ST. PETERSBURG -- The Twins got the hit they desperately needed. Heck, against most other teams, they might well have gotten the hits they desperately needed, plural, as they finally put together a rally in the ninth inning.

But against the best team in baseball -- one that does all the big things and all the little things well -- it wasn’t to be.

Royce Lewis picked up a nearly silent offense with a game-tying RBI single in the ninth, but the hard-hit ground ball down the third-base line from Ryan Jeffers seemingly destined to give the Twins the lead instead went for a highlight-reel, inning-ending double play. Minutes later, Randy Arozarena crushed the first homer off Jhoan Duran in nearly two months, sending the Twins to a 2-1 walk-off loss to the Rays at Tropicana Field on Wednesday night.

Over and over again, Minnesota has played these sorts of games through the first two-plus months of the season -- strong starting pitching, sporadic-at-best offense and decent defense and baserunning, with a key play or two late in the game leading to a close result. Wednesday’s result was, again, an encapsulation of that formula -- a particularly painful one -- that extended the Twins’ losing streak to a season-long four games and sank them to .500 (31-31) for the first time.

“You wrap all that together, it sounds like a .500 first couple of months,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “We’re going to have to play better. It’s in there. We have the group to do it.”

The Twins continue to echo the idea that they have the group to win games -- and, indeed, they rarely get blown out or thoroughly outcompeted, with 18 of their 31 losses having come by a margin of two or fewer runs.

Wednesday served as another example. Even after being held hitless from the fourth to eighth innings, the Twins could have come from behind to win. Following Lewis’ game-tying single in the ninth, they loaded the bases for Jeffers, who crushed a ball with an exit velocity of 102.4 mph down the line -- but Rays third baseman Isaac Paredes went to one knee to make the stop and made an off-balance throw to second while falling down to start the double play.

“We have many, many instances in games and players we can point to and say, ‘We’re actually on the verge of doing what we want to do,’” Baldelli said. “We’re right there. It’s time for us to take the next step. It’s time for us to take it up a notch right now.”

The Twins still aren’t hitting the panic button. They are willing to be patient, general manager Thad Levine said, because they haven’t had their full group healthy or playing to their historic expectations.

“Even if we had some of our players perform to their level and not overachieve, but just achieve their levels, we're going to see a meaningful spike in our production,” Levine said. “If any of these guys actually overachieve, we have a chance to vault forward.”

But injuries are a fact for any winning team -- just look at Tampa Bay’s decimated bullpen -- and the nearly team-wide underperformance on offense has gone on for the better part of a month, with the Twins having scored the eighth-fewest runs in MLB since the start of May.

That underperformance has also been prominent among the team’s stars, with Carlos Correa having entered the game with a .663 OPS since his last homer on May 13. He got his pitch in a big spot against bulk man Cooper Criswell in the sixth and hit it for a 348-foot foul. He struck out on the next pitch.

“I always put pressure on myself after tough losses,” Correa said. “I feel like if I played better, we always have a chance to win. I feel like all the games I've contributed in, [the ones] I've played really good in, we've won all those games. After every loss, I kind of blame myself.”

Somehow, thanks to the overall struggles of the American League Central, the Twins are still in first place. But they’re very much seeing how much room there is for improvement.

“We are very fortuitous to be in first place,” Levine said. “We still have the lion's share of our division schedule on the horizon. We're going through an extremely aggressive part of our schedule, and we believe in the guys. We've got a great unit of players in there. At some point, we're going to need to see them shine.”