The Twins’ pitching staff has endured a turbulent month of June, so much so that pitching coach Pete Maki called a meeting on Tuesday afternoon to address the group. It’s been especially noticeable in the rotation, which has lost two starters to injury and has had a generally shaky month.
But Joe Ryan has been mostly immune from that.
Ryan, who has been the Twins’ most consistent starter this season, gave the team exactly what it needed on Wednesday night, throwing six scoreless innings in the Twins’ 2-0 win over the Seattle Mariners at Target Field.
“The way he approached his outing today, the way he was so composed but also pretty electric — the way he threw the ball was just very impressive beginning to end,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “We needed that in some ways and he gave it to us.”
Ryan’s effort came after Twins pitchers had allowed a combined 52 runs in their last five games.
Within his six innings, he struck out Major League Baseball’s home run and RBI leader, Cal Raleigh, three times, catching him looking twice. Those three strikeouts came on a night in which Ryan recorded eight of them.
“(Catcher Christian Vázquez) did a great job calling the games and we had a couple areas where like, ‘Alright, let’s try this, let’s try that,’” Ryan said. “It was just fun.”
Ryan negated a hit by pitch and a pair of errors behind him, allowed just three hits, walked none and did not see a runner reach third base in a dominant effort.
“That’s what he’s capable of doing every single time he pitches,” Baldelli said. “I think that’s the standard he holds himself to. It was great to see him go out there, do it and pitch at such a high level.”
With the performance, he lowered his ERA on the season to 2.86. And he did so for a team that entered the day with a bloated collective ERA this month and was riding a five-game losing streak.
He had limited run support in his start, but what he got ended up being just enough.
The Twins, who finished the day with just four hits of their own, finally got on the board in the sixth inning with a Willi Castro single on the eighth pitch of his at-bat, which brought home Byron Buxton. It was the only run the Twins (38-42) would scratch across against Mariners (41-38) starter George Kirby in his six innings of work.
“I think I was really patient there,” Castro said. “I was trying to get a good pitch to hit. Just be on time on the fastball. When you’re on time with the fastball, you can react to any other pitches.”
An inning later, second baseman Kody Clemens gave the Twins a bit of breathing room, getting ahold of a first-pitch breaking ball and sending it out to left-center field. The opposite-field homer was his ninth of the season, a new career high for him.
That two-run lead was enough for Jhoan Duran, who responded to Tuesday’s effort in which he hit two batters and allowed the game-winning run in the ninth inning, with a perfect ninth inning on Wednesday. Louie Varland and Griffin Jax also threw scoreless innings in the Twins’ win.
“We needed it,” Clemens said of the win. “It’s been weird. It’s like we won’t hit and we’ll have pitching and then you won’t have pitching and we’ll hit. … Sometimes baseball goes that way. Obviously tonight we didn’t really hit but we had Joe to carry us late and we scratched a couple runs across.”
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