Red Sox tee off on Twins for 11-1 victory at Target Field

Sunday was always going to be the main event of the Red Sox's visit to Minnesota this year, a Santana-vs.-Sale pitching matchup that looks on paper like the best in Target Field history.

When heavyweights meet to duke it out, though, does anybody ever remember the undercard?

Certainly not the Twins, who will quickly try to forget the details of Saturday's sudden and brutal ugliness, an eight-run second inning that turned into an 11-1 loss to Boston. Pitting the reigning American League Cy Young winner against a pitcher with one game of major league experience in three years turned out to be exactly the mismatch it appeared.

The weird thing is, the hurricane that consumed Nick Tepesch, making his Twins debut after a 16-day layoff, seemed to arrive out of nowhere. His first six batters were a breeze, with only a walk to Dustin Pedroia briefly breaking his rhythm. And with two outs and nobody on in the second inning, two sharp sliders to Chris Young put Tepesch one strike away from getting his team off the field.

But like a fighter who never saw the uppercut coming, Tepesch was floored by a sudden and devastating Red Sox flurry. "It was an 0-2 pitch," he said. "You can't have that happen."

He means you can't leave a third consecutive 85-mile-per-hour slider hanging over the outside corner, where Young walloped it into the seats. That was only the beginning of Tepesch's troubles, though. Nine consecutive batters reached, and the fact that one of them was because shortstop Jorge Polanco dropped a routine inning-ending grounder didn't make anybody feel better.

"We'll never know how it might have changed the game," Twins manager Paul Molitor said of Polanco's error, which rendered six of Tepesch's seven runs unearned. "I don't know if I've ever seen that — two outs, two strikes, 0-2 count, nobody on base and then eight runs. It hurts a lot because you think about what might have been."

Eight runs in all, more than enough to anesthetize the announced crowd of 30,859 and, Molitor feared, his own lineup.

"They put us in a bad spot," Molitor said. "You try to remind the guys you've got a lot of baseball left, but that's a big hill to climb."

Especially with Rick Porcello on the mound. The Red Sox had not scored a single for Porcello in his previous four games, so Mr. Cy Young wasn't going to squander this rare bounty. The righthander let only one Twins batter reach third base in his seven innings — Robbie Grossman, who lined a home run into the right field seats — and whetted the appetite for Sunday's showdown.

Ervin Santana's 0.66 ERA and Chris Sale's 1.38 are the best and third-best performances in the major leagues this season, and both have been dominant. Not since June 2, 1972, when Jim Kaat faced Detroit's Mickey Lolich, has a Twins game featured two starting pitchers with ERAs below 2.00, and all of MLB has seen only two matchups of sub-1.40 ERAs in the past 35 seasons (minimum six starts).

"It's a nice matchup. Ervin's a little more finesse, Sale's got the big arm," Molitor said. "Sale is pitching high-caliber baseball right now. And Ervin's been as good as anybody around the game, so that'll be fun."