Colossal catch, collision just another day at work for Twins’ Byron Buxton

Helped up by Max Kepler, Byron Buxton strode, gingerly at first, toward the Twins’ dugout after the final out of the top of the sixth inning. His teammates, however, didn’t walk down the stairs but gathered in front of the dugout, waiting for him, applauding as he approached.

The Sunday crowd of 28,302 at Target Field stood, too, offering an unusually raucous appreciation for the latest in Buxton’s hundreds-strong collection of amazing, and body-sacrificing, defensive plays.

Even momentarily shook up, Buxton noticed the love.

“It’s awesome. Obviously, I’ve just been in that situation, and you just want to make a play,” Buxton said. “For them to do that is something special.”

For him to end an inning like that, and prevent a pair of sure-to-score Chicago White Sox runs, was something special, too. Buxton raced over to the warning track in right-center field, tracking Luis Robert Jr.’s 394-foot fly ball all the way, then leaped toward the wall as the ball arrived. In his glove it went, and crumpled to the ground went Buxton after a high-speed collision.

“Make a play. There isn’t much else I can say. Catch the ball,” Buxton summed up. “Trying to save runs and turn that momentum around. I’m trying to make a play and get us in the dugout. Just happy to hold onto the ball.”

Having Buxton in center field on a daily basis “makes the team feel like our muscles are bigger, you know what I mean?” Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said. “He singlehandedly does these types of things because he just makes us better. The energy he brings, it’s not something that the guys in the clubhouse don’t feel. They feel it in a big way.”

Buxton, who hit a double off the left-field wall at a season-high 113.2 mph in the second inning, was due up first in the bottom of the sixth inning, so Baldelli removed him for Manuel Margot, just in case.

“He crashed into the wall, [and] he didn’t get up that fast. Normally he gets up fast,” Baldelli said. “The last thing I want to do is find out we sent him up to the plate and shouldn’t have.”

Twins trainers examined him, and Buxton said he feels fine. He intends to play Monday night against the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field. “I’m standing. I’m smiling,” he said.

He took that jump knowing he would collide with the wall. Does he ever consider, you know, not doing that?

Silly question.

“It’s part of the job,” Buxton said, “if you love it.”

Last week, Matt Wallner pitched. On Sunday, he stole a base, his first of the season, and perhaps most remarkably, tripled off the center-field wall — off a lefthander, White Sox reliever Sammy Peralta.

Has his month-long hot streak earned Wallner more at-bats against lefties? “Each situation is different,” Baldelli said of his decision, pointing out it came in the second inning.

“We weren’t going to make a ton of moves early today,” the manager said. “So that really told our lefties that they were going to go out there and face whoever was pitching, really.”

• Bally Sports North dugout reporter Audra Martin sang “God Bless America” during the seventh-inning stretch, the first time in her nine seasons in Minnesota the formally trained singer has performed at Target Field.

“I was nervous to volunteer here, because I wasn’t on TV” when she performed at several Atlanta Thrashers and Hawks games, as well as in musical theater performances, Martin said. “Then last year, I started kicking myself that I hadn’t done it yet. So I asked, and [the Twins] said, ‘How about Aug. 4?’”

• Despite four runs in the top of the 10th inning and loading the bases in the 11th, the Saints fell 10-9 in 11 innings to the host Iowa Cubs.