Baltimore Orioles starter Wade Miley entered today’s game with a 3-7 record and a 5.20 ERA, but with the exception of a Miguel Sano home run in the 3rd inning, he kept the Minnesota Twins hitters at bay in a 5-1 O’s win.
Minnesota registered nine hits, but left 11 players on base and allowed the Orioles to score five unanswered runs after jumping out to a 1-0 lead following Sano’s homer.
“We had opportunities,” said Twins manager Paul Molitor. “We left a lot of people on base, which can bite you. You end up with only one run and double-digit left on base — it’s kind of a rough combination to overcome.”
Adalberto Mejia went 6.2 innings, giving up five hits and four runs, including a Jonathan Schoop homer that reached the third deck in the fourth inning. Mark Trumbo added an insurance run with a homer off of Buddy Boshers in the eighth.
“We pitched fairly well, I thought,” said Molitor. “I thought he hung the changeup to Scoop there, but other than that I thought he pitched fairly well. He got us deep in the game, and we just couldn’t solve their pitching enough to plate enough runs to get back in the game.”
The two highlights for the Twins were Zack Granite’s major league debut — a pinch-hit opportunity where he forced forced Orioles reliever Mychal Givens to throw 11 pitches — and Sano’s 376-foot blast.
“He had a good at-bat,” Molitor said of Granite. “Just trying to get a guy up there that I knew would grind it out. If he gets an opportunity to play tomorrow, he’d probably at least get over some of the jitters, getting a chance to get an at-bat today.
“But you battle, 11 pitches or whatever it was, against a guy throwing 98 miles per hour. It was a really good at-bat.”
Granite is hitting .360/.412/.492 in Triple-A Rochester this season.
Sano provided the only offense of the night with his home run in the third inning. The Orioles quickly scored two in the fourth to take back the lead, and Miley and the bullpen shut down the Twins hitters for the rest of the game.
“He had us in-between a lot. His command was fairly good,” said Molitor of Miley, who gave up eight hits.
“He had us guessing a little bit on the first pitch, dropped a lot of first-pitch curveballs in there, and then maybe a couple guys started looking for it and then came back with the fastball.”
The Twins have one more game tomorrow before heading into the All-Star Break. They currently are 45-42, two games behind the AL Central-leading Cleveland Indians.
