Twins top Angels 10-5 to halt four-game skid

The September Slump has been replaced, for one night at least, by Home Run Derby at Target Field.

Or Spoiled Meat Night. Same thing.

Kyle Farmer, Matt Wallner and Carlos Santana each homered on Tuesday, and the Twins scored as many runs in the first five innings as they had in their last five games combined, snapping a four-game losing streak with a 10-5 victory over the Angels.

“The guys were really getting into it. It starts with enthusiasm, energy and work before the game,” Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said of the raucous Twins’ dugout, thrilled to shed their weeks-long slump. “Then you bring it into the game and see the fruits of your labor paying off. It excites you.”

Fruits? No, this was something much worse. Each home-run hitter was rewarded — hmm, given its age, that’s clearly not the right word — by getting to carry the team’s months-old “rally sausage” during a congratulatory lap through the dugout.

Heaven knows what the unrefrigerated (though double-bagged) meat smells like by now, four months after its first appearance in the Twins’ clubhouse, but it’s probably a measure of how desperate the Twins were for runs that nobody seemed to care. Its presence seems to track with the Twins’ best moments this year, like their 12-game winning streak in May, so maybe we shouldn’t be surprised it’s back.

“No one can kill it,” Baldelli said, shaking his head. “It’s probably going to be around long after all of us.”

Even so, he said, given the results, “I wouldn’t mind seeing that again” on Wednesday.

Farmer capped a four-run second inning against Los Angeles starter Griffin Canning by slugging a middle-of-the-plate changeup 10 rows up in the left-field bleachers. It was Farmer’s team-high third home run of September — remarkable for a player who hit only two in the season’s first five months.

“You’ve just got to keep going, face it head-on, because I’ve had a really crappy three-quarters of the season, worst of my career,” Farmer said. “I stayed positive. I’m just thankful they’ve kept me around.”

An inning later, Wallner blasted an 0-2 fastball from Canning onto the right-field plaza, at 444 feet the second-longest homer by a Twin this season. (Byron Buxton’s 457-foot rocket in Arizona last June was the longest.)

Did he actually kiss the sausage afterward? “Maybe,” he said slowly. “Maybe.”

And in the fifth inning, following Trevor Larnach’s two-out walk — one of four times Larnach reached base — Santana took over the Twins’ home run lead by cracking his 21st of the year, and third this month, over the scoreboard in right-center.

The Twins tacked on a couple more insurance runs in the sixth, with Wallner missing his second home run of the game by just a few feet. He settled for a two-run double.

Santana’s home run was critical, Pablo López said, because it immediately followed his one bad inning, when he allowed four unearned runs after Edouard Julien’s two-out error to close the Twins’ margin to just 6-4. The big blow came when López left a first-pitch sinker to Zach Neto across the middle. It landed about halfway up the vines in center field, 428 feet away.

“My stuff got flat. I started falling behind guys. But then I got that third out and the guys scored two more, and I was able to go out for two more innings,” said López, who struck out 10, collected his fifth consecutive victory and became the first Twins pitcher since Jake Odorizzi in 2019 to be credited with 15 wins.

Does the sausage help pitchers too? López wouldn’t go that far.

“But it’s great,” he said. “I’m sure seeing the sausage made a lot of guys say, ‘You know what? We know how we can play when everyone is just playing loose.’ ”