Twins ride six-run fourth inning to 6-1 victory against Astros
Published in Baseball
MINNEAPOLIS — It’s hard to say the Twins’ offense is fixed, or cured, or found, not when they failed to scratch out a hit in their first three turns at bat Saturday, and their last three, too.
But if they can pile up five hits, six runs and seven baserunners in one inning, at least they can make the other ones irrelevant.
José Miranda smacked his first home run in nearly nine months, a three-run blast that highlighted the Twins’ biggest single-inning offensive outburst of the season, and Minnesota claimed a 6-1 victory over the Houston Astros at Target Field.
Houston pitched in with a pair of errors to augment the Twins’ one and only big inning, the fourth. After Byron Buxton was hit on the left hand by a Spencer Arrighetti fastball, he stole second base and watched Trevor Larnach draw a walk. When Ty France followed with a line drive to left field, Buxton sprinted home as converted outfielder Jose Altuve allowed the ball to deflect away from him.
Miranda’s home run later in the inning staked the Twins to a 4-1 lead, but they weren’t done. Christian Vázquez followed with a hustle double to left-center, and Matt Wallner drove him home with a grounder down the right-field line, another double. Carlos Correa then hit a chopper up the third-base line that Astros reliever Tayler Scott grabbed and flung on the run, his no-look throw sailing past first baseman Christian Walker for a Wallner-scoring error.
Larnach led off the fifth inning with a single, but the Twins then retreated into their offense-free shell once more. Relievers Ryan Gusto and former Twin Steven Okert racked up the final 12 outs without allowing another hit — not that the crowd of 16,082 seemed to mind. Not with Twins pitching up to the task of shutting down the Astros.
Bailey Ober could have been forgiven for fearing another rough start after his second pitch of the game, a slider on the outside corner, was lofted over the left-field wall by Altuve — the 20th time the All-Star has led off a road game with a home run.
But Ober didn’t allow another Astro to reach third base, and though he pitched only four innings (needing 84 pitches to get through them), it was a nice bounceback for the Twins’ right-hander after his nine-run outing last weekend in St. Louis.
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