MINNEAPOLIS — The Twins took dramatic action on Tuesday, trading for three upgrades to their pitching staff. They flaunted their new look on Wednesday, riding scoreless innings from Michael Fulmer and Jorge Lopez to a tight but encouraging victory.
And on Thursday, they reverted to the game plan that had made those upgrades so urgent. Guess how that went.
Sonny Gray allowed only one hit over five scoreless innings, but Emilio Pagan surrendered three runs, Trevor Megill three more, and Tyler Duffey three of his own, and Toronto extended its history of Target Field domination, and exasperated a boisterous concert-night crowd, with a 9-3 victory over the Twins.
Gray was hardly sharp, walking a season-high five hitters, but only once, when he loaded the bases with two outs, did he allow a runner to advance even to second base. But the Blue Jays couldn't make hard contact against the veteran righthander, either, and Gray took a no-hitter into the fifth inning, when ninth-place hitter Cavan Biggio lined a two-out single to center.
Still, Gray held a one-run lead, thanks to Toronto starter Alex Manoah's fourth-inning wildness; after an infield single by Carlos Correa, Manoah walked the bases full, then hit Jose Miranda with a pitch on his left wrist to force in a run. The game was delayed while Miranda was examined, but he stayed in the game — and drove in the Twins' other run, too, in the sixth inning, following a Jorge Polanco walk and a Nick Gordon double with a ground out that scored Polanco.
Having thrown 96 pitches, one fewer than his season-high, though, Gray's removal after five innings was inevitable. And if what came next wasn't inevitable, it was certainly familiar.
With Fulmer having thrown three times in the past six days, manager Rocco Baldelli bypassed his new weapon to face the American League's second-highest-scoring offense in favor of Pagan. The Twins' narrow 1-0 lead didn't survive for long.
With one out, Pagan worked two quick strikes on the low-and-outside corner against Blue Jays cleanup hitter Teoscar Hernandez, then tried to get him to chase three pitches just a little farther away. When that didn't work, Pagan left a 3-2 splitter in the middle of the plate, and Hernandez pounded it more than 400 feet into the second deck in left field.
It marked the ninth game in which Pagan has allowed a home run this year, more than any other reliever in the game.
Bo Bichette followed with a double high off the right field wall, and he scored the go-ahead run on Lourdes Gurriel's single up the middle. An infield hit by Whit Merrifield, the runner safe when Luis Arraez couldn't hold on to Gio Urshela's one-hop throw, widened Toronto's lead.
Megill and Duffey combined for a six-run eighth inning that put the game out of reach and turned the huge crowd's attention to the country-music finale. Hits by Bichette, Gurriel and Merrifield — yes, again — off Megill knocked him out of the game, and two singles and Vladimir Guerrero's line-drive home run off Duffey knocked the Twins out, too.
Jake Cave provided a ninth-inning homer, his first of the season, for the Twins' final run.
Toronto, which currently holds the final AL wildcard spot despite owning a better record than the first-place Twins, improved to 14-26 at Target Field, where the teams would meet for a three-game series in October if the standings stay the same.
