MINNEAPOLIS -- It’s too late for all this moxie the Twins have shown against division leaders to mean anything in the standings, but the remnants of this club have still managed to play their best baseball in the toughest stretch of the schedule.

Coming off series wins against the American League West-leading Astros on the road and the AL Central-leading White Sox at home, the Twins made it a hat trick with a 5-4 victory in a tightly contested rubber match against the AL East-leading Rays on Sunday afternoon at Target Field.

Jorge Polanco's walk-off sacrifice fly in the bottom of the ninth gave Minnesota back-to-back wins to close out the three-game set.

“This is not an easy part of the schedule,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “Any team in baseball that would be looking at our August would be saying, ‘That’s about as tough as it gets in Major League Baseball.’ We have not let that get in our way in any way. We’ve gone out there and kind of brought it to the teams we’re playing.”

Though the Rays rallied to erase an early four-run deficit against relievers Edgar García and Tyler Duffey, the Twins got some stout relief from Caleb Thielbar and Alex Colomé to set up the heroics in the ninth. Max Kepler lined a leadoff double down the left-field line and took third on a fielding error by Austin Meadows. Polanco launched the next pitch to the right-field warning track for his third walk-off of the season.

Minnesota’s rally capped an offensive performance driven almost entirely by the top three hitters in the lineup -- Kepler, Polanco and Josh Donaldson -- who combined for all four of the team’s hits, five walks and five runs scored.

This effort marked yet another way for the Twins to emerge victorious in this recent stretch that has seen them go 9-6 since the July 30 Trade Deadline and claim three consecutive series wins for the first time this year. Some, like Saturday’s 12-0 blowout win, were powered by the offense. Others have been propelled by timely hitting and improved pitching, with a much younger staff eager to show what it’s got given this newfound opportunity.

Those contributions have spanned the roster, from rookie left-hander Charlie Barnes, who twirled five strong innings of one-run ball in Sunday’s finale, to veteran $92 million man Donaldson, who cracked an RBI single and two-run double in the first four innings to spot Minnesota an early 4-0 lead.

“We’re getting healthy, and I do think that we’re getting production from up and down the lineup,” Baldelli said. “Basically every spot in our rotation has come up big at different times and given us a great outing. To play good baseball, everyone has to do something. The bullpen’s been throwing the ball really well, too. If any one of these pieces is not present, we’re not winning the games that we’re winning right now.”

Plenty has been said about the success of rookies Griffin Jax and Bailey Ober, who have stepped up in the rotation, but this revolving-door bullpen is also a significant part of why all but one of these wins against the Astros, White Sox and Rays was decided by two or fewer runs.

That bullpen nearly faltered in the seventh, when Duffey issued a leadoff walk to Jordan Luplow and Mike Brosseau hit a grounder to short that could have been an inning-ending double play, but Andrelton Simmons made a high flip to second baseman Polanco, drawing him off the bag. Following a walk, Randy Arozarena hit a dribbling infield single down the third-base line that knotted the game.

But the small core that has stuck around in a transient bullpen situation did its job, as Thielbar drew an inning-ending popup and worked around a leadoff double in the eighth before Colome tossed a scoreless ninth -- his eighth straight shutout appearance -- to earn the win.

Following an essentially season-breaking start to the year, Minnesota’s relief corps entered Sunday with a 3.53 ERA since the Deadline, sixth-best in the American League.

“Obviously, we wanted to play a little bit better earlier in the season, but I think this team is showing the potential that we have,” Thielbar said. “We're a really good team and we're going to compete the rest of this year."

Where was this performance at the start of the year? It’s hard to say. This is now a much younger team as a whole with more to prove, and the energy and grit to back it up. And if the Twins will, indeed, look to rebound from this nadir as soon as 2022, they’ll need to maintain this through an upcoming stretch that will next feature Cleveland, the Yankees, Boston and Milwaukee -- and they’re eager to show it.

“We want more,” Baldelli said. “We want much more of what we’re seeing right now. We just want more of it. We want to continue to even improve upon what we’re doing.”