One small mistake vs. White Sox snowballs quickly for Twins starter Bailey Ober

CHICAGO – Bailey Ober hates these kind of days. The days where he feels great, his pitches are working, everything is going well — until he makes one mistake, and his day is ruined.

That happened Wednesday in the Twins’ 3-1 loss to the White Sox in the first game of a doubleheader.

Ober faced the minimum 12 batters through four hitless innings, then gave up a double to Gavin Sheets on “a pretty good pitch. We were trying to go in on him, and got it there,” Ober said. “He had seen a couple of those today, and that one was the first one he got a bat to.”

Sheets eventually scored on a sacrifice fly, annoying enough. But an inning later, after getting two quick outs, Ober gave up a ground-rule double to Andrew Vaughn, and then a 416-foot home run to Luis Robert Jr. on the next pitch, an errant fastball.

“That was probably the biggest location mistake of the day. It was supposed to be up and in and I threw it down,” Ober said. “And that’s kind of right into his bat path.”

Ober finished with a quality start, his fifth in a row — six innings, only four hits and three runs — and a loss, his fifth.

“I felt I was executing, putting guys away early and making them swing and getting weak contact. I felt good, I just wish I had finished better,” Ober said. “But there are games like this all the time. I mean, if I make that pitch [to Robert] up and in, and then I get him with something else, we get out of that. It would be a 1-0 game going into the seventh. Sometimes stuff just happens.”

Speaking of Robert, when the White Sox speedster hit a slow ground ball between second and third bases during the 10th inning on Monday, Twins third baseman Brooks Lee instinctively broke toward the ball. But after taking two steps, he stopped and backed away, allowing shortstop Carlos Correa to step in front of him, field the ball and get it to first base a half-step before Robert.

It’s a play that manager Rocco Baldelli was still marveling at on Wednesday.

“A guy who’s been in the league for a week, and a guy who’s been a star for a long time, and they both have excellent field awareness. They know everything that’s going on around them and can make judgements very quickly,” Baldelli said. “Those are instinctual for guys like [Lee]. He just has it already. He’s so aware.”

Lee’s background as a shortstop was the reason for it, he said. Andrew Benintendi started the extra inning on second base, and Lee said he had that in mind when he backed away from the ground ball.

“On a play like that, the runner has a chance to get to third. When I play shortstop, I always let the third baseman know, ‘Hey, if I don’t have a play at first, then I need to throw to third base because maybe there’s an out there,’ " Lee explained. “That guy’s a good runner. I was just thinking, [Carlos] is in position to make the play, I need to get back to third in case he wants to throw to me.”

* David Festa joined the Twins on Wednesday as the extra 27th player allowed for doubleheaders. He didn’t get into a game, but he was the best option to serve that role, Baldelli said, “because he’s good — you start there — and he can pitch in almost any situation if we need him to.”

Currently a starter for Class AAA St. Paul, Festa has pitched in relief only nine times in his four-year professional career.

“But you could throw him for five innings in one of these games, if needed. Or he could end up closing game two if we use a lot of pitchers in game one,” Baldelli said. “You never know. We told him to be ready to pitch in any spot.”

* Wednesday’s first game ended with an historic footnote: White Sox closer Michael Kopech retired all three Twins he faced — Lee, Matt Wallner and Max Kepler — on three-pitch strikeouts, a rare feat known as an immaculate inning. Kopech is the first White Sox pitcher to accomplish it in more than a century, joining Hollis “Sloppy” Thurston against the Philadelphia Athletics in 1923.

It’s also the second time it’s been done to the Twins; Chris Sale, then of Boston, whiffed Nick Gordon, Andrelton Simmons and Rob Refsnyder on Aug. 26, 2021.

* Reliever Michael Soroka, who gave up Ryan Jeffers’ RBI single in the seventh inning, was charged with the loss in the second game, dropping his record to 0-10 on the season, and the White Sox to 1-20 in games he has pitched in. Soroka, who began the season in Chicago’s starting rotation, is challenging the MLB record for most losses by a winless pitcher — a record held by a Twin. Righthander Terry Felton went 0-13 for the 1982 Twins.

* The St. Paul Saints clubbed four home runs and had the Louisville Bats down to their final strike in the ninth on Wednesday, but Michael Truatwein hit a walk-off home run to beat the Saints 6-5 in front of a crowd of 4,582 at Louisville Slugger Field. Edouard Julien homered for the second straight game for the Saints, his fifth of the year.