DENVER — On Friday, the Twins fell victim to a pitcher, Kyle Freeland, whose 10 losses were tied for third-most in the majors. On Saturday, they lost to his teammate, Antonio Senzatela, a starter who has lost a league-leading 13 games.

A series against the Colorado Rockies that looked like it would provide a soft part of the schedule for the Twins has turned into anything but. The Twins lost their second straight game to the Colorado Rockies on Saturday night, this one a 10-6 defeat at Coors Field. With it, the Rockies, who are threatening the 2024 Chicago White Sox for the worst record in Major League Baseball history, won their first series at home all season.

Colorado broke open a tied game in the fifth inning after Zebby Matthews, fresh off the injured list, allowed a pair of hits to the first two batters of the inning, leading to his departure. Brock Stewart was summoned from the bullpen to replace him and after getting two outs, the first pitch he threw to Ezequiel Tovar ended up over the head of a leaping Byron Buxton beyond the center field wall.

The Rockies (24-74) pushed across another pair of runs an inning later and two more in the eighth with their 10-run outburst coming on a day in which the Twins (47-51) did little through the middle innings of the game.

After scoring three runs in the second — Ryan Jeffers doubled, Kody Clemens tripled him home, Carlos Correa’s double scored another run and Matt Wallner collected just his third hit with a runner in scoring position all season to bring in the Twins’ third run — Twins hitters saw fewer than 10 pitches in each of the next four innings.

Senzatela threw eight pitches in the third, seven in the fourth and just six in each of the next two frames. The Twins’ potential opportunities were squashed in two of those innings by double plays.

While the Twins did make some noise in the eighth — Clemens brought home two more runs with a double — their threat came to an end when Correa swung at a Tyler Kinley slider for strike three and in the bottom of the inning, Rockies catcher Hunter Goodman then hit a two-run home run to extend Colorado’s lead again.

Matthews, in his first major league start since landing on the injured list with a shoulder strain in early June, gave up five runs in the loss. The first came in the second inning. Two more came in the third, with Jordan Beck, who collected an infield hit on a ball that appeared to be rolling foul before catcher Ryan Jeffers picked it up, scoring on Ryan McMahon’s game-tying home run. The final two came after his departure, when Stewart gave up the home run that put the Twins down for good.

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ST. CLOUD, Minn. — Chris Klimpel knew she wanted to help people.

She’d previously worked as a teacher and in marketing before becoming a paralegal and joining Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid’s St. Cloud office in 2020. Klimpel said she didn’t have enough of an affinity for math and science to be a nurse, so she figured she could wade through pages of legal documents and footnotes to help people get the assistance they need.

Klimpel works with Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid’s teams that help seniors and others with housing issues. The U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to an attorney only in criminal cases, not civil cases such as divorce and eviction.

“If your landlord files an eviction action against you, and you go to court and they have an attorney and you can’t afford one — who’s going to win?” she said. “Low-income and people in need … are at a tremendous disadvantage because our world does not guarantee them an attorney.”

Klimpel and fellow paralegal Pam Manthei work to increase access to legal aid by driving around a 14-county radius in a Justice Bus, a mobile office used for consultations.

Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid is a nonprofit law firm that provides legal assistance to people with low incomes, seniors, people with disabilities, and others who need help. It has offices in Minneapolis, St. Cloud and Willmar. The affiliated Minnesota Disability Law Center has two additional offices in Duluth and Mankato, with an outreach coordinator in the Crookston area.

Among those offices, the nonprofit has four Justice Buses.

Since 2021, the buses have been used to connect with people who might not be able to make it to a Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid office. Manthei said they have worked with surrounding counties to identify good locations to visit.

“We’ve gone to a lot of senior centers and food shelves,” said Manthei, who works with seniors on addressing issues with things such as Medicaid and Social Security benefits. “I’ve even been asked to drive through a few apartment complexes so residents can get our information and know where to go for help.”

The bus and Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid staff have also made stops at county fairs and other community events to raise awareness, said Manthei, who has worked at the nonprofit law firm for 30 years.

The Justice Bus, a blue Sprinter van, is covered with information about how to contact Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid. Inside, the van is climate-controlled and has Wi-Fi, a computer, a printer, and pretty much anything else needed for it to be a fully functional office, Klimpel said. It also has a wheelchair lift to increase accessibility.

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It took a decade for the buses to become a reality, thanks in part to former Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid Deputy Director Ann Cofell, Manthei said. It was made possible with the help of the Minnesota Legal Services Coalition.

“It was her dream to do that,” Manthei said of Cofell. “I know she invested. It was probably almost a decade’s worth of persistent, gentle, effective advocacy to get a tool so that we could get the word out and reach people where they need to be.”

As paralegals, Klimpel and Manthei meet with clients to discuss their legal questions, help them fill out paperwork, and connect them with a Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid lawyer who can assist them.

While Klimpel and Manthei cannot give out legal advice, their goal is to help make the process as easy as possible and ensure clients are able to get the support they need.

They help people who are not legally equipped to handle dire, time-sensitive issues, such as a notice to vacate an apartment.

“Legal aid is kind of like the legal emergency room, so if you walk into the emergency room with a broken leg, they’re going to see you and they’re going to set your broken leg,” Klimpel said. “They may not be able to take care of all the other things that you have going on … but they’ll be able to help because nobody expects you to know how to set your own broken leg.”

After an opening day that felt electric despite severe weather chopping off the last 20 minutes of headliner Hozier’s set, this year’s Minnesota Yacht Club music festival returned for a sunnier second day Saturday.

Ticket sales had apparently been slower for Saturday — this was the only day out of the festival’s three days for which single-day general admission tickets were not sold out — but you wouldn’t know it: By late afternoon, Harriet Island Regional Park in St. Paul felt just as packed, if not more so, than it did Friday.

And an important update for fans of not only Weezer and Fall Out Boy but also public transportation: Metro Transit, which had initially said Green Line light-rail construction would last throughout the festival weekend, announced Saturday morning that they’d finished early and trains were back up and running.

To kick off the day after doors opened at 12:30, local opening acts Laamar and Raffaella commanded sizable and particularly engaged audiences. Up next, to a slightly more modest but still pumped-up crowd, Jake Clemons — who now fills his late uncle Clarence Clemons’ former role as the saxophonist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band — showed off his killer sax chops and solo music with a hard-rock edge.

The day really hit its stride when California alt-rockers Silversun Pickups erupted onstage — and yes, they were loud, but not just loud. Sound mixing has been really skillfully done throughout the entire festival but especially so here, balancing singer Brian Aubert against the band’s powerful guitar work and Nikki Monninger’s show-stealing bass.

Pitch hitting for a sick vocalist and guitarist Justin Pierre, Fall Out Boy lead singer Patrick Stump, joins Motion City Soundtrack on the Crows Nest Stage at the Minnesota Yacht Club Festival at Harriet Island in St. Paul on Saturday July 19, 2025.(John Autey / Pioneer Press)

And despite committing the cardinal sin of St. Paul concert openings — “Hello, Minneapolis!” — especially as a local band that should know better, Motion City Soundtrack delivered one of the day’s most fun sets. Frontman Justin Pierre had to call out sick, and it was a bummer to miss seeing him at the band’s first local gig in over a year and a half, but the show went on thanks to a series of “special guest” lead singers.

The first of which was none other than Patrick Stump, lead singer of today’s final headlining band Fall Out Boy, who has also provided backing vocals for Motion City Soundtrack in the past and is set to be featured on a track on the band’s forthcoming record “The Same Old Wasted Wonderful World,” their first release in a decade.

Stump is a longtime Motion City Soundtrack fan, he said onstage — a feeling that’s very much mutual, as MCS guitarist Joshua Cain told the Pioneer Press this week — and he absolutely crushed it on their stage. After a couple songs, the group brought out Minnesota singer-songwriter Ber for two songs and then local band Gully Boys’ Nadi McGill and Kathy Callahan for a song each before returning to Stump. He closed the set delivering some of MCS’s biggest hits like “Everything Is Alright” and “The Future Freaks Me Out” with contagious energy and slightly punkier vocals.

Jam rock stalwarts OAR and Cory Wong paved the way for the night’s headlining trio, and though food lines did get longer during Wong’s dinnertime set, it was cool to see crowds still go wild for the local guitar pro’s funk-jazz sound amid an otherwise rock-heavy lineup.

Headliners Weezer, Remi Wolf and Fall Out Boy are up next.

(This article will be updated.)

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DENVER — Royce Lewis can tell something is different, even though his swing feels good to him. When he watches himself on film, when he looks back on his at-bats, he notices something looks off.

His thoughts range from: “That’s not Royce,” to “I want it to be Royce,” to ‘Where’s Royce?’”

The production from Lewis that the Twins have become accustomed to getting hasn’t been there this season, and Lewis expressed a desire for a “reset” before Saturday’s game. Lewis, who was not in the starting lineup on Saturday, entered the day hitting .211 with just two home runs on the season. He has a negative bWAR (wins above replacement per Baseball Reference) and his numbers have dipped from his career averages across the board.

“To me, in my head, it feels the same,” he said of his swing. “It’s like, until you look at yourself in the mirror, you’re like ‘I’m the best dressed. I look good,’” Lewis said. “Then you look at yourself and ‘Maybe I don’t look good in yellow.’ I’m watching video and I thought it looked good, but it does look a little different.”

His swing, he said, doesn’t look the same as it did even last year. His body is compensating for something, he believes, and after dealing with two hamstring strains this year — including a very significant one that he suffered in spring training — he feels injuries have taken more of a toll on his body than he once realized.

Perhaps, the 26-year-old said, it’s because he’s “starting to get older.”

Hitting coach Matt Borgschulte said Lewis was continuing to put in the work to get back where he needed to be and said he believed the third baseman was getting closer “by the day.”

But the lack of results, it seems, have gotten into his head. In Friday’s game, Lewis scorched a lineout at 104.3 mph off the bat at second baseman Ryan Ritter. In the past, he said he’s done a good job of walking away from something like that, thinking “It’s part of the process, part of the game.”

Now, his perspective has shifted.

“I’ve become more results-oriented because of how we run things here personally. It’s been harder for me mentally,” Lewis said. “This year, it seems like if I don’t — or anybody in general — (they’re) quick to pull the trigger on you. I’m trying to do my best to get some balls to fall and when that doesn’t happen, you’re just like (out of luck).”

But Lewis, despite dealing with the frustrations of this season, still projected optimism for the remaining two and a half months of the season and called this year a “significant jump … in terms of growth and wisdom.”

“I’m trying to figure it out,” Lewis said. “Hopefully soon it looks like the Royce of old.”

Reinforcements arrive

The Twins welcomed Zebby Matthews back from the injured list on Saturday, the first of a group they hope can impact them down the stretch.

Bailey Ober (hip) threw four scoreless innings on a rehab assignment at Triple-A on Friday night and the Twins have not yet detailed the next steps for him. Joining him with the Saints was Luke Keaschall (arm), who is expected to have a lengthy rehab assignment as he comes back from a fractured forearm. And at some point, the Twins anticipate getting Pablo López (shoulder) back, as well.

“You definitely want to just keep getting guys healthy, keep getting guys back. You’re going to be better for it ultimately,” Baldelli said. “There could be some hard decisions that come along with it. That’s part of the game so we just want to keep, on the medical side, on the health side, just keep getting stronger and stronger and keep giving us options.”

Briefly

Joe Ryan will make his first start of the second half of the season on Sunday at Coors Field. Ryan, who last pitched Tuesday in the All-Star Game, has a 2.72 ERA on the season. … Travis Adams was optioned to Triple-A to make room on the roster for Matthews.

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