A series of mistakes in the field by the Minnesota Twins led to a 10-2 blowout at the hands of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.
Max Kepler’s misplay of Jett Bandy’s fly ball down the right field line led to a five-run fifth inning.
“I thought it was going to get to the wall,” Kepler told the Star Tribune. “I was thinking the wrong thing.”
Kepler was not the only player at fault. Eduardo Nunez booted Mike Trout’s ground ball to start the fourth inning, and C.J. Cron hit a two-run double in the sixth, in large part because Robbie Grossman took a bad route to the ball.
“It’s disappointing,” Molitor told the Star Tribune. “Even in defeat, you would like to play more soundly. You are going to make errors, we all know that. But sometimes those missed plays, they are hard to explain. Nunie missing Trout’s ball is one thing, some of those other plays…
“I think Robbie got fooled on that one ball out to left. He thought it was going to hook more and it actually cut back towards the gap.”
Kepler and Byron Buxton both doubled, but only five Twins players had a hit, and nobody had more than one.
Tyler Duffey only went 4.1 innings, throwing 99 pitches and giving up six hits and six runs (four earned). He has an 8.35 ERA over his last six starts and could be removed from the starting rotation.
“I have given up a few hard hits when it counts,” Duffey told the Star Tribune, “but ground balls have been just perfectly placed. I feel like that has happened to everybody. A bunch of balls just right where guys weren’t. There’s nothing to do about it. It’s baseball sometimes.”
“We obviously had some defensive slip-ups there,” Molitor told The Associated Press. “The fifth inning was really our downfall. We had a chance to minimize things and keep it respectable, but they broke it open.”
[Star Tribune, The Associated Press]
