The Texas Rangers have been among the worst hitting teams in the majors this season. But don’t be fooled by that, Twins manager Rocco Baldelli cautioned before the game.
“They haven’t swung it this year so far,” Baldelli said pregame. “But if you look at their lineup, it’s a very dangerous lineup.”
It sure was on Tuesday. Hours after he said that, the Rangers erupted for a season-high 16 runs on 17 hits in a 16-4 walloping of the Twins in the series opener at Target Field.
After skirting around trouble in his first three innings, Simeon Woods Richardson, recalled from Triple-A on Tuesday, couldn’t evade it in the fourth inning. The inning began when Byron Buxton couldn’t handle a ball hit at him that he leapt for and got a glove on. The play went for a two-base error, setting the stage for what would become a three-run inning for the Rangers (32-35).
“You can’t control that,” Woods Richardson said of the defense behind him, which committed two errors. “I also didn’t do my part as well. I didn’t throw as many strikes. It didn’t help them, so I think it was a combination of everything. There’s going to be days like that, but I guess I felt fine, did the best I could.”
The Rangers busted the game open an inning later, scoring five runs in the fifth inning and knocking Woods Richardson out. All of those runs came with two outs in the inning as the Rangers recorded five straight hits off Woods Richardson and reliever Justin Topa.
“He was battling through the outing. … As the outing went on, there were some baserunners,” Baldelli said. “They got on in different ways. There were a couple walks and they hit some balls hard. It just kind of piled up.”
Two more runs scored in the sixth inning off Justin Topa, and the Rangers rocked Jorge Alcala for six (five earned) in the eighth inning.
While every Ranger in the starting lineup finished with at least one hit, the bulk of the damage came from the bottom of the order with their six through nine hitters driving in 14 of their 16 runs. No. 6 hitter Evan Carter drove in three runs, Josh Jung another four, Adolis García two of them and Kyle Higashioka, batting at the bottom of the lineup, led the team with five runs batted in.
Though the Twins (35-31) collected 12 hits of their own, they would never recover after falling into the three-run deficit in the fourth inning. Ty France smacked a high fastball off the wall in right field to drive in the Twins’ first run of the game, and Royce Lewis added an RBI knock later in fourth.
The Twins scored once more in the fifth inning, and Matt Wallner hit his fourth home run since returning from the injured list on May 31 in the sixth inning for their final run of the day. All four of those runs came off former Twins starter Tyler Mahle, who threw 5 2/3 innings and picked up the win in his return to Target Field.
“They obviously swung the bats pretty good (Tuesday), gave them some tough at-bats, shot some balls the other way, stayed through some breaking (balls),” Baldelli said. “They did it in a number of different ways. But we can play better than what we showed out there … on all sides of the ball.”
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