Twins' five home runs, including three in a row, aren't enough in 10-7 loss to Yankees

They badgered Jameson Taillon, they battered Nestor Cortes, and on Thursday, the Twins absolutely blasted Gerrit Cole, socking five home runs while making only seven outs against the righthander.

So why, after such an extraordinary performance against baseball's best rotation this season, did the Twins limp away with only one victory?

Because the Yankees get to hit, too.

New York hit four home runs of its own and punished Twins starter Dylan Bundy and a pliable Twins bullpen by scoring in six separate innings, rallying from a four-run deficit to frustrate the Twins once more, 10-7 at Target Field. The Yankees took the series in the Twins' downtown ballpark for the 10th time among their 12 annual regular-season meetings.

Yet the Twins were uniformly positive about how they performed this week.

"We went right at 'em, went after one of the best starters in baseball and hit him around pretty good. Couldn't have been happier with the at-bats," Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said. "We go forward in a better spot having played a game like that. We know what we have to do."

In a game of odd and unusual occurrences — an appeal by New York that Gio Urshela missed third base was successful, a pop-up fell untouched between Jorge Polanco and Carlos Correa, and Joe Smith committed his first balk in six years — perhaps the most astonishing story was the bizarre ineffectiveness of the Yankees' ace starter and the Twins' most dynamic reliever.

Cole, the AL's highest-paid pitcher at $36 million, had never allowed more than three home runs in a game at any professional level. But that changed in a hurry.

Luis Arraez led off the bottom of the first by turning on a changeup and whistling it into the right-field stands. Byron Buxton crushed Cole's next pitch into the third deck in left field, 422 feet away. And Carlos Correa made it back-to-back-to-back home runs — only the seventh time in MLB history that a team had started that way, and the first ever for the Twins — with a screaming liner a dozen rows deep in the left-field bleachers.

"I didn't feel like he had that [fastball] ride that he usually has," Correa said of Cole, his former Astros teammate. "I played behind him so much, and I've seen that fastball look like it's going up from shortstop. Today, it wasn't like that."

Buxton added a three-run shot in the second inning, giving him 15 homers on the season. And Trevor Larnach unloaded on Cole's 98 mph fastball in the third inning, at 441 feet the deepest blast of the night.

When Gio Urshela followed with a double off his former Yankee teammate, Cole's night was finished after a season-high seven runs and only 2 ⅓ innings, and the Twins had inflicted a 12.66 ERA on the Yankees' three starters this week.

"Hitting around the best pitching staff in baseball bodes well going forward. But it didn't just happen," Baldelli said. "We took it as a challenge."

But New York struck back, with Joey Gallo twice launching no-doubt home runs off Bundy. D.J. LeMahieu did the same against reliever Jharel Cotton, and Aaron Hicks connected against Smith in the sixth, tying the game 7-7, and tying the Target Field record for home runs in a single game by both teams: nine, also done in an Astros' win over the Twins (which included a Correa home run) on May 31, 2017.

In came Jhoan Duran to pitch the seventh for the Twins, an effort to salvage a victory by stifling a relentless Yankee attack. But the fireballing reliever, who had not allowed a run in more than a month, was turned human by a hot lineup. Aaron Judge led off with a double off the bullpen fence, and three of the next four hitters singled. Duran's worst outing of the season was over after only five batters.

"He's going to watch this outing and he's going to learn something," Baldelli said.

The Twins never threatened against New York's bullpen, managing just one hit in the 6 ⅔ innings after Cole departed.