Minneapolis – Walks will always haunt in baseball, and they did so once again on Saturday night as they looked to scratch across their first win against the Detroit Tigers in a four-game series.
The Minnesota Twins walked nine Tigers batters on Saturday night, the 48th time they’ve had that many walks or more in a game dating back to 1995. They were 8-39 in those games over the last 30 years, and Saturday looked as though they’d finally crack a win with nine walks allowed since August 18, 2021, against Cleveland.
But the Tigers had other plans.
“We didn’t have that many chances,” said Twins manager Rocco Baldelli. “They had a lot of chances. And we’re sitting right there, past the halfway point of the game, we’re in a pretty good spot. We’ve got a chance, a real chance, to win the game. Couldn’t make it happen. I think we fought very hard and played with a lot of spirit tonight.”
The Twins were up 3-2 going into the sixth, and were trailing only by a run after getting two more across in the seventh. But despite putting the Tigers in a bad pinch, going only 4-for-21 with RISP, their pitching managed to shut down Minnesota’s best opportunity to get back into the game, striking out Brooks Lee with the bases loaded in the bottom of the eighth.
“You kind of look where we’re at, at that point in the game, and you’re one swing away from tying the game, you’re two good at-bats from winning the game,” said Baldelli. “On a night where we were far from perfect. We walked a lot of guys. And that’s never going to be part of a good formula.”
“When you walk nine, you’re playing with fire,” Twins catcher Ryan Jeffers said. “You can settle down and make some pitches when you need to, but getting out of the bases-loaded jam with no outs is hard to do very often. We got some big plays. We got out of them, limiting the damage, like I said. But I think overall, we need to be better than that.”
Minnesota’s shaky command started with Zebby Matthews, a pitcher who has built a reputation for controlling the strike zone. He set a new career high in walks allowed on Saturday with four. He’s only walked four batters once before in the minor leagues. Aside from that, he’s never had another game in his pro career with more than three walks.
Matthews was coming off a tough start against the New York Yankees on August 11, where he threw a career high 99 pitches. There were no indicators that the career high in pitches affected him on Saturday. Instead, it was a combination of mechanical mistakes and bad pitch location.
“I didn’t do a good job of working ahead of hitters, especially to [Colt] Keith — I fell behind twice there,” said Matthews. “I had a lot of arm-side misses; that could be a mechanical thing. But it’s also the takes. I thought, again, [Kerry] Carpenter had some good takes in that first at-bat when he drew the walk. As much as you’d like to pin it on one thing, lots of things go into it.”
Matthews’ results are nothing to fret about, according to him and Jeffers. Saturday was just a game where the command was a bit off, and it unraveled into a less-than-ideal outing.
“Obviously, I have to go longer than four innings in a start,” said Matthews. “That’s a lot to ask from the bullpen, to cover that many innings in a game, so that’s kind of the step moving forward — that you’re going to have days like that, but to continue to move through five, six innings.”
“I think at the end of the day, this game’s so hard, and days like that happen,” said Jeffers. “He didn’t really have a feel for the pitches early on and got behind the eight ball, used way too many pitches, just wasn’t able to compile the start, and add up the innings to go deep into that game.”
It was already the second time this week that the Twins had a game with nine or more walks. They allowed 11 walks to the Yankees in their 9-1 loss, where the Twins only managed one hit, and the Yankees were 3-for-14 with RISP. Walking 20 batters in two games over a week is never an ideal situation for any team. It’s not something that Baldelli and the coaching staff will take lightly, but they will not overreact to a two-game trend.
“Not something we should ignore and think that it just happens,” said Baldelli. “But I probably I’m not going to sit here and freak out about a week of strike throwing being less than ideal. No matter what the circumstances are, that will always be way too many walks. So we’ll start there and work forward from there.”