Minnesota Twins defeat Los Angeles Dodgers 6-4 – MLB Update
The American League’s Minnesota Twins took revenge of their last night’s shameful 15-0 shut-out defeat by the National League’s Los Angeles Dodgers, as the club romped to a 6-4 victory after a promising performance, in the second outing of the three-game
interleague series, at Target Field on Tuesday, June 28.
The Twins’ manager Ron Gardenhire was thrilled of the victory his team gained to get back in the series. He said, "The great thing about baseball is you get to play every day. We just turned the page."
As the Twins received their worst ever defeat of the season last night, their bull-pen was in full preparation to take revenge. They expressed their grudge right from the start of the first inning when their starter Brian Duensing took Tony Gwynn and Casey
Blake on a fly out while striking-out Andre Ethier with some brilliant pitches.
In the bottom of this inning, designated hitter Joe Mauer led a game off with an RBI single off Ted Lilly to provide his team a good 1-0 lead. Then in the second inning, Ben Revere and Alexi Casilla each scored an RBI single to take the lead into a strong
3-0 position.
On the other hand, Duensing kept restricting the Dodgers’ bat to no-score but he allowed his first run to their top slugger Matt Kemp to reduce the lead to 3-1 in the top of the fourth inning. However, the Twins’ Rene Rivera widened the lead to 4-1 with
his RBI single in the bottom of the fourth inning.
The score was 4-1 and this time Brian failed to defend it in the top of the fifth inning, as first he gave away a flat 359-feet long one-run homer to Aaron Miles and then the game-tying RBI double to Ethier. It perplexed the Twins’ manager Ron Gardenhire
for some time but his problem went away when he saw a dazzling 352-feet sky-high two-run homer off Ted Lilly to take the lead into a 6-4 position in the bottom of the fifth inning.
After this hit, Lilly’s spell ended and his manager Don Mattingly brought in his strong reliever Kenley Jansen. Brian, on the other hand, kept his pitching in the sixth inning where he handed the ball to reliever Alex Burnett after hitting a pitch to the
Dodgers’ Juan Uribe.
Lilly scattered six run on nine hits without even a single strike-out over four innings and lost his eighth game while Duensing allowed four runs on four hits, walked four and struck-out three over five innings to earn his fifth win of the season.
"I've thought about so many different things, trying to figure out what's going on the last month," Lilly said. "It's hard to pinpoint any one thing. Usually everything starts with command, and certainly that's one of the things."
Besides both starters, none of the pitchers from either side gave a run. Twins’ relief pitchers Burnett, Glen Perkins, Joe Nathan, and closer Matt Capps each did not concede any run. The Dodgers’ relievers Jansen, Matt Guerrier and Mike MacDougal also remained
scoreless over their minimum one inning spell.
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