SEATTLE — After what was almost assuredly their best win of the season on Friday, the Twins followed it up on Saturday with what was almost assuredly their strangest game of the season.

If a fire alarm blaring and flashing lights throughout the ballpark delaying the game for 10 minutes wasn’t enough, how about this? Star shortstop Carlos Correa was ejected for the first time in his career — and it happened from the on-deck circle.

The Twins saw their lead slip away late when J.P. Crawford blasted a two-run home run off reliever Jorge Alcala in the seventh inning but came back, again, with Trevor Larnach tying the game up in the ninth inning for the second consecutive day. Ultimately, though, after Griffin Jax stranded the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth, and Jhoan Duran left a runner on third in the 10th, the Twin ended up falling 5-4 to the Seattle Mariners when a run scored on a Cole Young fielder’s choice in the 11th in a game that was filled with drama on Saturday at T-Mobile Park.

The Mariners’ walk-off came after Kody Clemens fought through an 11-pitch at-bat to deliver a single into center in the top of the 10th, but automatic runner Matt Wallner — fresh off the injured list from a hamstring strain — was thrown out trying to score from second on a bullet from center fielder Julio Rodríguez. Harrison Bader then grounded into an inning-ending double play to end the top of the 10th and the Twins were unable to convert in the 11th, too, despite plenty of good at-bats throughout.

“We did about everything in the book besides score,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “You probably couldn’t try to do what we did and find a way to not put a run on the board.”

Both Baldelli and Correa were not around to see the end of it after home plate umpire Austin Jones, working in just his ninth game this season, tossed the shortstop during the middle of a Brooks Lee at-bat in the seventh inning. Jones had made a questionable strike call in Correa’s previous at-bat, Clemens was rung up on a low strike in the sixth and Larnach the same in the seventh.

And so, after the second straight borderline call of Lee’s seventh-inning at-bat, Correa said something that caught Jones’s attention.

“I said, ‘You’ve got to get them up. You’ve got to make an adjustment. You can’t call that all day,’” Correa recounted. “And then he threw me out.”

Correa was surprised by the decision because he felt he did not say anything that warranted an ejection. Crew chief Bill Miller told a pool reporter that Correa “was warned twice to stop,” but continued.

“He didn’t say anything bad,” Lee said. “Just let an umpire know that he’s doing a bad job.”

As an animated Correa moved closer to home plate, Baldelli sprung out of the dugout, wedging himself between the player and umpire. Three other members of the coaching staff came out to restrain Correa as Baldelli continued on with his argument, eventually throwing his hat in anger.

“There’s a reason why he’s only had one. He’s a pretty respectful guy,” Baldelli said. “I think it was a premature ejection, but it’s not my job to make those decisions, obviously. It’s the umpire’s job. He didn’t say anything personal.”

The seventh inning went from bad to worse for the Twins (31-26), who lost their star and then their lead.

Crawford got ahold of an Alcala fastball, sending it off the scoreboard ribbon in right field and erasing a lead that the Twins had been protecting since the second inning when Wallner, in his first major league at-bat since April 15, smacked a two-run home run. They added one more run in the inning when Willi Castro, who hit two home runs on Friday and had three hits on Saturday, drove in the Twins’ third run of the game.

Minnesota held onto that lead for much of the game, though the Mariners (31-26) chipped away an inning later when Cal Raleigh hit a two-run home run on a high fastball from Bailey Ober that was above the strike zone.

“He’s just on one right now,” Ober said of Raleigh, who hit two home runs a day earlier. “It’s hard to expect him to get a barrel to it, but he did.”

Ober’s start ended in the fifth inning at 97 pitches after he had allowed the first two batters of the inning to reach. Ober, who said he was “fighting some mechanical stuff,” in his start was bailed out of that jam, though, as Louie Varland stepped up, striking out Raleigh and Rodríguez before getting Randy Arozarena to fly out.

Arozarena would make a big play later in the game, catching a Clemens fly ball and then doubling Wallner off of second base, helping squelch a potential Twins’ rally in the eighth inning. But just like a night earlier, there was some more late-inning magic for the Twins in the ninth.

Byron Buxton, making things happen with his legs, wound up on third base when reliever Carlos Vargas threw away a chopper that he should have eaten. Larnach, with the infield drawn in, then tied the game up, poking a single past a diving second baseman into right field. But though they came back again, they couldn’t quite pull it off for the second straight night, finding themselves not rewarded for some good at-bats.

“We put a bunch of runs on the board yesterday. And our at-bats might have been somewhere in the same category today as they were yesterday, and we couldn’t find a way to score,” Baldelli said. “That’s life. I was really pleased. We hit the ball well. We made pretty good decisions at the plate. If we play like that tomorrow, offensively, we’re going to score a ton of runs.”

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MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred recently removed Pete Rose’s permanent ban from baseball, which will make him eligible for induction into the Hall of Fame. Manfred reinstated 17 other banned players as well, including members of the infamous 1919 Chicago White Sox who threw the World Series, including the team’s star “Shoeless” Joe Jackson.

This undated file photo shows baseball player player Shoeless Joe Jackson. (AP Photo/File)

The reinstatement was an obvious sop to the gambling industry, an MLB partner, and possibly also to President Donald Trump, who lobbied for Rose’s future election into the Hall of Fame.

Manfred offered a tone-deaf rationale for reinstating this MLB’s rogues’ gallery: “Obviously, a person no longer with us cannot represent a threat to the integrity of the game.” Whatever else Manfred learned at Harvard Law School, history’s lessons failed to make the curriculum. Understanding history — human nature, mistakes made and the significance of previous cultures — is essential to cultivating integrity.

The nature of history is that no matter how many accounts we read about an event — whether it’s Napoleon Bonaparte’s Russia campaign, the Titanic sinking or the assassination of John F. Kennedy — we can never know precisely what people were thinking, how they acted and why. But whatever history is ultimately knowable, certain falsehoods and myths can be dispelled. This is where, over 100 years later, Jackson, a central figure in the Series fix, provides a lesson about how subtle the lack of integrity can be.

The story now circulating with ever greater popularity is that Jackson was an innocent bystander in the 1919 World Series fix. Claims of his innocence rest on two facts: He hit .375, including the only home run of the Series, and he was never convicted in a court of law.

The first demonstrates how statistics can mislead. By the accounts of other players, the Sox deliberately lost five games (the World Series was then best of nine), and they probably played honestly in two or three. In the first four games that the Sox lost, Jackson got no RBIs. He raised his average remarkably in the three games they won, but his only home run of the Series, along with a base-clearing double, came in the fixed final game clincher, with the Sox already facing an insurmountable lead, and the Series outcome no longer in doubt.

Jackson’s impressive World Series statistics were the result of his poor performance in four fixed games, three games he tried to win and one game in which his contribution didn’t matter in a rigged blowout loss to Cincinnati.

Although Jackson committed no errors, his fielding was likewise suspect. A granular analysis of Jackson’s performance by baseball blogger Dan Holmes reveals his “lackluster efforts in the field, critically in both Games One and Two.” The presiding judge in a subsequent civil suit recalled that Jackson had told him that “he had made no misplays that could be noticed by the ordinary person, but that he did not play his best.”

Regarding his courtroom exoneration and that of the other Black Sox, they were found not guilty of conspiracy, which is different from innocent, primarily because the charges were nebulous — they were charged with conspiracy because fixing baseball games was not a crime — and the Chicago jurors loved their hometown heroes. Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis summarily banned the players permanently, restoring honesty to the game and saving baseball, along with the help of superstar Babe Ruth’s popularity.

Bill Lamb, a longtime state and county prosecutor in New Jersey, an authority on the scandal and author of “Black Sox in the Courtroom: The Grand Jury, Criminal Trial and Civil Litigation,” has analyzed the legal machinations. He points out Jackson originally admitted in grand jury testimony to being involved in the fix. Then, in a later civil trial against the team, he recanted his sworn testimony, essentially committing perjury.

Lamb poses other questions including why the other fixers would all implicate Jackson if he were innocent, and why Jackson, who claimed he wanted to return the $5,000 he received (he was promised $20,000), eventually deposited it in a Georgia bank near his home.

Lamb concludes: “That Joe Jackson was a likable fellow and persistent in his claims of innocence does not change the historical record. On the evidence, the call is not a close one,” Lamb wrote in 2019 for the Society for American Baseball Research.

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“As he admitted under oath after first being confronted, Jackson was a knowing, if perhaps unenthusiastic, participant in the plot to fix the 1919 World Series. And damningly, Jackson was just as persistent in his demands to be paid his promised fix payoff money as the Series progressed as he would later be in his disavowals of fix involvement. In the final analysis, Shoeless Joe Jackson, banished from playing the game that he loved while still in the prime of his career, is a sad figure. But hardly an innocent one.”

Manfred may not realize that baseball culture has always reflected the larger societal culture. His reinstatement of Rose and Jackson is no exception: History has become an irrelevant triviality — ignored or, even better, forgotten. Ethics are now a bore since unethical behavior can always be papered over with tricks such as deceptive statistics and abstruse legal arguments.

Nothing good can come of this.

Dr. Cory Franklin is a retired intensive care physician. He wrote this column for the Chicago Tribune.

SEATTLE — Something rare occurred for the Twins on Saturday, something that very possibly has not happened for years at this point of the season.

With outfielder Matt Wallner’s activation from the injured list from a hamstring strain that has kept him out since mid-April, the Twins have the full group they expected to break camp with finally healthy.

Of course, there’s a couple new names involved — Kody Clemens and Jonah Bride are now on the roster in place of Edouard Julien and Jose Miranda — and Luke Keaschall remains sidelined with a broken forearm, but everyone whom they entered the season planning on relying upon is now healthy, giving an already surging team a wealth of options.

“It feels good, especially getting everybody back together and having that group we had in spring training back together,” center fielder Byron Buxton said. “Obviously, we’ve got some new additions in here that’s been a big help to get us where we are. Just making sure, even though Matt’s coming back, you keep adding on and they keep doing their job as well as us doing our job. That’s what makes this team roll.”

They didn’t have their full expected group to begin the year — Royce Lewis (hamstring) and Brooks Lee (back) were out to begin the year. By the time Lewis returned as the later of the two, Wallner was already injured. Wallner, who hit a two-run home run in his first at-bat on Saturday, returned a day after Buxton (concussion injured list). And now, Twins manager Rocco Baldelli has his full core from which to craft lineups.

“It’s wonderful to have Wallner back,” Baldelli said. “We’ve got guys that come and go in our lineup pretty often. It’s a really great feeling to get guys back. When he left, he was as productive as any player that we had at that point.”

Wallner injured his left hamstring running to first base on April 15 in a game against the New York Mets. Initially, he said, it didn’t feel like it was going to get better at all. It was tight for a week and remained stiff.

After that first week, it started getting better every single day, little signs of progress that showed him that he was on the right track.

“(I was doing) little stuff in the training room that I’ve never done in my life before, but I think for the most part, it worked, so we’ll take it,” Wallner said.

Once healed, the outfielder went on a rehab assignment with the Triple-A Saints during which he went 8 for 25 (.320) with five home runs over six games, driving in 13 and he picked up where he left off on Saturday with the Twins.

After the first rehab game, he felt a little more tired than he normally would, but he returns to the Twins after playing three consecutive games from Tuesday to Thursday, something which he came out of feeling healthy.

“I feel really good,” he said. “I’m just happy with where I’m at.”

Keirsey Jr. sent down

To make room on the roster, the Twins optioned outfielder DaShawn Keirsey Jr. back to Triple-A.

Keirsey had settled into a role where he would primarily come in late to pinch run and play defense. He was hitting .109 in limited at-bats, with his biggest moment coming on Mother’s Day when he sent the Twins to a walk-off win.

“It’s hard to go from being a baseball player playing regularly to getting called up to the highest level and being told by the manager that you’re going to fill a specific role on Day 1,” Baldelli said. “He handled it great. Couldn’t have been better. … Now, it’s time for him to go get sharp again, go play and get a bunch of at-bats and get some time in the field.”

Briefly

Royce Lewis, who entered the day in an 0-for-28 slump, was not in the starting lineup on Saturday. … Chris Paddack is scheduled to start the series finale in Seattle, which will be at 3:10 p.m. CT. He is slated to face Luis Castillo.

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The Minnesota Wild are not one of the eight teams that employed Bill Guerin during his nearly two-decade career as an NHL player. But the Wild general manager skated for the home team in St. Paul once. In the fall of 2004, Guerin played for Team USA in the World Cup of Hockey.,

Before packed houses at Xcel Energy Center, Guerin had teammates like Brett Hull, Mike Modano, Jeremy Roenick, Chris Chelios, Keith Tkachuk and current Minnesota Frost head coach Ken Klee. The Americans beat Slovakia in the preliminary round, and downed Russia in the quarterfinals before falling to Finland in a tight, 2-1 semifinal game.

Between three trips to the Olympics, a pair of appearances in the World Cup and two stints with the American entry in World Juniors when he was a teenager, Guerin spent nearly 90 games wearing red, white and blue and vying for a medal on various international hockey stages.

He won gold in the 1996 World Cup, and silver in the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. So, when USA Hockey needed a general manager for February’s 4 Nations Face-Off, Guerin was the logical choice, and put together a team that came within an overtime goal of gold. He will serve in the same capacity for Team USA in the 2026 Olympics, which will be held next February in Italy.

In early May, as he held his season-ending meeting with the Minnesota media following the Wild’s first-round playoff exit, Guerin’s bags were already packed for the 2025 World Championship in Denmark and Sweden. And while there were seven Wild players and/or prospects dotting several of the international team rosters, Guerin was focused on his nation first and employer second.

“I put a big emphasis on it. It’s not necessarily how many goals you score or this or that or whatever,” Guerin said of the tournament held in Europe each spring. “It’s, ‘When are we going to win that tournament?’ We need to win that tournament soon. We need our best players going.”

Rite of spring

The NHL pauses for the Olympics and competitions such as the inaugural 4 Nations Faceoff so that its top players can skate for their countries. The World Championship is played at the same time as the NHL playoffs in the spring, meaning that the rosters for the United States, Canada, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Switzerland and others are composed primarily of skaters, defensemen and goalies from NHL teams that either didn’t make the playoffs or were knocked out in the first round.

Among the top players for Team USA in 2025 were former Gophers star Logan Cooley, Frank Nazar and Zach Werenski, whose NHL teams — Utah, Chicago and Columbus, respectively — did not make it to the 2025 playoffs. Wild defenseman Zeev Buium was on a plane for Europe to skate for the Americans just a few days after Minnesota was knocked out of the postseason by Vegas.

Other Wild properties in the tournament were defense prospect David Spacek (Czechia), goaltending prospect Samuel Hlavaj (Slovakia), defenseman Jared Spurgeon (Canada), retiring goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury (Canada), defenseman Jonas Brodin (Sweden) and forward Marcus Johansson (Sweden).

With Guerin and other USA Hockey higher-ups in attendance for several of the games in Stockholm, the American team did something it had last accomplished in 1933. After just one loss in their seven preliminary round games, the Americans bested Finland, Sweden and Switzerland in the medal round to bring home gold.

The finale versus the Swiss, whose international hockey stock is rising fast, was an overtime thriller, with Buffalo forward Tage Thompson scoring the game’s only goal.

“It was a great experience … and the buy-in from players was awesome. There was a good feel,” Guerin said this week while taking some much-needed time away from the rink. “The guys wanted to be there, and that’s what I’ve been trying to push is (that) it’s a great experience to get to play for your country.”

Guerin noted that the 1933 team won gold in an era when rosters had fewer than a dozen players, goalies wore little to no padding, and the forward pass was a relatively new element to the game.

“This is really the first time in modern history that we’ve done it,” Guerin said.

And this gold medal may have come at what is looking more and more like the best of times for American hockey. Guerin pointed out that the American entry in sled hockey — an adapted version of the game for players who have lost limbs or dealt with paralysis — is dominating the world stage.

Best of times?

Team USA won its second consecutive gold at the 2025 World Juniors and will go for the three-peat when the tournament comes to the Twin Cities in December.

In April, the U.S. women beat Canada in overtime to claim the World Championship in Czechia. And when they get to Italy next winter, the Americans will be pushing for their first men’s Olympic gold since the 1980 Miracle On Ice, while the Team USA women won their most recent gold in 2018.

“There have been a lot of great accomplishments, and the player pool for all of the different categories we play in is having success. It’s a good thing,” Guerin said. “We don’t want to take our foot off the gas, though. The World Championships happen every year. We don’t just want to say, ‘Hey, great, we won one, let’s back off.’ We want to continue to compete for medals. That’s where we are now.”

With an eye toward the Olympics, Guerin said perhaps the most important thing key members of Team USA gained this month, in addition to those gold medals, was the experience of playing in meaningful games while wearing the nation’s colors.

“A lot of times there are very, very good players that haven’t played in meaningful games,” Guerin said. “We had some guys in that category that really stepped up and proved that they can do that.”

The process of choosing the Team USA roster for World Juniors will begin in late July in Minneapolis with the World Juniors Summer Showcase, which will include teams from Canada, Sweden and Finland as well as the United States, and will be held at Ridder Arena on the U of M campus. Minnesota Gophers men’s hockey coach Bob Motzko is the American coach for World Juniors, for the third time in his career.

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