HOUSTON -- Joe Ryan had the Twins in control Tuesday night, and for a few innings it looked like he might cruise through one of his sharpest outings of the season. Then the fourth inning arrived, and everything tilted fast.
What had been a 3-0 lead turned into a six-run Astros burst, and Minnesota never got it back in a 6-4 loss. Ryan, who was tagged for his most earned runs since Aug. 25 of last year in Toronto, said afterward, “It’s a tough one to digest,” and the way the inning unfolded made that pretty easy to understand.
The right-hander was out after 12 outs and 91 pitches, his shortest non-injury-shortened start in almost three months. By the end, he said he was running on fumes.
“I think it’s just the amount of pitches that I’m throwing,” Ryan said. “It’s the most exhausted I’ve ever been on the baseball field since I’ve been in the big leagues. Just a lot of foul balls, put the ball in play and they get on.”
The inning began innocently enough with Christian Walker grounding out, but then the whole script changed. Cam Smith slapped a single on a fastball that was well off the outside edge. Taylor Trammell followed with another single on a sweeper that was well inside, a ball that took a strange hop and likely should have been handled by Royce Lewis at first.
Ryan made another strong pitch to Yainer Diaz, a sweeper at the bottom of the zone, and Diaz still managed a single. After Ryan struck out Nick Allen, he was one out away from escaping with the lead still intact.
Instead, the inning kept stretching.
With runners on the corners and two outs, Raynel Delgado worked a full count. The payoff pitch looked like it caught the zone, but Victor Caratini didn’t challenge, and Delgado walked. Ryan said he wished he had pushed for the challenge himself.
“That's a situation where I should probably tap the hat and get out of it with [one] run and still probably we win that ballgame,” he said.
That still left Minnesota ahead by two, but Jose Altuve followed with another full count, and this time the call flipped. Ryan threw a 3-2 fastball just off the plate, started walking off the mound after the initial strike call, and then saw the challenge overturn it. The walk forced in another run and brought Yordan Alvarez to the plate with the bases loaded.
“As we've talked about,” manager Derek Shelton said. “We want to try to get Alvarez up as much as possible without guys on base.”
That plan vanished in a hurry. Ryan missed with the first pitch, got a foul ball on a splitter below the zone, then came back with a sinker in the strike zone. Alvarez turned it into a grand slam, and just like that the game had swung all the way around.
Ryan said the damage felt even more frustrating because the pitches he wanted to execute were often the ones that turned into hits, while the ones that caught too much of the plate were the ones that got punished hardest.
“It's tough,” Ryan said. “They're a really good team and really aggressive, and [it’s] never going to be easy.
I'm looking at the [pitch chart] after and it's like, 'Of course the middle-middle ones are popups and outs, and the executed ones are gone or hits.' It's tough.”
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