After Brian Dozier hit a leadoff home run, the Twins tagged the 2015 American League Cy Young Award victor with four more runs in the second before the skies opened up 53 minutes into the game and the customers hurried for cover.
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The Twins entered the year with postseason hopes after a surprising 2015 season but then finished the first half as the worst team in the American League. He also scored twice and knocked in a run as Houston won for just second time in its last eight games.
“Next thing I know, there’s five runs on the board”, Kuechel said.
Game 1 is today’s originally scheduled game starting at 12:10 PM. I feel like everybody contributed to the win.
-We outline the concerning parts of Byron Buxton’s game. Astros SS Carlos Correa homered and matched his career best of four RBIs in Tuesday’s contest.2.
Mike Fiers (8-5) overcame a shaky outing to earn the win, allowing four runs on five hits and two walks in five innings of work.
In nine starts since July 18, Keuchel has had just one clunker in which he allowed seven runs in five innings against Detroit on July 31.
Minnesota Twins pitcher Hector Santiago leaves the game against the Houston Astros in the sixth inning during a baseball game on Tuesday, Aug., 9, 2016 in Minneapolis.
The Twins hit back-to-back homers off Fiers in the fifth to take a 4-2 lead.
Hinch said Gurriel would stay at third base in the minors.
“Hector, after the two-run homer in the first, settled in pretty nicely”, Twins manager Paul Molitor said. “They just kept coming”.
Like a lot of other pitchers, Santiago had trouble getting Altuve out.
“We didn’t play well enough to win (on Monday) and it’s been troublesome for a couple of weeks now”, Astros manager A.J. Hinch said.
Danny Santana followed with a run-scoring single.
Eddie Rosario cut down a run at home plate in the 1st inning with a nice throw from center field. “Every time he hits the ball, it’s somewhere where nobody is not”. He always just seems to find a hole.
“You literally can’t do anything else”, Santiago said.
“Maybe one of the better games I’ve ever seen him play at short”, Molitor said of Polanco.
Kepler and Kurt Suzuki each had two hits for Minnesota. The Twins’ 5-0 lead against the reigning American League Cy Young victor?
The pitching matchup for the first game on Thursday remains unchanged.
“We had to get offense going”. He runs the bases aggressively, intelligently, he creates havoc, disruptive. On Tuesday he used 83 pitches to get through 5 1/3 innings.
After Suzuki walked to lead off the fifth inning, Grossman ripped a letter-high 1-0 fastball from Fiers deep over the right-field fence for his seventh homer.
After the Twins tagged the 2015 American League Cy Young Award victor with four runs in the second, sending 10 batters to the plate as dark clouds rolled in and lightning flashed in the distance, the skies opened up and the fans hurried for cover.
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Dozier, the next batter, belted a two-strike changeup for his 23rd homer to give the Twins a 4-2 lead. In that case, the two teams do have a shared day off Monday the 15th, but Houston would have to fly to Toronto and back, while both teams would be playing more than 20 consecutive days which probably wouldn’t thrill the player’s union, let alone the teams themselves. Jorge Polanco poked a single up the middle with Plouffe at second base, and Twins third base coach Gene Glynn waved him around. Twins C Mitch Garver was promoted to Triple-A Rochester. To make room, the club released OF Darin Mastroianni.
