After an April to forget, Lance Lynn didn’t exactly get off to the hottest of starts in May, either.
But if the end of May is any indicator, he should be able to keep rounding into form as June comes along, as the burly righty threw six strong innings to spur the Minnesota Twins to an 8-5 win in the series opener against the Kansas City Royals at Kauffman Stadium.
The outing marked back-to-back quality starts for Lynn for the first time since joining the team as a free agent. It also lowered his season ERA to 5.94 — the first time it’s been under 6.00 he held the Astros scoreless for five innings back on April 9 at Target Field.
That now marks three solid starts in the last five for Lynn; by no means a stretch to write home about, but a solid pattern as both he and the Twins have been searching for consistency through nearly 50 games.
Here’s what we saw from our vantage point
Lynn had to battle, but overall was fairly solid
It was a bit of a tight-rope act, but Lynn did a nice job to wriggle out of a few jams along the way to a quality start. In all, Lynn managed to go six innings — and he wanted to go out for the seventh, he said after the game — with six hits, two earned runs, five strikeouts and three walks.
After setting the Royals down 1-2-3 in the first inning, Lynn allowed at least one baserunner in every inning until the sixth, when he again set them down in order. Jon Jay was the thorn in the collective sides of Twins pitchers in this one, as he went 4-for-5 with three doubles.
Jay grounded out to Brian Dozier at second base to lead off the first inning, then polluted the bases the rest of the night. Jay led off the third and fifth innings with doubles off Lynn, then did the same to reliever Trevor Hildenberger in the seventh before reaching on a bunt single against Zach Duke in the eighth.
However, it was Jay’s baserunning gaffe in the in the seventh that cost his team dearly. With Whit Merrifield up, the Royals trailing 3-2 and Jay on second after his third double of the night, Hildenberger got a grounder to short. Eduardo Escobar took the short route to third, getting Jay — who for some reason had decided to chance it on a ball hit to his right.
That proved pivotal at the time, as Mike Moustakas lined to left and Salvador Perez singled to center. With Merrifield picking up third on the play, that all but guaranteed that Jay would have scored had he stayed put at second base in the first place.
As for Lynn, it was a pretty ordinary outing for him. He got just six swinging strikes on 91 pitches, but he did throw first-pitch strikes to 16 of 27 batters. He got as high as 95.8 mph on his four-seam fastball, and threw some variation of the heater — two-/four-seamer or the cutter — on all but seven of his pitches.
“I just threw it where they didn’t get hits, except for Moustakas, who put a good swing on a ball,” Lynn said. “That whole inning, I think I made a bad pitch to Jay, he got the double, and then walked a guy. It’s part of it.”
Lynn is very much a “what you see is what you get” guy on the mound, and to his credit, it has worked well for him in the past.
Jakob Junis kept the Twins off-balance with his sinker/slider repertoire
Junis came out of the start with a 3.61 ERA, and in general has looked pretty solid so far this season. His numbers are almost like an homage to Twins starter Jake Odorizzi: 8.3 K/9, 2.3 BB/9, 39.3 percent groundball rate, 1.6 HR/9.
Over six innings on Monday night, Junis fanned seven batters, walked four, gave up six hits and three earned runs and allowed a two-run homer to Miguel Sano to get the scoring underway.
Junis, who is not a flamethrower by any stretch of the imagination, kept the Twins off-balance and managed to get 13 swinging strikes on his 93 pitches. Brooks Baseball had him as high as 93.5 mph on the fastball, but the slider was his real moneymaker, as he got nine swinging strikes on 31 offerings (29 percent).
Dozier said that Junis has a really, really good sinker that allows him to set up the slider well — since the pitches have opposite break — and his four-seamer has some natural cut as well. In other words, he brings a number of pitches/angles with little predictability, which makes him especially tough if a batter wants to lean out over the plate to stay on the slider.
The Royals simply wouldn’t go away
The Twins pushed across two runs on Sano’s homer in the fifth, and the Royals answered back with two of their own on a double that Moustakas scorched over Byron Buxton’s head in center in the bottom half of the inning.
The Twins took the lead for good with a single run in the sixth on a Dozier single, but after they tacked on three more in the eighth, the Royals answered with a pair. The Twins, in return, scored two more in the ninth — off old friend Blaine Boyer — and the Royals still did not go away as Jorge Soler hit a solo homer off closer Fernando Rodney.
Ned Yost’s bunch is plucky, even if their record (18-36) doesn’t indicate as such.
Eddie Rosario hit one of the craziest bases-clearing doubles in recent memory
The old pitching proverb is something along the lines of not throwing a batter a changeup after he wasn’t able to get around on your fastball. It’s something to do with “speeding up a hitter’s bat.”
And yet in the eighth inning, Royals reliever Burch Smith did exactly that after getting up on Rosario 0-2 with a pair of heaters.
After Max Kepler opened the inning with a pop to short, Robbie Grossman dropped a single into shallow left off the glove of shortstop Alcides Escobar. Mitch Garver drew a walk, and Buxton took Smith to the limit before fanning on the 11th pitch he saw.
That turned the order back over to Dozier, who reached on an infield single to load the bases as Escobar made a diving stop but couldn’t get the force at second.
After Rosario got into an 0-2 hole, he golfed the changeup into right-center and hustled out of the box. Two runners came across to score to give the Twins a 5-2 lead, but they weren’t content with just that. Rosario drew the throw to second base, with third-base coach Gene Glynn and Dozier watching carefully as the play developed.
As the throw came into second, Dozier scurried home for the third run on the play. As a result, Dozier ran 270 feet — first-to-home — on a ball that Statcast said went only 165 feet total.
That’s pretty impressive.
“A lot of things factored into that kind of play,” Dozier said. “First of all, I’m not being held on. Two outs, you’re going to take a chance, especially with the shift. On the broken-bat, that means it’s not hit hard at him so and in between the right field and (center) fielder so you know there’s going to be that type of play evolving. Geno, we’ve done it in the past, three or four times probably. He does a really good job. He has a lot of savvy over there. He knows the play is developing.
“It’s my job to go as hard as I can and it’s kind of a last-minute read on his part, not even before third base, it’s kind of after third base, that’s why you see him all the way down the line rather than at third base. It’s not a full arm wave, it’s a (motions) kind of thing because a lot of times as a defender we’re taught to maybe glance at the third-base coach to see if he’s waving. We’ve done that in the past a lot.”
“It’s one of those plays where you’re looking to score back door with two outs,” Molitor added. “We had a play where there happens to be an attempt on the trail runner. A good baserunner is going to run hard all the way to third and give Geno an opportunity. That one set up perfectly. It was going to be a close play at second. They tried to make a tag, and by then it’s going to be too late to get the last runner.”
No matter who gets the most credit — Rosario, Dozier or Glynn — that’s the kind of play a team needs to take when presented to them.
Miguel Sano dealt with the ups and downs of trying to work his way back into form
Sano pounded a 1-1 fastball from Junis for a home run to center — his first since returning from the disabled list — but that was after a pair of tough at-bats to start the game.
Sano struck out swinging on a check-swing in the first inning for a three-pitch strikeout, and did the same in the third. The second one was even more frustrating, since it came immediately on the heels of Rosario walking on four straight pitches. All three strikes to Sano in that count were swinging strikes — a foul and two misses — and at least one, if not two of them were out of the strike zone.
But he got his revenge the third time around:
Sano is still very much a work in progress. After making the final out of the eighth inning, he remained in the field for defense in the bottom half and missed a grounder that led to the Royals scoring their fourth run of the night.
The bottom of the order carried some of the water in this one
Garver absolutely pummeled a double to left-center off Boyer, but batters 5-9 had a strong night collectively for the Twins. That quartet — Kepler, Grossman, Garver and Buxton — went 7-for-17 with a pair of walks, two RBIs and five runs scored. After some really tough nights at the bottom of the order in recent games, this was a breath of fresh air for Molitor.
Boyer is really, really having a rough season
His ERA after this one is 11.76 in 20.2 innings, and that comes with 3.9 K/9, 5.2 BB/9 and 2.6 HR/9. He’s got a long history with general manager Dayton Moore — dating back to Boyer being drafted by the Braves in 2000 — but it looks like the window is closing on his big-league career.
Molitor went with the push-button bullpen — to mixed results
The honest-to-goodness truth is it probably would have worked if Zach Duke hadn’t struggled in the eighth. Hildenberger gave up the double to Jay, but got the out from Merrifield before giving way to a lefty-lefty matchup between Moustakas and Taylor Rogers.
Rogers got Moose to line to left, and Molitor went to Ryan Pressly for the righty Perez, who singled to left-center before Soler grounded into a 6-4 fielder’s choice.
The Twins then scored three runs in the top of the eighth, leading Molitor to go to Duke with a four-run lead rather than bringing Pressly back out there. Pressly has worked a lot so far this season — 28 games, 27.1 innings to Duke’s 23 and 17, respectively — so giving him as little work as possible made sense on the surface.
The final damage for the seventh was as follows:
- Hildenberger – five pitches, all strikes
- Rogers – four pitches, two strikes
- Pressly – two pitches, both strikes
But then Duke got into trouble, and 20 pitches in, Molitor had to go to Rodney for a rarely-seen four-out save. The process made sense, it just didn’t work out as far as execution. If Duke has an even decent eighth inning, he probably goes back out for the ninth to give both Rodney and Addison Reed the full night off.
Instead, Rodney ends up going out for his first inning-plus outing since getting five outs in extras against the Philadelphia Phillies back on Sept. 16, 2016.
After not pitching more than an inning at all in 2017, Rodney got a four-out save
It was a bit unexpected to see Rodney trudge out of the Twins bullpen in the eighth, but that’s what it came to. Ultimately, he wasn’t too worried about it.
“I don’t know,” Rodney said about the difficulty of heating up for the eighth, sitting down and coming back for the ninth. “Obviously, I don’t do it much. It wasn’t hard tonight. I prepared myself to come back and get ready. Sometimes it’s hard, because when you sit down all your energy goes away.”
Rodney said the bullpen told him to get ready to face Merrifield, so he did exactly that.
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Notes
- The win snapped a four-game losing streak for the Twins, who improved to 22-27 on the season.
- The Twins are 11-15 on the road this season; the Royals are a meager 7-19 at the K this year.
- Monday marked Dozier’s first three-hit game since going 4-for-4 against the Los Angeles Angels on May 10.
- Not only did the Twins trade Phil Hughes to the San Diego Padres on Sunday, but the team used the open 40-man spot to make a waiver claim — utility player Taylor Motter from the Seattle Mariners — on Monday. Motter will join the Rochester Red Wings, though he could be an option with the big club at some point this season. Motter, 28, is a career .198/.269/.326 hitter in 390 MLB plate appearances, but he has some pop (10 homers) and has played every defensive position but catcher. That does, in fact, include him pitching 1.1 innings over his time with the Rays and Mariners.
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