Twins win 5-1 in Detroit, clinch AL Central Division title

DETROIT – It was Rocco Baldelli's 38th birthday. Randy Dobnak is getting married on Saturday. Luis Arraez was — who knows? — probably happy to break out of a five-game sort-of slump.

Point is, the Twins had a lot of things to celebrate after their 5-1 victory over the Tigers, plenty of reasons to throw a party. And one other thing comes to mind, too.

Their first American League Central championship in nine years.

"It's been a long time coming, man," said Kyle Gibson, who has been a Twin for 6½ of those years, amid the clamor and spray of a clinching celebration. "I look around the room and see a lot of guys who have worked a long time to get here. That's what makes it special."

The Twins broke out the champagne and beer a little over two hours after Dobnak and Arraez — who weren't even on the roster five months ago — helped carry them past the Tigers. The team gathered in their clubhouse and watched the final few innings of the Indians' 8-3 loss in Chicago, officially ending Cleveland's three-year hold on the division.

Then it was time to party.

"It feels great, man. No matter how many times you do this, you've got to celebrate, because it's a really hard thing to do," said Marwin Gonzalez, who was celebrating his third consecutive division title, including two — plus a World Series championship — with the Astros. Amid the champagne shower, Gonzalez pulled out his phone and held a video call with Michael Pineda, suspended last month for failing a drug test, and later Byron Buxton, to allow the missing teammates to enjoy the moment, too.

"We miss those guys. They were a big part of this," Gonzalez said. "Everything that we did over the season, it was a great thing. And now a new season is starting and we're just going to play good baseball."

So are there more celebrations in store for this team?

"Every team that goes to the postseason has a chance to win it. Every team in it is a great team, and we are, too," Gonzalez said of the Twins, whose 98 victories (with four to go) are the second most in Minnesota history. "You've got to play good baseball no matter who we're facing, and if you go game by game, round by round, pretty soon you'll be surprised what you can do, how far you can go."

But only after a little partying.

"It's a very special day," said Baldelli, MLB's youngest manager, who won a division championship in his first year in the job. "To be able to stand here with the people that you spend all the time with, and you sweat with, and you work with — when you achieve something like this, it's extraordinarily satisfying and it's beautiful."

To pass the time while waiting for the Indians to lose, the Twins held a clubhouse meeting to present Baldelli with a birthday cake — which they promptly shoved into his face.

"This is my best birthday," Baldelli said.

It wasn't a bad day for Dobnak, either — though he's got one better coming up. There are plenty of champagne toasts in his immediate future, but he'll be toasted in the Twin Cities, too, for one of the most dominating pitching performances of the Twins' season.

"Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought anything that has happened [to me] already would happen," Dobnak said. "It's been an incredible year for me, for sure. And the best thing to happen is going to be in two days."

Dobnak, the undrafted rookie who started the season in Class A, allowed only one hit over six innings, a first-inning double to right-center by Jeimer Candelario that scored Miguel Cabrera from first base, but just barely: The former MVP, reduced by weight and bad knees to one of the game's slowest runners, slid home a split-second before Mitch Garver's tag.

If Dobnak was bothered by the sequence, it didn't show, because he proceeded to mow down 16 of the next 17 hitters he faced, the lone blemish once again not his fault: an error by Miguel Sano. Mixing four different pitches brilliantly — Dobnak used all four on a couple of his six strikeouts — Dobnak didn't walk a batter, got 16 swinging strikes, 10 on his curveball, and finished with a flourish, striking out the side in the sixth inning.

"He was awesome," Baldelli said of Dobnak, who has allowed two earned runs in his past three starts, a total of 16⅓ innings. "He is kind of one-upping himself every time he goes out there. He was locked in from the very beginning."

Still, for the second consecutive night, the Twins' offense was quieted by Tigers pitching, at least for six innings. But just as they did Tuesday, the Twins came alive in the seventh. Sano led off with a walk, and Arraez pounded a 1-1 curveball from Drew VerHagen into the right-field seats, his fourth home run of the year.

'"He's done stuff like that for us all year," Baldelli said of the rookie, who uncharacteristically had collected only four hits in his previous five starts. "You don't know exactly what he's going to do, but generally he's going to find the barrel, put a good swing on it and spray it around the field. He sprayed this one into the stands, which was really nice."

Better than that, even.

On a scale of one to 10, Arraez gushed afterward, "this was a 10, obviously. And probably more."