Minnesota Twins catcher Ryan Jeffers didn't hold back his feelings after his team showed little fight during a second straight blowout loss to the Milwaukee Brewers.
"You want to sum it up in one word, it's embarrassing," Jeffers said after his team's 9-0 defeat, according to Bobby Nightengale of the Minnesota Star Tribune. "We're big-league ballplayers, and we're not playing like a big-league ball club. We can't expect to win baseball games and play like that."
The reeling Twins managed just four hits during Saturday's loss and had only one runner reach third base. That result came one day after a 17-6 drubbing in which Brewers rookie Jacob Misiorowski carried a perfect game into the seventh inning. Four of Minnesota's five hits in Friday's loss came off Brewers position player Jake Bauers, who pitched the ninth inning.
The Twins continued their sloppy play out of the gate in Saturday's contest. Jeffers' first-inning throwing error allowed what ended up as the winning run to score before Minnesota took an at-bat. Harrison Bader also dropped a routine fly ball in the eighth inning, allowing another run to score and extending Milwaukee's rally.
Milwaukee scored two more in the ninth after Bader and shortstop Carlos Correa lost a fly ball in the sun, drawing boos from the Target Field faithful. More boos rained down after the final play of the game, when Brooks Lee declined to run to first base after a dropped third strike.
(Video source: MLB.com)
Minnesota looked to have turned its season around in mid-May thanks to a 13-game winning streak. However, since that run ended, the team has gone 11-19 to fall below .500. Saturday's loss was the Twins' 12th in the last 15 games, with the club's pitching staff allowing double-digit runs in five games in June.
The Twins were four games out of first place in the AL Central when their winning streak ended. Now, they're 10 games behind first-place Detroit and two back of the final AL wild-card spot with four teams ahead of them.
Manager Rocco Baldelli wasn't about to run from his team's struggles, but he also didn't have many answers for how the Twins could turn things around.
"We should probably call it how we're seeing it," Baldelli said. "Of course, we're in a bit of a rut right now. We're seeing it in a few different ways. You can't hide from it. You have to acknowledge it and move forward."
