Just a note to start: I’m writing a few articles about the World Cup for the Star Tribune. Here’s the first one about the USA’s competition for the title, including a few traditional men’s powerhouses that were late getting going with women’s soccer.

The Twins scored two runs in the top of the first inning on Tuesday, in the scratchiest fashion possible - a flare from Carlos Correa, a walk, a wild pitch, a sacrifice fly, and - finally - a two-out single from Willi Castro.

It took Bailey Ober less than ten pitches in the bottom of the first inning to give it all back, thanks to an Eugenio Suárez home run. The dust hardly settled from there; Ober ended up giving up six hits in the bottom of the first inning, including two to end the inning in which the Mariners had a runner thrown out at home plate.

Remember the acronym TOOTBLAN (thrown out on the bases like a nincompoop)? The Mariners defined TOOTBLAN, in the first; Teoscar Hernandez ran through a stop sign to get thrown out, and then on the very next play, they sent Ty France home on a sharp single, and he was out by thirty feet.

At this point, Seattle had sent seven players to the plate, Ober had retired exactly one of them, and it was somehow still 3-2 and the Twins were batting again.

From there… I can’t figure it out, hardly. Ober retired 15 of the next 17 hitters, somehow cruising through six innings after a nightmarish first inning. Meanwhile, Alex Kirilloff finished a double short of the cycle, Castro had three hits, Edouard Julien had three hits, and the Twins pounded out 14 hits and won, 10-3.

It was a “scheduled day off” for Byron Buxton; we’ll see if the Twins have the gumption to give him a second scheduled day off in a row.

Luckily for strikeout fans, the Twins have too many struggling veteran hitters to sit them all down at once. Joey Gallo and Christian Vázquez both struck out three times and went a combined 0-for-9.

Also, a word for Jordan Balazovic, who was having a terrible season in St. Paul before the Twins called him up due to their ongoing needs for bullpen cannon fodder. Pitching with a 7-3 lead, he allowed a hit and a walk and then a blast to left, into the wind, that died on the warning track. He’s got a 1.50 ERA in nine appearances, and seems to have the best quality that a relief pitcher can have: he’s lucky. Until Brock Stewart gets back, that’ll have to do.

I checked the stats and they’re kind of shocking. The Twins are below league average in a lot of categories, but not THAT far below average; they’re 20th in runs scored, 18th in OPS, and so on. They are leading the league in strikeout percentage, I guess. But I suppose it’s worth noting that, while the Twins have trouble scoring runs, so does half of the league.

It’s starting to feel like the Lynx, who’d recovered some optimism after their terrible start, are now sliding right back into Collapse for Caitlin mode. Napheesa Collier scored a career-high 35 points on Tuesday; the rest of her team combined for 38, on 12-42 shooting, and Minnesota lost to Atlanta 82-73.

It was the seventh straight win for the Dream, who scored 54 points in the first half and led by 17 at the break, another entry in the “Lynx can’t play defense” ledger. Minnesota did manage to cut that lead to six in the third, holding Atlanta to just 11 points in the quarter, so whatever Cheryl Reeve said at halftime both worked, and presumably could be heard by passers-by outside the Dream’s tiny arena.

Minnesota is home against Los Angeles on Thursday, a team they’ve beat three times in three tries this year, but after that the schedule gets rough: Las Vegas, Washington, New York, two with Connecticut, and then another one with New York. That could pretty easily be six straight losses for the Lynx. 0-6 turned into 9-9, but has now turned into 9-12; being 9-19 in a couple of weeks is not out of the question.

The St. Paul Saints did so little offensively on Tuesday, a 1-0 loss at Omaha, that it’s honestly kind of impressive.

  • They got two hits: one single and one double.
  • They walked twice.
  • They never managed to get a runner past second base.
  • After a one-out walk in the fourth inning, they didn’t have a single baserunner; the next 17 hitters went down in order.

We must give a special mention for Jorge Polanco, whose rehab assignment is starting with a thud; he was 0-for-4 with three strikeouts. Randy Dobnak did throw six scoreless innings, striking out five on a hit and two walks, so there’s the good news.

Amazingly, the Saints threw out the potential winning run at the plate in the ninth inning, but the Storm Chasers battled back and got the game’s one run anyway.

Also I want to mention something that’s very funny to me: Omaha has a beautiful downtown ballpark, now called Charles Schwab Field, that seats 24,000 fans. It hosts the College World Series, and Creighton’s baseball team, and some other college tournaments… and that’s it. The Storm Chasers play at a 9,000-seat park in the middle of nowhere, on the outskirts of Omaha, which actually was built at pretty much the same time as the CWS stadium. This is not quite as amazing as the Saints, then an independent team, managing to get a ton of money to build a park in downtown St. Paul… but it’s close.

TODAY’S SLATE

SAINTS at Omaha, 7:05pm
TWINS at Seattle, 8:40pm

ON DECK

LYNX vs Los Angeles, Thursday
LOONS vs. Puebla, Sunday