MINNEAPOLIS – Very little stays constant over six months of baseball. It’s rare that all facets of a team go well or poorly at once. There’s never been a team that only wins or loses one way. But one thing has been true all year for the 2026 Twins: the best version of this team rakes.
They are raking again.
For the second straight night, Minnesota blew out the visiting Tigers, this time by a 15-2 count thanks in large part to a 10-run sixth inning. It was their second straight double-digit output, after going five weeks without one.
The top of the order has produced in recent weeks even through a relative overall dry spell. Now the sluggers in the middle of the order are heating up, and on top of that, Minnesota has added a pair of dynamic young players to the 8 and 9 spots. Even with Byron Buxton on the injured list, the current version of the Twins' lineup looks awfully dangerous, and not a minute too soon.
“Our lineup was No. 1 in baseball for a long time,” said Royce Lewis, who hit a monstrous three-run homer to straightaway center. “It’s hard to stay No. 1 no matter what you’re doing stats-wise in this league and in this game, so it comes in waves. And I could tell as a team, we were all kind of just in that downward wave and it’s going to be really nice to go into this final stretch and everyone’s starting to get hot.”
Lewis’ blast, a 427-foot shot that chased starter Troy Melton, was the defining blow in a 10-run sixth inning that turned a fairly comfortable lead into a rout. It equaled their biggest inning of the year and gave them consecutive double-digit games for the first time since June 2-3, 2025.
Kody Clemens got it all going with a solo homer in the first, and some defensive shenanigans helped the Twins put three on the board in the fifth against another hard-throwing young Tigers starter in Melton.
It turns out that would have been enough for Connor Prielipp and the Twins bullpen, but the home team was nowhere near done. When Lewis hammered a three-run homer to straightaway center in the sixth, Minnesota was only getting started.
A Luke Keaschall RBI single and Brooks Lee’s sac fly stretched the lead to 9-1, and Ryan Jeffers hit his third homer in three days to make it 12-1. Kaelen Culpepper’s two-run single was the final blow in the 15-batter, 10-run, eight-hit outburst.
“Very impressive,” said manager Derek Shelton. “Melton’s got good stuff and we just continued to add on. I think if you look down our lineup, everybody contributed in some way.”
The Twins searched for their form in many ways through a frustrating August, with starting pitching, the bullpen and the offense all faltering at times in a 10-17 month. But no falloff was quite as pronounced as the offensive production. At the end of July, Minnesota led the American League in runs. In August, the Twins ranked 10th. Their power remained intact, but they were searching for the big hit.
For the last two nights, there have been no such worries.
“It was tough,” said Jeffers, who had his worst month of the year individually in August. “It was ebbs and flows of the season. Baseball, you fall into patterns that you don't want to fall into without knowing. That's kind of the nature of this game. But the other side of that is, the faster you can make the adjustment back to the league, back to what you're doing wrong, the quicker you can bounce out of it.”
The starting pitching has shown signs in recent days of progress as well, and that can only have good effects on the relievers as they’re asked to do less. But the simplest equation for this team is that big hits equal more wins, and there’s reason to feel good about that part of their game again.
“I wish every game could be like that, for sure,” said Culpepper. “This game is pretty hard. It’s the highest level, so you’re going to get those days. But when they happen, you’ve got to enjoy them for sure.”
The Twins remained 3 1/2 games behind Cleveland for the third AL Wild Card spot and 6 1/2 games behind the White Sox in the AL Central.