Twins takeaways: Brutal loss to Astros, Royce Lewis’ progress, low attendance

MINNEAPOLIS — What a disaster.

The Minnesota Twins should be waking up Monday morning with a 4-5 record, a palatable spot considering they’d started the season with four straight losses.

Instead, they’re sitting three games under .500 after a total meltdown Sunday afternoon. Once leading by six runs, the Twins gave it all back and stunningly lost 9-7 to the Houston Astros in 10 innings at Target Field.

Chris Paddack couldn’t escape the fifth inning, Griffin Jax blew a save, and an offense that couldn’t be stopped early didn’t score over the final six innings as the Twins lost a very winnable series.

“You’re going to have to have some little bit of thick skin,” Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said. “Some losses are different than other losses. This is going to be a tough one that’s going to bother a lot of people in our clubhouse, there’s no doubt about it. And I can’t think we’re wrong for thinking that. It’s a game we should win. It’s a game we need to win.”

Early on Sunday, the Twins played with urgency.

They knocked Astros starter Ronel Blanco out of the game after 1 2/3 innings and led 4-1. They added to their lead in the fourth inning with consecutive run-scoring doubles by Byron Buxton and Trevor Larnach, the latter accounting for two runs.

But then the offense went silent.

Twins hitters went 0-for-9 with runners in scoring position after building the 7-1 lead, which opened the door for Houston to deliver another crushing defeat.

Before Paddack started the fifth inning, he had retired seven consecutive batters. But then he walked Zach Dezenzo and yielded a double to Jake Meyers. Jose Altuve, Isaac Paredes and Yordan Alvarez followed with singles, and suddenly it was a 7-3 game.

Fortunately for the Twins, Cole Sands escaped a bases-loaded, no-out jam with only one inherited runner scoring as Houston climbed within three runs on a Jeremy Peña sacrifice fly.

“I’ve just got to be better,” Paddack said. “At the end of the day, my pitch count’s low. I can’t let an inning like that in the fifth snowball with a leadoff walk when we’ve got a 7-1 lead. That’s a game where I can maybe take it into the sixth, seventh, save our bullpen guys. But I think, overall, I’m just not pleased with where my stuff’s at right now.”

Not much has gone to plan through the Twins’ first three series.

They dropped their first four games, which put them in the type of early hole they’d hoped and worked to avoid. They recovered at the end of their first trip, winning the final two in Chicago, and appeared to be on the verge of taking two of three from Houston before Sunday’s implosion.

The Twins quickly overcame a one-run deficit in the first inning, with Larnach hitting a score-tying sacrifice fly and Ryan Jeffers doubling in two runs to take the lead. An inning later, Carlos Correa singled in a run to make it 4-1.

Doubles by Larnach and Buxton in the fourth provided the Twins with what should have been an insurmountable lead. But the bullpen couldn’t hold it.

Darren McCaughan surrendered a run in the sixth inning as Houston cut the lead to 7-5 before Justin Topa and Jhoan Duran provided scoreless innings to get the ball to Jax in the ninth.

But Paredes singled on a first-pitch fastball from Jax, and Alvarez ripped the reliever’s pitch for a no-doubt, two-run homer.

After Josh Hader shut down the Twins in the ninth, Houston pulled away in the 10th against Louis Varland. Altuve singled in another run, and he and Jake Meyers, who drew a one-out walk, executed a double steal with Meyers coming home to extend the lead to two runs.

With no off day until April 17, the Twins must move on from the loss as quickly as possible.

Jeffers said: “You can’t lose that type of game. But we’ve got KC tomorrow. … This early in the season — really the whole season — you can’t … linger on s— like you can maybe in other sports. Football, maybe you lose a big game, you’ve got the whole week to kind of stew on it. How do we get better? Crazy thing and the reality of baseball is you’ve got a game tomorrow, so stewing on it is not going to do any (good).”

Here are several other Twins takeaways from the first homestand.

• Royce Lewis is making good progress in his injury recovery, but he’s unlikely to return for quite some time.

Three weeks after he suffered a left hamstring strain, Lewis ran for a second straight day Sunday, the latest sign of increased activity for the Minnesota Twins infielder.

Even though Lewis and the Twins are encouraged by his recovery, he’s expected to miss at least another three weeks.

Lewis won’t accompany the team on its four-day trip to Kansas City as he continues to rehab. Though he plans to take Monday off from running, Lewis expects he’ll run three straight days starting Tuesday.

“It’s coming along good,” Lewis said. “Matt Kemp always joked about in the cages, hitting: ‘Anyone can do it twice. You’ve got to do it three times.’ Now we’re going to take a break, probably run three days in a row, take a break and then try to get on (the) bases. It’s a long progression. Running, it’s not just like run two days and then you’re back, as much as I wish it was.”

Lewis suffered the injury March 16. For the first two days, Lewis experienced pain; he couldn’t straighten his leg. Since then, Lewis said he has felt aches instead of pain.

He still had swelling in the hamstring area March 25, when the Twins left Fort Myers, Fla., to start the season. But last Thursday, Lewis was cleared to ramp up his baseball activity.

Twins president Derek Falvey said the upcoming week is significant for Lewis.

“The most important thing is how he responds to the running and the buildup,” Falvey said. “So over the course of this week, we’ll have a better sense of how he’s tracking. … No changes in his status at this point. He just needs to continue to progress and feel good with the running part of it.”

• Saturday’s chilly temperature didn’t help, but the first home weekend of the season drew significantly fewer fans than the Twins’ first three games at Target Field a year ago.

After attracting 36,783 fans to Thursday’s home opener, attendance fell off sharply for the rest of the series against Houston. The Twins drew 16,082 fans Saturday and only 14,638 Sunday. The team’s three-day total of 67,503 is 9,075 fewer than the first three home games of the 2024 season, which included a Monday game against the Los Angeles Dodgers after a weather postponement against the Cleveland Guardians for the Sunday series finale.

The Twins haven’t drawn 2 million fans in a season since 2019.

The team returns home Friday to open a six-game homestand against the Detroit Tigers and New York Mets.

• Brooks Lee (lumbar strain) began a rehab assignment at Class-A Fort Myers by going 0-for-3 with two strikeouts Sunday. Lee sustained the injury March 20 but, unlike Lewis, had been more mobile earlier in the recovery phase and is ahead of his teammate to potentially return to the field.

(Top photo of Ryan Jeffers and Jose Altuve: David Berding / Getty Images)

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