MINNEAPOLIS – Eury Pérez was just inches away from throwing five scoreless innings against the Twins on Tuesday night. But baseball famously is a game of inches, and on the most important play of the night, the breaks went against the Marlins.
Bailey Ober outdueled Pérez, needing just 89 pitches for a complete-game shutout and Ryan Jeffers hit a two-run homer on Tuesday as Minnesota beat Miami, 3-0, at Target Field.
The Marlins were tripped up by one of the game’s trickier plays: a double steal with runners at the corners. There are a lot of moving pieces to the play, and the timing on each of them has to be perfect to execute the play correctly.
The situation: The game was scoreless with two out in the bottom of the fifth inning. Byron Buxton -- still one of the fastest runners in the league at age 32 -- drew a walk. Trevor Larnach then poked the ball to left field on a hit-and-run play that gave the Twins their first hit of the night, not to mention runners at the corners and two outs.
On a 1-0 pitch to Jeffers, Larnach broke for second base. Catcher Joe Mack threw down to second, but Larnach stopped running and tried to get caught in a rundown that would allow Buxton time to break for home.
Second baseman Xavier Edwards chased Larnach back to first base, keeping an eye on Buxton the whole time. And when Buxton headed for home, Edwards stopped and fired the ball back to Mack. The diving Buxton was ruled safe, and video review confirmed the call. The Twins were on the board with a 1-0 lead.
That lead tripled quickly, as Jeffers hit Pérez’s very next pitch to deep left for a two-run homer. Pérez, via team interpreter Luis Dorante Jr., didn’t want to take the lifeline, but he admitted the long delay for the review threw off his focus a bit.
“No,” he said when asked if the delay played a role in the Jeffers home run. “but kind of a little bit. Like, you're there, you're waiting for that out, you know? It's gonna get you out of the inning. But then you’ve gotta go back again and just do your best,”
But back to the rundown. The wheels started turning before the pitch.
“There's basically three types of plays there: throw through, a cut play, and a pump fake or a throw to third,” Mack said.
The plan was to throw through to Edwards and either tag Larnach or start a rundown while keeping an eye on Buxton.
“We had him at second base, but he stopped,” Mack said. “So Xavier did a great job coming up, getting the ball. Buxton took off from third, and he's a pretty fast guy.”
While representing a missed opportunity, the play was also close enough that the Marlins challenged the call.
“If they're going to run that, we’ve got a chance there just to play catch,” manager Clayton McCullough said. “Joe makes a throw, X comes up, handles the ball. You go check Buxton initially, then you kind of start working the other way. When you get to a point where the runner's going to make a break for home, fire to the plate.
“It was really bang-bang,” McCullough said. “Buxton might have just … accelerated and just beat it, but I thought our guys executed it well.”