Many of the Twins' best teams of the past 20 years built their success on the compost heap of the American League Central Division.
Using a patient approach, Twins' bats handling AL East arms
Is this a different kind of Twins team? Their at-bats against Toronto and New York give hope.
June 9, 2022 at 12:03PM
Maybe this year's team is different.
Beating the dregs of the division is useful. What the Twins have done in the past five days is a departure from their bottom-feeding past.
Without their top three starting pitchers and without four players on the COVID restricted list, they went to Toronto over the weekend and won a series against a good, hot team.
They demonstrated the ability to hit excellent starting pitching in the first two games of their series against the Dreaded Yankees at Target Field, culminating in their 8-1 victory Wednesday night.
In their 10-4 loss on Tuesday, they scored more runs against Yankees starter Jameson Taillon (four) than he had allowed in any other start this season.
Wednesday, the Twins scored more runs against Nestor Cortes, who entered the game with baseball's best ERA (1.50), than he had allowed all season.
He has never allowed more than two home runs in one start. The Twins hit two in three at-bats against him.
"You can't really pay attention to the names of the guys you're facing," Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said. "You get ready for what they throw, the way they go out there and compete, but you have to have a plan.
"The plan isn't a narrative. It's not, 'Hey, we're gonna go out there and we're gonna beat up on this guy.' That doesn't get you where you need to be. What gets you where you need to be is looking for certain pitches in certain places at certain times, being disciplined. Our guys were that."
The Twins didn't manage a baserunner against Cortes until Byron Buxton led off the fourth with a single. The Twins would hit five singles in the inning, and be limited to two runs only because Gio Urshela tried to score on the strong arm of Yankees left fielder and former Twin Aaron Hicks.
Twins catcher Ryan Jeffers broke an 0-for-21 slump with a home run into the third deck in left field to start the fifth. Two batters later, Buxton hit a line-drive home run to center, and Cortes was done for the night.
In the sixth, Urshela doubled to deep right-center, then Jose Miranda had his pop-up down the right-field line fall in for a double.
On those two plays, the Yankees' Giancarlo Stanton failed when going back to his right and when coming in to his left. He might be the worst right fielder to play in Target Field since Miguel Sano.
Entering Wednesday's game, the Yankees were 40-15 this season. They were an astounding 110-38 against the Twins since 2002, including 32-12 at Target Field.
If nothing else, the Twins demonstrated that beating the Yankees isn't some impossible feat, that failure isn't guaranteed by the presence of those battleship-gray road uniforms.
When facing the Twins, the Yankees usually win the battle of the quality at-bats. That was the working theory until 6:40 p.m. Wednesday, when Twins starter Chris Archer took the mound and retired the Yankees in order.
It was a small victory. When you're the Twins and you're facing the Yankees, small victories are welcomed.
In the seventh, the Twins started the inning by drawing three walks against two different pitchers. At that point, 13 of 21 Twins batters had reached since the beginning of the fourth.
Miranda hit a one-out single to score two runs, to make it 8-1.
Archer was the Twins' MVP on Wednesday night, allowing one run in five innings one night after the Yankees shredded Twins pitching.
But it was the quality of the Twins' hitting approach, starting with Buxton in the fourth, that made this feel like a different sort of Twins-Yankees game.
Neither history nor curses matter much when you take good at-bats.
Emmanuel Rodriguez had an abbreviated season after being hit by the injury bug, but he showed promise as a disciplined hitter.
