one, his team-leading 13th of the season, to lead off the third.

Not that the laid-back Ryan ever feels much stress. The biggest worry he had Thursday was what the liquid his teammates dumped over his head during a postgame interview was.

"I didn't know if it was Gatorade or water," he said with a laugh. "I was looking at it and thinking, 'Please don't be red …'"