MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. — Is your team riding a five-game losing streak after getting embarrassed in its own building by the Tampa Bay Rays? Here, have a steady diet of the MLB-worst Minnesota Twins.
Is practically your entire batting order suffering through a season-long bout of underperformance at the plate? Here, take a dose of Twins starting pitcher Tyler Duffey.
OK, that’s not fair—Duffey’s actually pretty good. But only against every single team he’s faced but the Toronto Blue Jays, who found him and the Twins to be just the tonic they needed to finally look like themselves in a 9-3 throttling Friday night.
You may remember that Duffey made his MLB debut last August against the Blue Jays at Rogers Centre. You may also remember that the second batter he ever faced in the big leagues, Josh Donaldson, took him deep for a two-run shot. Duffey recorded just six outs that day, allowing six runs on five hits, including a Jose Bautista grand slam.
Since then, he’s been great. Duffey finished 2015 with a 2.25 ERA in his final nine starts, and has begun 2016 with a 1.85 ERA in four outings, allowing just five earned runs. But he didn’t face the Blue Jays in that span.
Alas, in the third inning Friday night, there was Donaldson again, with a runner on first, fighting his way into a full count. That’s when Duffey hung a 78-mph curveball that Donaldson smashed 431-feet into the second deck. It was Donaldson’s second hit in 28 at-bats, and his second homer of May after he hit eight in April.
“I think he just made some mistakes today,” Blue Jays third baseman Josh Donaldson said, diplomatically. “And we were able to execute on some swings.”
A lot of swings, it turns out, as in the sixth that rarest of rare Blue Jays sightings this season made an appearance: add-on runs. Michael Saunders struck his second single of the night off Duffey ahead of Troy Tulowitzki, who drove a 2-1 fastball into the power alley in right, scoring Saunders from first.
Duffey got Russell Martin to bounce a grounder for the second out of the inning, but then hit Ezequiel Carrera on the foot and left a curveball up to Jimmy Paredes—pinch-hitting for Ryan Goins, who is 8-for-his-last-82—who sent it into right field to score Tulowitzki.
That’s when the Twins went to their bullpen for Trevor May, who threw a 2-1 fastball to Jose Bautista that he wishes he didn’t, as the Blue Jays leadoff hitter sent it 390-feet into the left field seats to put the Blue Jays ahead, 7-1. That gave Duffey six earned runs on the night, the first time in 13 outings that he’s allowed more than three.
“He’s tough. He’s got a really good breaking ball. He’s been pitching well. And he was battling,” Blue Jays manager John Gibbons said of Duffy. “Really, the key hits to open it up were Paredes and Bautista. That’s tough to do, getting those two-out knocks.”
And they didn’t stop there. Saunders added a solo shot—his seventh of the year and his fourth off a left-hander—in the seventh and Darwin Barney hit one of his own in the eighth to give the Blue Jays nine runs, the second-most they’ve scored in a single game this season.
“You can’t expect us to go out and score nine or 10 runs a game. It’s obviously nice that we did. But we hit our homers tonight when we had guys on so I think that’s the biggest difference,” Saunders said. “I don’t think we’ll ever go through a drought where we’re not driving the ball. We just need those runners on when we do get those hits.”
Meanwhile, Aaron Sanchez cruised on the Blue Jays’ mound, allowing just two earned runs over his seven innings, while striking out seven.
The Twins got their first run in the second when Robbie Grossman, playing his first major league game of the season, lined a 96-mph Sanchez fastball down the left field line. The ball clipped the short wall in left, diverting from the path Saunders expected it to, which gave Miguel Sano enough time to score all the way from first base.
Grossman drove in Minnesota’s second run, too, skipping a groundball past a diving Barney to bring in Jorge Polanco’s leadoff double in the seventh.
But that was it for Minnesota off Sanchez, as the tall right-hander mixed 96-mph sinkers with an excellent curveball he could throw for strikes to keep Twins hitters guessing.
“It’s huge,” Sanchez said of his curveball. “I’ve always labelled that as one of my better pitches, and for me to finally have a grasp on it from start to start, it’s been an equalizer for me for sure.”
It was a nice bounce back outing for Sanchez, after the 23-year-old allowed six runs on seven hits and four walks in his last outing. The most promising aspect was that Sanchez threw 68 per cent of his pitches for strikes and didn’t walk a single batter, after allowing nine free passes in his previous two starts.
“That’s been a huge goal in between starts for me—trying to limit those walks, understanding that walks have killed me in recent games.” Sanchez said. “It seems like, for me, walks always find a way to cross the plate. And when you can eliminate those, like I did tonight, they’ve got to earn it more.”