Rich Hill rocked in return, Mitch Garver injured in Twins' 9-3 loss to Brewers

Rich Hill threw five shutout innings against St. Louis in his Twins debut July 29, then disappeared.

A slightly sore shoulder forced the 40-year old Hill out of action until Wednesday night at Target Field. So the Twins hoped the crafty lefty could pick up where he left off while easing his way back into the rotation.

And the first two innings were exactly what the Twins were looking for. Then he pitched in the third.

Hill was knocked out after 2⅔ innings as the Brewers blasted their way to a 9-3 victory over the Twins behind home runs from Ryan Braun, Christian Yelich, Avisail Garcia and Keston Hiura.

Hill recovered from a sore left shoulder, then prepared for his return to the Twins by facing reserve hitters in training at CHS Field in St. Paul. It's not like a minor league rehabilitation assignment, which he'd normally get to face real game action.

"Um. I can't really point to that," Hill said. "When you get the opportunity to take the ball and go out there, you have to perform, and there's no excuses. That's the way I look at it. I'm pretty much a cut-and-dried and a bottom-line guy and did not pitch well [Wednesday]. I hold myself to a really high standard, and that was pretty pathetic."

To make matters worse, the Twins lost starting catcher Mitch Garver midway through the game.

Garver struck out in the sixth while attempting to hit a down-and-away breaking ball. Then he went down, dropping to one knee and grabbing his right side before slowly walking back to the dugout and being replaced by Alex Avila. Garver was diagnosed with right-side soreness and will be re-evaluated Thursday.

"We have some concern," Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said. "We're going to kind of wait and assess it and figure out over the next 24 hours what we're dealing with. No way to really know that at the moment."

The Twins took a 1-0 lead in the second when Miguel Sano doubled and Eddie Rosario followed with an RBI single. Hill needed only 16 pitches to get through the first two innings and retired the first two batters of the third before he lost his command.

He walked Orlando Arcia, then gave up a two-run homer to Braun, walked Yelich and gave up a single to Hiura.

Replays suggested Hill struck out the next batter, Jedd Gyorko, with a 3-2 curveball, but home plate umpire Ed Hickox called it a ball.

"I guess, at the end of the day, I've got to make better pitches,and I've got to get out of the situations that I put myself in," Hill said. "So whether it gets called or it doesn't get called, I still need to make better pitches in that inning."

Garcia followed with a two-run single to left, and Milwaukee took a 4-1 lead it never relinquished.

Baldelli was on the verge of a bullpen crisis. Caleb Thielbar got four outs in relief of Hill, then Baldelli handed the ball to the third lefthander of the night, Lewis Thorpe, for the fifth.

Braun singled and Yelich homered to left. Milwaukee led 6-1, as Yelich looked ready to emerge from a season-long slump and Braun dialed the clock back four years. Three batters later, Garcia cannoned a pitch out to left for a two-run homer that tried to puncture a hole in the tarp covering the seats.

Thorpe recovered to throw three scoreless innings before Baldelli used infielder Ehire Adrianza to pitch the ninth, during which Hiura homered.

"If he wasn't able to find his way through that, and he didn't work his way through it, truthfully, we'd still be out there and it would probably look even worse than it did," Baldelli said of Thorpe. "But he was able to figure it out and every inning he went out there, he did almost pick up in a lot of ways."