Minnesota Update, 7.25.2023

The Twins and Mariners give everybody a chance to be mad.

Monday’s 4-3 Twins win against Seattle was a very good game, from both an excitement and anger perspective; the lead changed twice in the ninth inning and again in the tenth inning, so you can’t beat it for drama, and both Twins fans and Mariners fans both had two or three chances to be indescribably angry along the way.

Photo by Eastman Childs on Unsplash

For Twins fans, much of the anger came in the top of the ninth, when Griffin Jax - protecting a 2-1 lead - had the Mariners down to their final out, with nobody on base. But Cal Raleigh singled, and then Seattle made the somewhat surprising decision to pinch-hit Kolten Wong.

Wong has had 200 plate appearances for the Mariners this year, which is probably the biggest indictment of the struggling Seattle offense that we could find; he was hitting .157 coming into the game, with a .473 OPS, numbers that make Christian Vázquez look like a slugger.

Of course, Wong managed to turn on a hanging slider and whack it approximately two feet into the right-field overhang at Target Field, turning a certain win into a probable loss for the Twins.

And yet, you can’t beat this Minnesota squad for resilience. Alex Kirilloff smacked a double to left, off the left-fielder’s glove. Max Kepler followed by ripping a double to right to tie the game. A quick word about Kepler: he was 3-for-4 on Monday, he has an .884 OPS over his past 30 games, and we’re about two more weeks of decent hitting away from the entire Twins front-office taking a victory lap about sticking with him. I assume they’re going to go around just slapping people in the face, in retaliation for the awful things we said, so I guess we better get ready.

So now Mariners fans were angry. Then Twins fans got another chance for rage, as Matt Wallner and Donovan Solano both struck out to end the ninth. Then it was Seattle fans’ turn again, as the Mariners didn’t manage to move their tenth-inning ghost runner up even one base, going groundout, popout, groundout against Jorge López, another Twin who - kind of quietly - has made a real comeback this year.

In the bottom of the tenth, the teams went one better, giving everyone the chance to be mad at the same time. Vázquez bunted the ghost runner to third. Then the Twins attempted a safety squeeze to score the runner, which is one of those super-cute management moves that can drive you crazy; it didn’t work, but Ryan Jeffers ended up on first base anyway because the Mariners didn’t have anyone there to cover it. So at that point you probably had both sets of fans who were mad - the Mariners for not having effective bunt defense (which is debatable, I guess - they did keep the run from scoring), and the Twins because they’d attempted a squeeze with a guy with a .823 OPS.

Carlos Correa ended everybody’s misery, and the game, by looping a fly to right that ended up going for a single, but could fairly easily have been a sacrifice fly.

That’s nine wins out of eleven games for Minnesota, since the All-Star break. Cleveland lost again on Monday, so the Twins are four games ahead in the AL Central, and now that the Mariners are back at .500, Minnesota can say that none of their next eight games are against teams with winning records.

With this year’s Twins, it always seems like the wrong move to be optimistic. In-game anger aside, however, there doesn’t seem to be much of a reason to be pessimistic, either.

TODAY’S SLATE

TWINS vs Seattle, 6:40pm
SAINTS vs Toledo, 7:05pm

ON DECK

LYNX vs Washington, Wednesday
LOONS vs. Chicago, Thursday