PHILADELPHIA – Caleb Thielbar released the full-count fastball and didn't hesitate a bit. He walked off the mound in stride and headed for the dugout.
"I thought it was a strike. I wasn't shocked at all that he called it," the veteran reliever said of plate umpire Alex MacKay. "He was calling them there all day."
The Phillies, batter Alec Bohm and the noisy crowd disagreed, to put it lightly.
Bohm slammed his bat to the ground, said something that got him ejected and stormed off. Fans booed and chanted at MacKay for the rest of the game. And the Twins? Ho-hum, they shrugged at the commotion and left with a 3-0 victory, their second victory in a row at Citizens Bank Park.
"I had absolutely no idea where the pitch was. And I'll tell you, in 100-however-many games we've played this year, there have been a lot of close pitches, some that we've gotten and several which I remember losing games on because we have not gotten them," said Twins manager Rocco Baldelli, whose club salvaged a 3-4 road trip by limiting the Phillies to one run over the final two games against the defending National League champions before an announced crowd of 42,901. "I'm going to assume it was a close pitch."
That's debatable, obviously. But it was certainly a potentially decisive one.
Trailing 2-0 in the seventh inning after managing only two singles in the first six innings against Sonny Gray, the Phillies loaded the bases with one out against Griffin Jax in the seventh with two hits and a hit batter. Thielbar was summoned and retired the lefthanded-hitting Kyle Schwarber on a popup.
With two-time MVP Bryce Harper on deck, Thielbar worked carefully to Bohm, trying and failing to get the third baseman to chase a couple of pitches outside the zone with two strikes. "Obviously I know if I give up a hit, the game is tied. You've got to just clear your mind and make good pitches," Thielbar said.
With the count full, "I'm just trying to throw it down the middle. I wasn't doing anything tricky there," Thielbar said. "I thought I made a pretty good pitch. I'd have been mad if I hadn't gotten it."
As mad as the bat-throwing Bohm?
"Eh, hitters love to do that stuff," Thielbar said. "It was a big situation and a close pitch. One of us was going to be mad."
TV replays and MLB's own Statcast system showed it was clearly inside to the righthanded hitter, perhaps by a couple of inches but also perhaps too close to take. Those graphics oversimplify it, Thielbar said. "You can't go by the TV zone," he said. "It's just not accurate."
Bohm maintained after the game that he was right to take the pitch. "We're trying to win a game. It's a big spot, and I felt like I did all I could do," he said. "I felt like the bat was taken out of my hands. But it's just a bunch of humans out there, and mistakes happen."
Harper tossed his bat, too, when MacKay called him out on a low sweeper to lead off the eighth inning, and though he remained in the game, Phillies manager Rob Thomson was ejected for complaining. That pitch, Thielbar said, "was a strike, for sure. I did the automatic zone in Triple-A, and I've had that exact same pitch called a strike in the zone. It doesn't get called every time up here, but it was over the plate, at the knees. That's a strike."
Lost, at least to the angry partisans in the stands, was the real root of the Twins' victory: excellent pitching. Gray was masterful, allowing just two singles and three walks in his fifth shutout start of the season. He struck out Schwarber with the bases loaded in the second inning, the Phillies' only threat during his stint.
Meanwhile, the offense did just enough against Philadelphia lefthander Ranger Suárez. Jordan Luplow hit a 410-foot home run to straightaway center field in the first inning, his first as a Twin, and three straight singles in the second, by Edouard Julien, Donovan Solano and Jorge Polanco, scored a run. Polanco also singled home Julien in the ninth.
So let the Phillies and their fans complain, Baldelli said. He makes no apologies for the way the Twins won and maintained their 4 1/2 -game lead in the AL Central.
"There are very rarely apologies in this game," the manager said. "I think the umpire, honestly, as a whole was pretty solid today."
