It felt like a big welcome-to-Minnesota party at Target Field on Wednesday, with Brooks Lee playing his first big-league game and David Festa making his first home start.
The response from the Twins' prospects was decidedly divergent.
Lee collected both his first hit, a fourth-inning line-drive single to center, and first RBI, a nearly identical liner in the seventh inning that brought home Byron Buxton.
"First strikeout, too," he said with a laugh.
But the celebration over the first-rounder's arrival, due to Royce Lewis' latest injury-list stint, was muted by Festa's third-inning blowup, a nine-batter, five-run ordeal that relegated the Twins to a 9-2 loss to the Tigers.
"I felt great. The results, the box score, doesn't show that, but I feel like I was confident out there," Festa said after allowing seven runs in a game for the first time in his professional career. "The nerves are fine. Just a frustrating result."
Hard to fathom, too, just like his debut last week in Arizona. In that one, the righthander didn't allow a hit for three innings, then gave up six of them, five of them consecutively, in the fourth.
This time, he looked poised and in charge for two innings, Detroit's only hit coming when Buxton dove but couldn't catch a sinking line drive. Festa threw first-pitch strikes to 17 of the 24 hitters he faced, and regularly reached 96 mph with his fastball.
Suddenly, however, he drove his game into the ditch in the third inning, again by allowing six hits, five of them in a row, including Tiger catcher Carson Kelly's first career grand slam.
"We've seen it a couple of times, but I don't have anything helpful on that. He came out throwing the ball well. He looked good. He was in the zone early and often," Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said. "And then they strung together all those hits, including the big homer."
Before he could catch his breath, Festa left his next pitch, a changeup, in the middle of the plate, and Wendell Pérez bashed it into the planters above the wall in right-center.
Two innings later, Festa gave up a triple off the right-field wall to Colt Keith, and Riley Greene drove him in with a blast over the seats and onto the right-field plaza.
Festa has pitched 10 innings in his two starts for the Twins, and in seven of them, he has allowed a combined two hits and one run. The other three? 14 hits and 11 runs, ballooning his ERA to 10.80. And this time, there was no 13 runs of support to rescue him, as there were in Arizona last week.
"The fact that it's back-to-back games with five straight hits is kind of weird, I guess. That's just the ups and downs of the game," Festa said. "But my head and my focus is on every next pitch, no matter what. Like I said, it's just frustrating."
Especially since Tigers righthander Keider Montero, a rookie whom the St. Paul Saints have beaten twice this season with seven runs in just 6⅔ innings, had the night — also in his second career start — that Festa had hoped for. Montero wasn't as efficient, allowing a baserunner in all but one of the seven innings he pitched in, but he repeatedly pitched out of trouble.
Only Christian Vázquez, who led off the third inning with his third home run, a fly ball into the bullpens, could drive a run home until Lee connected in the seventh.
Lee received several long ovations from the announced crowd of 25,053, the first as he strode to the plate in the second inning. Umpire Alex MacKay, familiar with Lee from the minor leagues, took his time sweeping off the plate, in order to allow Lee to soak in the applause.
"It was a very nice moment," Baldelli said. "We had a nice crowd, and allowing everyone to clap for him, we liked that."
"It was awesome. I wasn't expecting that," Lee said. "I didn't know how to act."
Even when Montero delivered, it seemed; Lee took five pitches, three of them for strikes, in his first career at-bat.
"All right, we're going to pull the trigger next time," he told himself as he walked to the dugout. "I'm going to get the bat off my shoulders."
Two innings later, he did, picking out a high fastball on a 1-1 count and driving it up the middle and over the infield, to rousing applause. And in the seventh, after Buxton doubled to the bullpens in left-center, Lee cracked a first-pitch slider into center to drive in his first run.
With that, Lee matched the two-hit performance he produced against Montero just 12 days earlier, in the Saints' 4-2 win over Toledo.
