Nobody said playing out the string had to be boring.
The Twins and the Chicago White Sox, carrying 162 losses between them with a month to go, played a Labor Day game irrelevant to the playoff races but chock full of fielding mistakes, base-running head-scratchers and a roster’s worth of pitchers only marginally effective. They were rewarded with a back-and-forth contest that the White Sox won 6-5 at Target Field with a pair of eighth-inning doubles off the wall in right-center field.
The Twins have now played 22 games since Aug. 8 without winning two in a row. Worse, this was the Twins’ third consecutive loss to their American League Central rivals, something that, given Chicago’s 50-88 record, is not easy to do. Only the Pittsburgh Pirates, in last place in the National League Central, have managed to drop three straight games to the AL Central’s worst team.
“We had the lead in the seventh inning,” Twins manager Rocco Baldelli pointed out. “We expect to win that game. We want to win that game.”
Then they probably shouldn’t give up a dozen hits, half of them for extra bases. Though to be fair, the Twins cuffed around Chicago’s pitching, too. In fact, both teams put at least one runner on base in each of the first eight innings — then, oddly, went out in order in the ninth.
“We fell behind early. We fought back. We drove in runs. What else do we really want after a tough start?” Baldelli complained. “We just couldn’t hold it and finish it off.”