CLEVELAND — Adding Lucas Giolito, the Guardians hoped, might win them an American League Central Division title. Adding Royce Lewis, the Twins have discovered, was a much more effective way of doing so.
Lewis ruined Giolito’s Guardians debut, and perhaps Cleveland’s chances of catching the Twins over the remaining 24 games, by pummeling a 2-0 fastball high into the left-field bleachers with the bases loaded on Monday, his third grand slam in the past eight games. The Twins widened their lead over the second-place Guardians to six games with a 20-6 rout at Progressive Field.
Jorge Polanco and Carlos Correa also homered against the former White Sox ace, who was making his 24th career start against the Twins but had never before given up more than seven runs to them. With the help of three walks, the Twins racked up nine runs in just three innings against Giolito.
When the Twins piled on four more against reliever Enyel De Los Santos — this time, Lewis settled for a mere two-run single when he came up with the bases loaded again — the Guardians chose to preserve their bullpen for the rest of the series and use a position player, catcher David Fry, on the mound.
From the sixth inning on.
Joey Gallo, Kyle Farmer and Matt Wallner each crunched tape-measure homers off the human surrender flag, there being no 10-run-surrender rule in MLB, and the Twins wound up with the most runs they’ve ever scored in 63 seasons of playing games in Cleveland.
The game devolved into a farce by the end, with the Twins turning to a position player of their own, Willi Castro, to pitch the ninth. He gave up three runs before retiring the side on Tyler Freeman’s soft line drive to shortstop.
Pablo López was the recipient of the Twins’ offensive outburst, though he was far from perfect. The righthander allowed eight hits — at least one in each of his six innings — and three walks. But only when José Ramirez followed a Steven Kwan single with a triple, one-hopping the wall in right-center with a López changeup, did the Twins starter give up a run.
Lewis, who drove in four runs in Texas on Sunday with a homer and two singles, has almost single-handedly reversed the Twins’ seasonlong drought with the bases loaded. Though the team as a whole is batting only .217 with a runner on every base, Lewis is 5-for-10 in those situations with three home runs and 15 RBIs. Driving in six runs Monday, in fact, raised him to sixth on the team in RBIs, despite playing only 44 games.
The loss had to be discouraging for the Guardians, who traded away their most effective starter this season, righthander Aaron Civale, at the trade deadline, then reversed course last week and claimed three pitchers off waivers from the Angels in an effort to climb back into the race.
Giolito was the most acclaimed of the three, and though he hadn’t beaten the Twins in his three previous starts against them this season, he had pitched well, allowing just two runs over 18 innings.
But the righthander was terrible from the start, serving up Polanco’s home run to center field with his fifth pitch of the game.
Giolito opened the second inning with back-to-back strikeouts, but then loaded the bases with two walks and Castro’s first hit since returning from the injured list. Polanco then drove home another run by drawing a walk, bringing up Lewis.
He didn’t take long, letting two pitches in the dirt go by before turning on a fastball across the middle. It traveled 401 feet, and the relatively sparse Labor Day crowd of 17,359 began booing their new pitcher.