BALTIMORE – We should all have Jose Berrios' outlook on baseball, on pressure, on life. Feel like swearing when the Twins leave multitudes of runners on base all afternoon? Want to throw heavy objects at your TV when they give back a run on the first pitch of the 10th inning? Can't help averting your eyes when they put the tying and winning runs on base with only one out?
"Not really," Berrios said chirpily after the Twins' 3-2 victory over the Orioles in 10 innings Monday at Camden Yards. "That's the inning I was eating a banana."
Nobody deserved a job-well-done snack more than the righthander, who let only one Baltimore batter reach third base all day (albeit during a home run trot), and faced a batter in the ninth inning for only the third time in his career. But Berrios' brilliant day — "He was magnificent, I told him that," manager Rocco Baldelli gushed — only brought the rest of the Twins' fingernails-on-chalkboard habits into sharper relief.
C'mon, it shouldn't be this hard, right? Monday's holiday matinée was the Orioles' 14th consecutive loss, second-worst streak in franchise history. It was the 16th consecutive game they have dropped to the Twins, stretching back to March 30, 2018. Berrios has never lost to the Orioles in his career, and apart from Ryan Mountcastle guessing right on a fifth-inning curveball and driving it 410 feet over the center-field fence, he was never seriously challenged this time, either. The Orioles rank 14th in the American League in runs scored, 14th in runs allowed, and first in the race toward mathematical elimination.
Yet here the Twins were, fortunate to reach extra innings in the first place, with baserunners galore and nobody to propel them home. The Twins went 1-for-9 with runners in scoring position, the lone hit being a tapper to the pitcher that scored nobody, and their first two runs came courtesy of the Orioles, on a double play not turned and a wild pitch not blocked.
Don't you want to scream at all these missed chances, Josh Donaldson?
"Not along the lines of a fan," the Twins third baseman said. "Hitting's pretty much known as the hardest thing to do in any sport, so to go up there and be like, 'Hey, you need to be better with runners in scoring position,' well, of course that's what we want do to. It's not easy, and those guys get paid to get us out."
Point taken. Besides, when Jorge Polanco drove an Adam Plutko cutter over the right-field wall to cap the 10th and give the Twins a two-run lead, it felt like it wouldn't matter. It felt like extra innings, a horror show eight times already this year, were finally the Twins' friend again.
Nothing comes that easy this year, however. Hansel Robles' first pitch to D.J. Stewart wound up falling between Kyle Garlick and Rob Refsnyder and rolling to the wall, scoring complimentary baserunner Maikel Franco with a run that cut the Twins' lead in half. Robles' second pitch sailed high and out of Mitch Garver's reach, and suddenly the tying run was on third base with nobody out.
"I got really mad with myself," Robles said. "I just had to settle in and execute my pitches."
That's what happened, mostly, though after striking out Mountcastle, Robles walked .194-hitting Stevie Wilkerson, just to increase the mental torque on Twins fans. But the disaster that stalks the Twins so often this year … didn't happen.
"He really dialed it in," Baldelli said of Robles, who struck out catcher Austin Wynns on three consecutive changeups, and induced a harmless pop fly to right from Freddy Galvis on an 0-2 fastball. Game over.
BOXSCORE: Twins 3, Baltimore 2 (10 innings)
"Hansel made a lot of good pitches right there. A ball in play is dangerous. Anything can happen in those spots," Baldelli said. "But getting a strikeout and a pop fly on fairly harmless swings — he made a lot of good pitches."
Whew, just in time. It probably made that banana taste awfully good.
