NEW YORK – To the Yankees, it was a frivolous matter of hygiene, no more than hand-washing done poorly. To the Twins, it was enough real-time evidence to at least raise suspicions of rule-breaking, and of a double standard.
That the judges, er, umpires sided with the pinstriped home team only added to the postgame unhappiness in the Twins clubhouse.
"If our pitcher's in that situation, they're probably not going to be in the game," Byron Buxton said. "And we know that."
Ultimately, it was Twins manager Rocco Baldelli who wasn't allow to remain, after he objected to the decision not to eject Domingo Germán when the righthander still had rosin on his hand a half-inning after being warned to wash it off.
"Everyone's reaction was on par with how Rocco reacted. It's pretty frustrating," outfielder Trevor Larnach said. "There's a rule book. I don't know the rule word-for-word, but the rules are expected to be followed. It's pretty common sense for everybody."
Crew chief James Hoye, however, said he followed the rules against foreign substances, which were updated two years ago to prevent pitchers from imparting an unusual amount of spin to the ball. He even asked fellow umpire D.J. Reyburn to double-check his opinion.
Germán had been told as he left the mound that his hand was too tacky with rosin and to wash it between innings. Hoye still detected tackiness on the pitcher's pinky as he took the field the next inning, and conferred with his fellow umps about what to do.
"It was a lot less than when he went off the mound the first time. So he definitely had tried to clean the rosin that was there," Hoye said to a pool reporter. "In that situation [we ruled that] this is not an ejectable offense because we didn't feel it rose to the foreign-substance standard of affecting the flight of the ball, affecting his pitching. That's why we didn't eject him."
When Baldelli protested, "he basically said, 'You're going to have to run me in this situation,' " Hoye said. "He felt like this was a stand he needed to make."
To the Yankees, the whole matter seemed almost silly. Germán said he washed his hands as instructed, but picked up a rosin bag in the dugout before taking the field again, because he prefers it to the one on the mound.
The Twins, though, were suspicious because Germán was pitching the game of his life, retiring the first 16 hitters he faced.
"Our report didn't have him with as much carry, and it was carrying," Larnach said. "My first at-bat, definitely, it was kind of like, 'Wow, it's moving a lot. Up.' "
Added Buxton: "We see the [analytics on the] board. It ain't like you can hide it. They got the vertical and horizontal [movement measurements] on the board. We see RPMs."
Kepler activated
As expected, the Twins activated Max Kepler from the injured list, with his right knee no longer giving him pain. Matt Wallner was returned to Class AAA St. Paul to make room.
But Louie Varland, who pitched six innings as a fill-in for Kenta Maeda on Friday, remained with the team and on the roster. His status, and Maeda's, remain a matter of internal discussion, Baldelli said.
"I don't know what we're going to do yet," Baldelli said. "Some of it will have to do with exactly how Kenta's doing and how long we wait for that." A stint on the injured list for a "fatigued arm," which the manager had downplayed earlier in the week, seems a possibility.
For the moment, though, the Twins have only seven relief pitchers, none of them suited for more than one or two innings, and that's not ideal, he said. "I'd prefer not to, to be honest," Baldelli said. "We have guys who could give us some innings if we needed them. But I really don't want to sit here with seven relievers if it's not necessary."
Etc.
• Donovan Solano singled in the seventh inning, extending his hitting streak to 10 games. He can tie Luis Arraez's 11-game streak set last May, the longest by a Twins player since 2019, on Sunday.
• Simeon Woods Richardson gave up five runs on 10 hits in 3 ⅓ innings as the Saints lost 9-2 at Indianapolis, their first loss in five games in the series. In his second game of a rehab assignment, Twins slugger Joey Gallo went 0-for-4 with four strikeouts, and the Saints struck out 16 times in all.
• Alex Kirilloff and Jorge Polanco each went 0-for-2 in a rehab game for Class A Fort Myers, a 3-1 loss at Clearwater. Fellow injured Twins player Josh Winder took the loss, giving up three hits and a run in 1⅔ innings of relief.
