Twins 9, White Sox 6: Fifty shades of Tristan Gray

No pitchers, no problem. As long as you have Tristan Gray on your team, he’ll give you enough runs to make sure your suddenly shaky pitching staff can pound the strike zone with ease. It wasn’t all the Twins’ journeyman infielder, but he’s already had a few big swings when they needed it most this season.

The Twins only managed a single hit against David Sandlin when they faced him last week, but they were able to triple their previous hit total in the first inning alone. Brooks Lee and Kody Clemens singled to put two men on for Minnesota. Sandlin then struck out Josh Bell before Trevor Larnach came up clutch with a two-out single to give the Twins an early lead.

The Pirates evened the game in the third thanks to another Victor Caratini mistake. With a man on third base and two outs, Caratini dropped a foul tip that would have ended the at-bat and the inning. Given an extra strike and out, Andrew “bad against everyone except Joe Ryan” Benintendi singled two pitches later to knot the game at one apiece. The way the Twins have been swinging lately, that seemed like a mistake that could cost the game. Luckily, Tristan Gray had something to say about that.

After a hard hit Bell double to start the fourth inning and a couple of baffling baserunning mistakes, the Twins looked like they were going to squander a potential big inning. But famed grand slammer Tristan Gray came to the plate with the bases juiced and only needed to see two pitches to put a well-placed curveball into the right field bleachers. Big dong, big inning, big 5-1 lead.

The White Sox immediately answered back in the fifth with back-to-back homers from Miguel Vargas and, guess who, Benintendi to bring the game to 5-4. But the Twins were finally seeing the ball well and capitalized for the second straight inning. In the bottom of the fifth, five straight Minnesota batters reached base to start the inning and score a pair of runs, and sac flies from Luke Keaschall and Gray gave the Twins a couple extra runs to boot. With the exhausted state of Minnesota’s pitching staff and an entire week until their next day off, the insurance runs were much needed.

After Ryan’s solid six innings, Kody Funderburk and Yoendrys Gomez threw a scoreless inning each. With a five run lead, manager Derek Shelton turned to Travis Adams who gave up a single and second home run to Vargas to give the home fans a fright, but buckled down and got the next two White Sox batters to finish the game. Twins win!

• Tristan Gray: 1-3, 5 RBI, GRAND SALAMI

• Trevor Larnach: 2-3, R, RBI, BB

• Josh Bell: 2-4, R, 2B

Tristan Gray: 1-3, 5 RBI, GRAND SALAMI

We’ll see tomorrow night for a fun matchup between exciting rookie Connor Prielipp and breakout All-Star candidate Davis Martin. Don’t worry though, Tristan Gray is hitting 1.000 against Martin for his career.