Twins lose to Red Sox again as Bailey Ober gets little support

Bailey Ober owns a 2.83 ERA in his 11 starts for the Twins this season, which is really good. If Ober had enough innings to qualify for the ERA title — and he's only about 10 innings shy of it now — he would rank seventh in the American League.

But you know who has pitched even better than Ober? Pretty much every starting pitcher who has faced the Twins righthander this season.

Ober turned in his standard just-a-couple-of-mistakes quality performance Tuesday, but both slip-ups cleared the fences.

And as has become a painful reality for the former 12th-round pick this season, he was outpitched yet again. Kutter Crawford and two Red Sox relievers shut down the Twins, Boston's hitters punished Minnesota's beleaguered bullpen, and the Twins lost for the fifth time in six days, 10-4 at Target Field.

"I felt good. They put two good swings on me pretty much the whole game. The rest were weak-hit singles, basically," said Ober, charged with the Twins' seventh quality-start loss of the season, which leads the American League. "Obviously stuff's not going the way we want it to go. We're a little frustrated. We're trying to go out there and win games every single day, and right now, it's just not happening."

The 11 starting pitchers who have opposed Ober this season have combined to post a 2.43 ERA, and the trend has gotten worse as the season has progressed. The Twins have scored only 29 runs in Ober's 11 starts, and only 16 while he's on the mound. In fact, for the fourth time in his past six starts, the Twins on Tuesday didn't score a run while Ober was still in the game.

"I'm not thinking about it. I'm not going to pitch any different" if the Twins ever break their slump while he's on the mound, Ober said. "I didn't walk anyone [Tuesday]. Felt like I attacked these guys. I thought I pitched really well. It was really sharp. But this team that we're playing against right now is pretty hot. They've been putting up a lot of runs lately."

As opposed to the Twins. Their 57 runs scored in June are fewer than all but four teams in the majors.

The Twins hit three home runs Tuesday, including Byron Buxton's first since May 23 — but all of them came after the Twins fell behind by 10 runs. In addition to Buxton's blast, his second hit of the game to end his 0-for-24 skid, Royce Lewis and Max Kepler hit back-to-back shots off two-time Cy Young winner Corey Kluber in the ninth, but they only closed the gap to six runs.

But while the game was still in doubt? A Kepler double play that traveled only a couple of feet out of the batter's box snuffed one rally, and back-to-back strikeouts by Edouard Julien and Carlos Correa stranded Ryan Jeffers on third base.

"We know it's not good baseball. I'm hoping this is just the worst day that we're going to see in this stretch, and it's going to get better," Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said. "Hope isn't a good plan in professional sports. But the truth is, the players we have, and the collective at-bats we had before the eighth inning, I don't think our group is capable of having those at-bats much longer."

Ober, meanwhile, pitched out of trouble a couple of times, but Adam Duvall smacked a fourth-inning slider 426 feet over the center field fence. Two batters later, Christian Arroyo got around on a 2-2 fastball above the strike zone and pulled it several rows deep into the left field seats.

"I was trying to get him to swing and miss up there," Ober said with a shrug. "I was trying to throw a fastball elevated, did that, and he ended up putting a good swing on it."

Considering the Twins have been held to two runs or fewer in six of Ober's starts this year, he likely sensed what was coming. He allowed another run in the sixth on three well-placed, not-hit-particularly-hard singles, and Boston added five runs against Brent Headrick and two more against Oliver Ortega.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the game after Ober departed was the spectacle of the Twins' ninth-inning player shuffle: Lewis playing shortstop, Joey Gallo moving to center field, Donovan Solano taking over at third base, Christian Vázquez manning first base and utility man Willi Castro soft-tossing nine pitches from the mound, none of them exceeding 54 mph.

"We've just got to forget it. If you can't forget it, [if you] sit here and toil in this spot we're in right now, it's not going to get better," Baldelli said. "But I promise you, this team is going to get better [than] what we're watching right now. I expect it from our group."