Carlos Santana was a teammate of Phil Maton’s for a couple of seasons in Cleveland, and he considers him a friend.
“He’s competition [now], but I root for him,” Santana said.
Just not when Maton is facing … Carlos Santana. The veteran first baseman, called upon to pinch hit with two outs and two runners on base in the ninth inning, lined a curveball into shallow right-center field, scoring Manuel Margot from second base and completing a long, soggy night at Target Field in a jubilant way — with a 7-6 victory, the Twins’ sixth in a row.
“I know what kind of approach he would have, so I tried to swing slow because he uses power pitches to make outs, especially in that situation,” said Santana, who is now 3-for-6 with a walk against Maton. “Like the curveball — I tried to hit it in the middle.”
It was a particularly satisfying victory for the Twins, who had to wait out an 83-minute rain delay midway through the game and overcome a 4-0 deficit that Pablo López found himself in, a problem wrought by a critical home run by Randy Arozarena.
López is certainly used to the problem. The Twins’ nominal ace moved into the major league lead in home runs allowed, having surrendered 16 in 80 innings this season. Five of them have come in the first inning, just one away from the lead.
“It’s been kind of like, one step forward, two or three steps back. It’s been very frustrating,” said López who, one year after earning an All-Star berth, finds himself saddled with a 5.63 ERA. “It’s hard not to feel your confidence, like, mellowing down a little bit, diminishing day by day. But just like in life, you’re never guaranteed anything.”
Maybe. But on this homestead, the Twins seem guaranteed plenty of runs. They’ve scored 59 in the first eight games, going 7-1, and at least a half-dozen in the last six in a row. So when López watched Arozarena’s first-inning blast disappear into the upper deck in left-center, the Twins seemed more worried about the impending storm than the score.
