MINNEAPOLIS -- One thing that has made this year's Twins team different than the Twins teams that lost 90 or more games the last four years has been their resiliency. Even when Minnesota has gotten down, that hasn't always meant the Twins were out.
Such was the case again Friday with the Milwaukee Brewers in town. Despite trailing 5-0 early to their neighbors to the east, the Twins rallied to tie the game on a three-run homer in the fifth inning by Joe Mauer. It seemed destined to follow the script of several other wins this year in which Minnesota rallied.
That is until sloppy defense late in the game cost the Twins a shot at a victory. Milwaukee scored twice in the eighth and three more times in the ninth to sink Minnesota with a 10-5 loss. This came one day after the Twins overcame poor defense in a win against the Boston Red Sox.
"We recovered yesterday," Twins manager Paul Molitor said after Friday's loss. "Today, we didn't."
Mauer's homer capped a five-run fifth inning that pulled the Twins out of a five-run deficit that starter Kyle Gibson put the offense in by the third inning. Gibson eventually steadied and got through seven innings while striking out a career-high nine batters, saving Minnesota's bullpen a bit in the process.
However, once the Twins finally did turn things over to the relievers in the eighth, things took a turn for the worse. Carlos Gomez hit a two-out double off the wall in right-center field. One batter later, Adam Lind sent a hard-hit liner to right field off Minnesota left-hander Aaron Thompson.
Twins right fielder Torii Hunter took a few steps in on the Lind liner before realizing the ball was over his head. He jumped to try to make a play on it, but it got past him and rolled to the wall to score Gomez for the go-ahead run. Hunter said after the game that he lost the ball initially in the lights and couldn't recover in time.
"It stayed in the lights," Hunter said. "All I can do is just try to make the adjustment, jump as high as I could and run. But damn, that was hit hard."
Lind scored one play later on yet another defensive miscue by Minnesota. Milwaukee catcher Jonathan Lucroy skied a high popup just in front of home plate. Four Twins players -- pitcher Casey Fien, third baseman Trevor Plouffe, catcher Kurt Suzuki, and Mauer -- converged between the pitcher's mound and home plate but no one made the play.
As the ball dropped to the ground, Lind scored from second to give the Brewers a 7-5 lead.
"It's a long way to go because it didn't have quite enough height for anyone to quite get there," Molitor said. "Your best options are your catcher and your pitcher. . . . It was obvious everyone was kind of backing off, looking at each other. Kurt made a last-minute lunge at it, but you would hope that someone would kind of take charge and recognize what we need to do to make that catch."
That two-run eighth opened the floodgates for a three-run ninth for the Brewers, who tagged Twins reliever Brian Duensing for three runs in the final inning. Minnesota needed five relievers to get through the final two innings, and three of those pitchers were charged with at least one run.
Unfortunately for the Twins, they weren't able to overcome their second straight game of sloppy defense. That wasn't the case in Boston on Thursday as Minnesota committed two errors to fall into an early hole yet recovered in time to escape with an 8-4 win and a series split with the Red Sox.
Against a Brewers team with the worst record in the majors, Minnesota's mistakes proved costly as the Twins' mid-game rally went for naught. Minnesota has shown this year, though, that it has the ability to forget about an ugly game and move on the following day. The Twins have less than 24 hours before taking the field again to put Friday's mistake-filled loss behind them.
"I think tomorrow we're going to play better," Hunter said. "These guys, we came back and they just finished it. That's the way it goes sometimes. Sometimes you're the bug, sometimes you're the windshield. You just don't want to be the bug all the time."
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