Twins falter late as Rangers win 6-5 in 10 innings to prevent a four-game sweep

ARLINGTON, TEXAS – Well, nobody said the Rangers weren’t paying attention.

After watching the Twins erupt with late-inning rallies to claim the first three games of this series, Texas salvaged the finale Sunday in the same way.

But at least the Twins made them do it twice.

Over the span of just 19 pitches, two of which carried over the fence, Jorge Alcala turned a four-run lead into a one-run deficit. The Twins tied it again on Carlos Santana’s latest crunch-time home run, but the Rangers eventually handed the Twins a deflating walk-off loss, 6-5 in 10 innings at Globe Life Field.

“Yeah, it’s disappointing, but you’re going to run into some games like that. A handful of pitches turned the game completely upside down,” Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said after third baseman Jose Miranda’s 10th-inning throw was off target, enabling Adolis Garcia to score the winning run from second. “But our guys almost still won the game. We’re in every game these days, and we’re going to continue to be.”

The Twins missed a chance to move within one game of the Guardians in the AL Central after Milwaukee finished off a three-game sweep of Cleveland. They now head to San Diego for the final three games of the road trip, while the Guardians open a three-game series at Yankee Stadium on Tuesday.

Pablo López scuffled through a difficult afternoon, loading the bases during a 31-pitch first inning and letting at least one batter reach base in each of his six innings. Yet somehow the righthander always found a way to work out of trouble, and he improbably departed, with his pitch count in triple digits, with a 4-0 lead.

“It was definitely a long way from his best outing, his crispest outing,” said catcher Ryan Jeffers, whose first-inning, two-run homer — once again using a bat painted to look like a pencil — against former teammate Tyler Mahle gave the Twins a 3-0 lead. “But when you’ve got a guy that has heart and can dig as deep as Pablo can and keep putting up zeroes on a day like that, that’s why he’s our ace.”

Alcala, however, undid all of that work over the span of only seven batters. Leody Taveras singled leading off the seventh inning, Marcus Semien and Corey Seager belted back-to-back RBI doubles, and Garcia and Josh Jung finished his day by launching home runs to put Texas ahead 5-4. Left fielder Matt Wallner tried to reach over the fence to bring Garcia’s back, even losing his glove for the effort. The Twins had no chance on Jung’s 420-foot blast, though.

BOXSCORE: Texas 6, Twins 5 (10)

MLB standings

Baldelli said he considered removing Alcala after Garcia’s homer, but the bullpen was worked a lot this weekend, and “you have to think a guy with a track record as good as Alcala is fine to pitch with two outs and nobody on base. … Some of his pitches were probably just more hittable versions of his normal pitches, location-wise. … That’s how he throws the ball in most of his outings and you know most of the time the other team is not hitting the ball on the barrel.”

The game appeared over when Texas brought their heretofore perfect closer Kirby Yates — 21-for-21 this season in save situations before Sunday — for the ninth. But that illusion ended after just four pitches, when Santana clobbered a 1-2 fastball a dozen rows deep into the right-field seats.

Still, the Twins faced an uphill climb, given that the Rangers own MLB’s best extra-inning record at 8-2 now, and 5-0 at home.

Sure enough, Edouard Julien was thrown out at the plate in the 10th inning on a one-out grounder by Miranda that was hit directly to Seager at shortstop. The throw easily beat Julien to the plate, giving Texas its chance to win a game that kept slipping away.

In the bottom of the inning, Jhoan Durán struck out Nathaniel Lowe on three pitches before Jung chopped a ball that Miranda caught as he ran toward first base. Garcia, the courtesy runner, broke cautiously toward third, and Miranda perhaps should have held the ball to force Garcia back to second. Instead, he rushed a throw to Santana, high and wide of the first baseman. Santana tried to catch it and tag Jung, but the ball was knocked out of his glove, enabling Garcia to score.

“That was a tough way to end this series, but we took three out of four off the defending World Series champs,” López said. “So we have to be pretty proud of the way we played.”