HOUSTON -- The Twins' losing streak hit five games on Wednesday night, a 5-3 defeat at the hands of the Astros at Minute Maid Park.
Despite the loss, which dropped the Twins into a second-place tie with the White Sox in the AL Central and four games back of the third Wild Card spot, manager Rocco Baldelli addressed his team, urging the players in the clubhouse to relax more over the final 40 games on the schedule.
"Changing a team's mindset or or general feel or energy, it's not an easy thing to do," Baldelli said after the game. "But I do think that we just need to play baseball and not be worrying about the stresses of the fact that we haven't been playing well."
“Let's play the freest possible baseball that we can," added Baldelli. "You're allowed to have a good time when you show up to the ballpark, getting your work in and preparing with your teammates, things like that. We're going to go ahead and do that and make a point to do it even more so than normal for the rest of the way. But zero cares right now about anything except going out there and playing the game.”
Starter Dylan Bundy said he hadn’t noticed anyone putting pressure on themselves, but he understood the manager's message.
“It was more of a ‘Let’s go get ‘em, we’re prepared, we’re a team built to win, so let’s just go out there and win' [kind of thing],” Bundy said. “We don’t need to put any pressure on ourselves, and we still have a lot games left to play, so there’s nothing to really worry about. We've got to play good baseball as a team, and I think we will.”
Bundy (7-6) continued his strong August, allowing two runs on three hits in five innings, but Houston's Framber Valdez stifled Minnesota’s offense for seven frames of his own.
Bundy said he didn’t know if he'd consider himself "sluggish," but he did tell Baldelli that he felt “a little slower” on the mound than usual.
“Obviously, everyone can see on the scoreboard, I didn’t have much on the heater,” Bundy said. It was that heater, clocked at 88.6 mph, that Jose Altuve connected for a first-pitch leadoff homer in the bottom of the first inning. “The curveball felt good, the split felt good, and I just tried to work with those two and randomly sneak a heater in there if I could. I got outs. I gave up that extra run there in the third. I really didn’t want to give up that one obviously right after we scored one. You've just got to work with what you got any given day.”
Bundy has yielded two or fewer runs in four straight starts.
“Dylan went out there, gave us a good opportunity to stay in this game and win the game,” Baldelli said. “He did what he normally does, he changes speeds well and mixes his pitches well. … I thought it was a gutsy performance by him.”
The right-hander, who threw just 66 pitches, retired the final seven batters he faced. He needed only five pitches to retire the side in the fourth.
In the end, though, the Twins' efforts came a bit too late. For the second straight game, Minnesota attempted a game-tying rally in the ninth, only to see those efforts denied.
Gio Urshela scored on Luis Arraez’s double and an error by Mauricio Dubón before Nick Gordon walked. Arraez scored on a fielder’s choice from Jake Cave, cutting the lead to 5-3 and putting the tying run on first.
However, that would be as close as the Twins would get, as Max Kepler lined into a double play and Gary Sánchez grounded out to end it.
Facing Valdez, however, the Twins couldn't do much at the plate for the first seven innings.
The left-hander (13-4) allowed one run on two hits and struck out eight. It was his 21st consecutive quality start, setting an Astros franchise record. He retired 15 of the final 17 batters he faced, with Jorge Polanco drawing a walk in the fifth and Kepler earning a walk in the seventh.
“I’ll tell you what, the game, the way it played out today, we got beat,” Baldelli said. “We gave ourselves a deficit to work out of, and we had some good at-bats late again, gave ourselves an opportunity again to be a swing away from, I think, taking the lead at one point. Against a good team, sometimes you’ve got to do it that way, [but] you’ve got to finish it.”