The Minnesota Twins had a 4-0 lead after the third inning, the Miami Marlins tied 4-4 in the fifth, but they were able to seal it with two runs in the seventh with a Trevor Plouffe RBI double and Brian Dozier’s RBI single for their second win in a row.
“Last night, tonight you’d have to classify as team wins,” said manager Paul Molitor. “The offense picked us up in both those games.
“Tonight we got out early, and Ricky was cruising. They weren’t really tattooing them around the field, but they were bunching their hits and before we knew it, it was tied, and we had to go to the bullpen.”
Nolasco wasn’t down on his performance, even though he gave up four runs in the fourth, blowing a 4-0 lead, and was only able to go 5.2 innings. He gave up 11 hits and five earned runs on the night while facing his former team.
As Molitor said, however, the offense picked Minnesota up on Wednesday night. Joe Mauer, Trevor Plouffe and Byung Ho Park all homered, and Plouffe also delivered a key RBI double to put the Twins ahead for good.
“It was a really good sign,” Molitor said of Plouffe’s home run and RBI double. “It’s been a struggle — some of it physical, some of it mental. It’s one of those cases where he’s had some success up here, and you look at where he’s at, despite missing a lot of games, it’s not where you’d think he would be here at this juncture.
“He’s been working. I think getting a home run kinda helped him relax a little bit, and then we saw him hit that power shot to the gap going the opposite way, which we know he can do, and we haven’t seen much of that. So that’s a good sign.”
It was Plouffe’s first home run since May 10. He hit 22 last season, and his career high is 24, set in 2012. He said it was nice to hit the home run, but quickly complimented his teammates, especially Dozier, who was hitting behind him and also has been scuffling this season.
The Twins have hit six home runs in two days, and 12 in their last six games. Molitor downplayed the trend, however, when asked about it after the game.
“I’m always hesitant to jump on the home run bandwagon, but it’s good to see. It’s been a big part of our offense when we’ve won games here in the last 10 days,” he said.
“Seattle for sure, and then these couple games here we’re hitting it over the fence, and we’re getting it from different people, which is good to see.”
Molitor shook things up by going to Brandon Kintzler in the ninth inning in lieu of the struggling Kevin Jepsen.
“I’m a big fan of Kevin. I know he’s got the experience, I don’t think he gets nervous per se, it’s been a little bit of a struggle for him trying to find rhythm and clean innings,” he said.
“We just talked about trying to get him into different situations here in the short term and see how it pans out. And he’s good to go, he said, ‘Whenever you want me, I’ll be ready to pitch.'”
It created the opportunity for Kintzler to earn his first major league save. Everything went well for him, it seems, other than that he came out to Creed, and he’s more of a fan of Eminem.
(For a little context on the video, since I got to the scrum late, he said that nothing can really prepare him for the intensity of closing out the ninth. This is pretty common to hear, obviously, from new closers, even guys who are 31 and in their seventh major league season — the first six with Milwaukee.)
Molitor said that he’s going to back Jepsen off the ninth for the time being and go with a Kintzler-Fernando Abad combination in save situations.
“I’m kinda shaping up with Kintzler and Abad closer to the back end,” he said. “I don’t want to have to save them both for the 9th all the time, because that would tax everyone else, but we’re kinda shaping up trying to get to those two guys.”
