We’re only nine games into the Minnesota Twins season, but we might have already witnessed one of the team’s worst losses of the season. After Chris Paddack gave up an early lead in the first, Minnesota’s offense roared to life building a six-run lead; it was one that unfortunately wouldn’t hold.
In truly embarassing fashion, the Twins chased their offensive explosion by imploding in the second half of the game. Paddack ended up allowing four runs and lasting just four innings which forced Rocco Baldelli to lean heavily on his bullpen the rest of the way — emphasis on leaned.
Minnesota sent seven relievers to the mound over the final six innings, which included extras after Griffin Jax uncharacteristically blew his appearance and a save in the ninth. Paddack looked absolutely cooked in just his second start of the season, which is worrisome in its own right, but for the most part the bullpen looked pretty decent right up until the end.
That’s what makes the fact that Jax blowing a save so much worse. Between five pitchers between Paddack leaving and Jax taking the mound, Minnesota allowed just one earned run and seemed to have the game in the bag.
In total the bullpen will be charged with five runs, four of which are split between Jax and Louie Varland over the last two fatal innings of the game. How well everyone else did, and how bright the unit’s future seems to be, is something Rocco went out of his way to mention after the loss.
Rocco Baldelli defends Griffin Jax after blowing save against Astros on Sunday
After the game Rocco spoke to the media and refused to throw anyone under the bus for what happened, at least not from the bullpen. He also explained that the decision to use Jhoan Duran in a setup role and let Griffin Jax attempt a save in the ninth won’t be the only time we see such a thing happen this year.
Baldelli made sure to punctuate that by noting he doesn’t think the bullpen shuffling led to the loss.
“We have a good bullpen that can go out there and put up a ton of zeroes,” Baldelli said. “[Jhoan] Duran threw the ball as good as I’ve seen him throw the ball probably ever … Griffin Jax is one of the best relievers in all of baseball, and he’s going to close some games for us too. They’re both going to close games, so I don’t point to that in any way for what happened. It just wasn’t the outing for Jax.”
A lot went wrong for the Twins on Sunday, and blowing a six-run lead is never something that can simply get shrugged off. Willi Castro had a pretty disastrous day defensively at third, which is where more than a few hits slipped into the outfield for Houston that ended up turning into runs. He also had a bad drop in the middle of the game and a bad throw that turned what seemed to be a ground out into an infield single.
Above all else, if anyone deserves to wear the loss it’s Paddack. Once again he looked like a shell of the guy Minnesota needs him to be at the back of the rotation and it feels like the clock is officially ticking for him.
It’s stuff like that which compounded the struggles of the bullpen late in the game, but Rocco is spot on in his assessment that there’s no real reason to panic yet. If anything, fans will harp on his managerial decision to drain the bullpen down to just one available arm in extra innings, or his decision to put Duran out for the eighth and leave the ninth for Jax.
There’s nothing to harp on, though. Jax is one of the best pitchers in the baseball and he’s exactly the guy a team wants to depend on in the situation he was in on Sunday. Perhaps the most troubling thing is that so much went wrong that it can’t be simply pinned on one thing, which is truly worrisome moving forward.
More Minnesota Twins news and rumors