‘Tension and pressure’ mount as Twins lose 4-2, get swept in Baltimore by walk-off homer

BALTIMORE – There’s the kind of pain and strain that every member of the Twins’ traveling party is feeling right now, the emptiness of losing seemingly no matter what you do.

“There’s a lot of tension and pressure that everybody’s put on themselves,” reliever Griffin Jax said Wednesday in the Twins’ silent clubhouse. “When you look around and there’s a lot of key guys missing, a lot of guys may be, myself included, trying to do too much at times.”

Then there’s the type of torment that Jax himself was feeling at that moment — the sting, even grief, of being responsible for a game-deciding mistake. Jax left a ninth-inning changeup in the middle of the plate, and Cedric Mullins launched it onto the right-field plaza, completing the Baltimore Orioles’ three-game sweep in the cruelest way possible: A walk-off 4-2 victory.

“He just got me,” Jax said. “It probably seems a little bit [harder], looking at how we’ve been playing recently, but just letting the team down in any capacity is never fun.”

Baseball isn’t much fun for the Twins these days, not after losing their seventh straight game to the Orioles, not after winding up with only two wins on a seven-game road trip, and especially not after taking a late-inning lead, a first for this series.

The Twins, shut out for almost six innings by a random Orioles journeyman named Albert Suárez whose last major league start was eight years ago, somehow tied the game in the seventh thanks to the combination of Austin Martin’s single, Manuel Margot’s speed and Tommy Watkins’ aggressive decision to wave Margot home.

“A really good call by [Watkins],” credited Twins manager Rocco Baldelli, after Gunnar Henderson’s relay to the plate sailed wide. “We have to do a lot of the little things well right now in order to win these games, and that was good.”

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So was Kyle Farmer’s two-out single moments later to score Martin and put the Twins in front with their only hit of the day with runners in scoring position.

But what happened next was utterly predictable, at least on this prison sentence of a road trip. Baldelli lifted Pablo López, who had given up Henderson’s third home run in three days to start the game, then dominated the Orioles’ high-scoring lineup, retiring 18 of the next 19 hitters he faced.

Steven Okert came in, and Anthony Santander took him deep, tying the game with a blast into the bullpen. Two innings later, Jax faced Mullins, got ahead with two changeups, then fatefully tried a third.

“I kind of regret the pitch [selection], but that’s technically the pitch to [use against] him. But that’s not really my game, so it kind of makes me wonder, like, should I have leaned more on what I do in that situation?” Jax mused. “But you can’t do that. You’ve got to just swallow it and get ready to go the next day.”

“It feels quite hard. It feels like no matter what you try, nothing is smooth, nothing is working like you want. And it’s tough to play the game with confidence and with an air of anything when it’s so difficult,” said Baldelli, whose team was outscored 22-9, outhit 35-23, and outhomered 9-1 in the series.

“Even when we do things well, we’re not getting the results. We’re not getting the wins. We’re ahead late in the game, and we lose — that can be frustrating. It does feel like it’s not easy, but it’s up to us. We have to figure it out.”