Postgame: Gibson believes beating Kluber may spark Twins' offense

CLEVELAND — A couple of extras from Progressive Field:

Kyle Gibson watched the Twins take first-inning leads and then fail to score again on Wednesday and Thursday, leading to back-to-back damaging losses to the Tigers. But he swears he wasn't thinking, when Eddie Rosario's home run staked him to a 1-0 lead on Friday, that he wasn't going to get any more support.

"I try not to think about that," the veteran righthander said. "I've got a job bigger than worrying about [whether] one run is going to hold up, you know?"

Turns out, worrying wasn't necessary. The Twins scored three more runs off Corey Kluber, of all people, and then a couple more — on an error and a balk, thank you very much — off the Indians' beleaguered bullpen, Tyler Olson and Dan Otero in this case. (Otero ended up with one of the weirder stat lines you'll see: 1 2/3 innings, one balk, nothing else.)

It was certainly no surprise that Rosario provided the first run; he's collected a first-inning extra-base hit and then scored in three straight games.

"Man, he's been so good. That guy has just been a spark plug," Gibson said. "He's done such a great job putting up runs early and getting big hits. The walk-off homers, the go-ahead homers. He's a guy that's never intimidated up there, it doesn't matter who he's facing. He's seeing the ball really well and putting a lot of really good swings on the ball."

And Gibson believes that Friday's outing might be the start of some better times for the Twins, who won their 30th game.

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How did Paul Molitor judge Joe Mauer's first major-league at-bats in four weeks?

"Well, he got practice running to first," the manager cracked about Mauer's four groundouts.

But there's a logical reason for his 0-for-4, too, Molitor said, beyond being out for a month. Facing Yankee farmhands earlier this week might not have been the best preparation for Corey Kluber.