Twins fall to Rangers 6-2 as Pablo López loses third start in a row

The yellow jerseys, the waving flags, the noisy fans, the hat tip in salute — Pablo Days at Target Field are a blast, Pablo López says, when he pitches well.

But when a start goes south and his pitches are suddenly getting hit around the ballpark? Surely that’s different from an ordinary loss.

“Gosh, yeah,” López acknowledged. “It hurts so much more.”

Corey Seager inflicted that pain Sunday, refusing to play along with the Twins’ Pablo Day promotion. The Rangers’ slugging shortstop, runner-up in MVP balloting last season, bashed a pair of López’s pitches over the high wall in right field, powering Texas to a 6-2 victory and stopping the Twins’ four-game winning streak.

López, who has allowed 16 runs in his last 16 innings, gave up six of them Sunday, the first time since May 8 that the Rangers, who had lost six straight and 12 of 14 games, scored more than four runs.

“I feel like I disappointed, letting the people down in times where I should have stepped up and performed better,” López (4-5) said. “It makes me mad, more than anything. I know that something needs to change, and hopefully it happens quicker than later.”

This one was hardly all López’s fault, not when his position-player teammates combined for only three hits, none at all in the first three innings or the last four. Making it worse, they were facing Gerson Garabito, a 28-year-old minor league journeyman making his big league debut more than a decade after turning pro.

But Garabito looked like a bona fide major leaguer, walking a batter in each of the four innings he pitched but never allowing one to score.

Carlos Correa broke Garabito’s spell with a leadoff single in the fourth, and he scored moments later on Max Kepler’s double off the top of the right field wall.

Correa also provided the Twins’ other run an inning later, doubling home Willi Castro, who had drawn a walk against Rangers reliever Jonathan Hernández. But no other Twin reached base after that hit, the final 13 outs coming in order.

The Twins’ three hits were the second fewest of the season, and the Twins’ streak of nine consecutive games with a home run against Texas ended.

BOXSCORE: Texas 6, Twins 2

Sign up for our Twins Update newsletter

That was way too little offense against Seager, who homered three times in the series, and the defending World Series champions. López retired eight of the first nine hitters he faced, but then eight of the next 12 reached base safely, six of them on hits, four for extra bases and six of them scoring.

Seager hit a third-inning curveball more than 400 feet to right-center with a runner on, then a fifth-inning slider into the seats down the right field line.

“It’s crazy when you see how [Seager] is on time with everything. You try to blow something by him, he fouls it off, and you’re like, ‘Oh, he’s on time with the fastball, let me spin something,’ ” said López, whose ERA has ballooned to 5.25, worst of the Twins’ five starting pitchers. “So you spin something, and he’s on that, too. He got the best of me. Maybe they weren’t terrible pitches, but he’s pretty good.”

Still, pitching coach Pete Maki said he’s not particularly worried about the Twins’ nominal ace.

“There’s some elements of poor luck right now for him,” Maki said, citing Ezequiel Duran’s double on a pitch that jammed him and Josh Smith’s off-the-end-of-the-bat ground double down the line. “He’s doing a really good job limiting his walks. He’s punching guys out at an above-average clip. … He’s doing a lot of things that lead to not giving up runs. He’s tough enough to come out of the other side just fine.”