Late-game gaffe allows Cleveland to rally to 4-3 victory over Twins

CLEVELAND – The Guardians have feasted on Twins relievers all year, but they hadn't hit Jhoan Duran. On Friday, they discovered they don't need to.

Minnesota's hopes of catching Cleveland in the AL Central suffered a ruinous blow on Friday, and the Guardians didn't even swing at the winning curveball. It bounced in the dirt, caromed to the backstop and enabled pinch runner Ernie Clement to score from second base, securing a come-from-behind 4-3 victory that drops the Twins five games out of first place with 19 to play.

"That was a very tough ballgame to watch," manager Rocco Baldelli said after his bullpen blew a late lead against the Guardians for the sixth time this season. "We were feeling good [about] a lot of things we were doing. We had some big swings, made some big plays."

And absorbed another big loss — one that clinched the season series for Cleveland, meaning the Twins need to finish ahead of the Guardians to win the AL Central, as there are no longer any tiebreaker games.

Duran, who had not given up a run to Cleveland in 8⅓ previous innings this year, entered with the score tied in the eighth inning and surrendered a soft-liner single to Josh Naylor, then a ground-ball single by Oscar Gonzalez into an area vacated by a shift.

Up stepped Andres Gimenez, who took a ball, futilely swung at a fastball, and then watched a 1-1 curve from Duran bounce well inside, just missing his shoe and skipping past catcher Gary Sanchez, who didn't realize where it had gone.

By the time he spotted the ball, Clement was rounding third, and Sanchez's throw home, where third baseman Gio Urshela was waiting was too late.

Duran retired the side without another run, but one of the cruelest losses of the season — blowing a 3-0 lead, using four of their best relievers and watching the Guardians beat their most reliable one — was all but inevitable.

"This is the kind of baseball they play. They apply pressure and they continue to compete and they probably have a lot of comeback wins," Baldelli said of the Guardians, who have won 16 games in their final at-bat. "But when you feel like you can make the plays and make a few better pitches and you're right where you need to be and we don't do it, it's frustrating."

It's about the worst possible start to this weekend's critical five-game series that the Twins could have imagined. Especially after it looked like they might capture an improbable win, thanks to practically the most unlikely pair of heroes imaginable — a pitcher who's been gone for 3½ months, and a hitter who doesn't drive in runs on the road.

But Bailey Ober and Jake Cave came through in the first of five games here, even if it didn't work out in the end.

Ober, who hadn't pitched for the Twins since suffering a groin injury June 1, faced 13 batters before giving up his first hit. The tall righthander breezed through five innings, though he hit two Guardians with pitches, and left after throwing 70 pitches, the Twins clearly committed to ramping up his workload slowly.

Cave, fighting to keep his batting average above .200 since being added to the roster six weeks ago, startled Guardians starter Triston McKenzie by ambushing a first-pitch slider in the fourth inning, driving the ball 412 feet to just in front of the Twins' bullpen in center field. Cave's homer, his first run-producing hit in a road game this year, scored Urshela and staked Ober to a 3-0 lead.

It didn't last.

Cleveland woke up its crowd of 20,669 with a three-run seventh, taking advantage of an errant throw by second baseman Nick Gordon to start the rally, then stringing together three line-drive singles. The last coming on a two-out, two-strike, too-far-inside fastball from Griffin Jax that Amed Rosario punched into center field, just inches out of Carlos Correa's leap, to score two runs and tie the game.