MINNEAPOLIS — The Twins came into Friday's game with a mirror-image pair of streaks in play: They had homered in nine consecutive games, and surrendered a home run in seven in a row, each the longest such streaks of the season.
One of those stretches is over now. The wrong one, for the Twins.
Tim Anderson broke a tie with a fourth-inning solo blast into the White Sox bullpen, and Adam Engel became the second White Sox center fielder to homer in two nights, and Chicago crept another game closer in the AL Central standings with a 6-2 victory at Target Field.
Cleveland's victory over the Tigers drew the Guardians within 2 1/2 games of the Twins, who have lost six of their past eight games, and the White Sox now trail by just three games with two more to play here before the All-Star break.
Luis Arraez smacked a seventh-inning fly ball to the warning track in center field, but the Twins, who had rocketed 18 home runs in nine games since the Fourth of July, got no closer to clearing the fences against White Sox right-hander Michael Kopech and four relievers. Instead, they resorted to their homestand habit of setting themselves up for big innings, then letting them fizzle.
The Twins put runners in scoring position with less than two outs five different times, but scored in only one of them. Alex Kirilloff, who left the bases loaded in the first inning with a ground out on Thursday, faced the same situation a day later, but this time delivered a double to right field, scoring two runs.
But they were the Twins' only runs of the night; they went 0 for 6 with runners in scoring position after the first inning.
Perhaps the biggest disappointment, though, was another short and ineffective start by left-hander Devin Smeltzer, who hasn't started a Twins victory since June 23. Smeltzer needed 67 pitches to record nine outs, and though he allowed only two runs — the White Sox didn't have a hit with runners in scoring position after the first inning, either — Rocco Baldelli cut short his night after three innings.
What followed was a parade of relief pitchers, five in all — and the game-deciding blows.
Anderson's home run came in the fourth inning off Emilio Pagan, who has given up eight this season. Engel, who entered during Friday's game for Thursday's grand-slammer Luis Robert, hit a long fly ball off Griffin Jax that carried just out of Kirilloff's reach and into the left-field planters. It was the 52nd home run surrendered by the Twins bullpen this season, the most in the American League.
Kopech was mostly as shaky as Smeltzer, though by inducing Carlos Correa to hit into a critical double play, he escaped the fourth inning, and he finished his night with a 1-2-3 fifth. Another double play, this by Kirilloff, snuffed the Twins' eighth-inning rally, and former Twin Liam Hendriks needed just 13 pitches to finish off his old team and earn his 10th consecutive save and 19th on the year.
