Twins frustrated but not too mad after fan catches Brewers home run

Austin Martin might have made the catch of the year Sunday, a well-timed leap to reach over the planters atop the left-field wall and “a snow-cone [catch] off the end of my glove,” he said, to keep Rhys Hoskins’ deep fly from turning into a tiebreaking home run.

“But we’ll never know.”

That’s because a fan in a Twins jersey reached out with his glove and made a far easier catch, standing in the front row of the bleachers. It wasn’t quite a Jeffrey Maier moment — that’s the 12-year-old who reached over the Yankee Stadium wall during the 1996 playoffs and caught a Derek Jeter fly ball before Orioles outfielder Tony Tarasco could — but the Twins asked the umpires to have the play reviewed.

“That’s a boundary call, we get a free ask on those,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. Did he think the fan interfered with Martin?

“I really, truthfully, couldn’t tell, not from where I’m at it,” Baldelli said.

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That was Martin’s opinion, too. “I’d like to say I had an opportunity to possibly get there. I was up there, I thought my glove was right where the ball was coming down. … But I don’t know,” he said. “When I jumped up, I looked up and saw it go into his glove before I came down. So it was just frustration after that.”

Griffin Jax, who had given up only two home runs in 43⅓ innings this season, gave up the blast, the first time since Sept. 13, 2023, when Tampa Bay’s Randy Arozarena got him, that Jax had served up a homer at Target Field.

“I made my pitch. It was a four-seam [fastball], top of the zone. I’ll live with it,” Jax said. “It’s not a pitch I regret throwing. He just got it.”

But shouldn’t Martin have gotten the chance to catch it? Jax said he can’t be too angry. “It was a Twins fan,” he said.

Injured righthander Chris Paddack said the mental stress of wondering whether his twice-replaced elbow ligament was damaged again was worse than the actual pain.

After facing the San Francisco Giants last Sunday, he went home to Texas for the All-Star break, and everything seemed normal. “Then Thursday, I woke up, and the elbow kind of locked up on me,” he said. “I’d be lying to y’all if I said I wasn’t worried.”

Paddack’s theory: The pain was simply his body wanting a break from all the work he’s been putting in this year.

“The body is so weird, man. You can run a couple of marathons, and then one day you wake up and you can’t walk. It’s like your body just naturally responds, like, ‘Hey, that’s enough. I’ve had enough,’ ” he said. “And that’s what it was. ‘Hey, I need a breather, man. You’ve been beating yourself to death.’ ”

The Twins played a man short Sunday, though it didn’t come into play. Before the game, they put lefthander Kody Funderburk on the 15-day injured list because of a strained left oblique.

Funderburk last pitched July 12, so the problem caught the Twins off guard. They summoned Class AAA righthander Ronny Henriquez from Toledo, where the Saints were completing a three-game sweep with a 10-3 victory, but his flight didn’t arrive in time for him to get to Target Field before the game ended.