MINNEAPOLIS -- Brent Rooker's bat is waking up -- and evidently, so are the Twins.

Minnesota’s recent surge powered on with a 12-0 dismantling of the American League East-leading Rays on Saturday night at Target Field, continuing its run of success against first-place teams kick-started by series wins over the Astros and White Sox.

Rooker homered for a second straight game and added a double to lead a balanced attack featuring multiple hits from six Twins and six scoreless innings from starter Kenta Maeda, who combined with Ralph Garza Jr. and Danny Coulombe for a three-hit shutout.

Minnesota, which forced a series rubber match on Sunday, claimed its first double-digit margin of victory since May 21 and its largest margin of victory in a shutout since a 16-0 win over the Padres on Sept. 12, 2017.

“We came out today, maybe played one of our best games of the year,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “Swung the bats from the start, pitched well, played well defensively, played a pretty clean game. A good ballgame on our end.”

And on a day when the Twins celebrated the worst-to-first tale of the 1991 World Series championship club, the present-day team’s recent surge could continue to suggest that this fourth-place team doesn’t have far to go to return to contention in the coming years.

“We just come in here to enjoy the game,” said Luis Arraez, who has reached base in 23 of his last 25 games. “That’s why we won a couple of games. We need to keep going, keep going. We got a lot of young [players on the] team like me, so we’ve got to enjoy the game.”

If Rooker can keep up the production that mounted with his four-hit game on Friday and two additional knocks on Saturday, he could prove to be a significant part of that surge. He was in an 0-for-19 slump before he clubbed three singles and a home run in the series opener. He narrowly missed a homer in his first at-bat against Rays right-hander Michael Wacha before he did sneak a blast into the stands just inside the foul pole in the sixth off reliever Louis Head for his sixth knock in the last two days.

And though Rooker’s need to improve on defense has been a major talking point the last two seasons, he flashed the leather with an all-out diving catch in the second inning, snaring a sinking liner off the bat of Joey Wendle near the left-field foul line to save at least one run for Maeda, who now owns a 2.98 ERA in eight starts since July 1.

“It's something that I've continued to work on,” Rooker said. “I think I've done a good job up to this point of working and improving, and I'm going to continue to do that moving forward, and I think it's going to pay off."

Max Kepler led off the game with a blast off Wacha, priming a four-run, four-hit frame that set the tone for the game early, even before the Twins pulled away with a three-run third and kept adding in the sixth, seventh and eighth. Mitch Garver singled and doubled, while Arraez crushed a Statcast-projected 402-foot homer as part of a two-hit game with three RBIs. Ryan Jeffers also launched a late homer off position player Jordan Luplow.

And if Maeda continues to handle top lineups the way he did against the Rays -- he retired 12 of the first 13 batters he faced and needed 76 pitches for six scoreless frames -- it would go a long way in anchoring a pitching staff that will need plenty of help in the coming years to supplement the expected production of this offense.

“We’re getting guys on base and we’re not leaving them there,” Baldelli said. “We’re bringing them around with even more good at-bats, and I think that’s a big part of it, but against these good teams, you have to pitch well, too. Our starters have been doing a real nice job.”

The Twins look like they’re starting to have a lot more fun on the field, too, an encouraging sign following the raw emotion of Nelson Cruz’s trade to these Rays on July 22 ahead of the Deadline, continuing to signal hope that they might be able to forge a new vibe, build on two strong months to finish the season and come back stronger next spring.

Arraez, for his part, showed that excitement by hugging opponents Randy Arozarena and Ji-Man Choi while on the field and by skipping down the first-base line following his homer. That translated into the dugout, too -- and on a day like this, it’s easy to see why.

“You could look to almost everyone out there and almost everyone did something constructive today and productive to win,” Baldelli said. “It was fun in the dugout.”