8 October 2023
HOUSTON — For three innings, Justin Verlander danced into and out of trouble. He looked far from the dominant, shutdown version of the ace the Twins have seen so many times in the past.
And yet, the Twins couldn’t take advantage.
While there was plenty to like about their at-bats against him, in the end, Verlander finished with six scoreless innings to his name, settling in after a shaky beginning and causing the Twins to rue their missed opportunities.
“That’s what good pitchers do. When you give them — when you don’t take advantage of the mistakes, for any pitcher, obviously they can go into cruise control in that point later in the game, as they start getting more of a feel for it,” Twins designated hitter Royce Lewis said. “And you could tell, he started feeling his pitches out a little more. If we took advantage early on in the game, it would have been a totally different ballgame.”
Lewis had one of the Twins’ first big chances against Verlander, coming to the plate in the first inning after Edouard Julien had walked and Jorge Polanco had singled.
But Lewis, who has been hampered by a hamstring strain, grounded a ball to shortstop to start a double play. Running at full speed, he might have been able to beat out the throw, but his hamstring has prevented him from doing that. Verlander would walk one more batter in the inning before stranding a pair of runners.
An inning later, another double play killed a potential rally and the Twins came away with nothing despite a pair of hits.
“Verlander goes out there, and we had pretty good at-bats against him. That’s what I would call it,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “We had a lot of traffic out there. We’re one good swing or even one well-placed swing away from getting some real action going, putting some runs up, and we just didn’t get that.”
In his third inning of work, Verlander allowed a leadoff double to Julien. In total, six of the first 10 Twins hitters reached base. None scored.
And then, Verlander settled in, finishing his outing with three relatively easy innings
“When you start off struggling and are able to make some adjustments and find it, and the third, fourth, and fifth obviously was able to have some things click and make some better pitches and get some easier outs — the first few innings were not easy,” Verlander said. “So that felt great.”
Significantly less so in the other dugout, where the Twins were finally able to put up some runs once he departed — Polanco and Lewis hit back-to-back home runs in the seventh inning off reliever Hector Neris — but were still thinking about their missed early chances.
Missed chances that dramatically could have changed the outcome of Saturday night’s loss.
“He was a little erratic around the zone, but, you know, it keeps you off balance with speeds,” first baseman Alex Kirilloff said. “He’s been doing that for a long time. So, we’d like to capitalize when we have guys on base and capitalize on walks, but we didn’t do that enough.”