Twins' pressure mounting as Trade Deadline approaches

LOS ANGELES -- Sometimes it’s not how you start, or how you finish. In baseball, the last two weeks of July can carry as much weight as any stretch of the entire calendar.

It certainly feels that way for the Twins, who lost for the fourth time in five games Monday, 5-2 to the Dodgers, in the opener of a three-game series. Minnesota dropped to four games under .500 with a tough stretch of schedule looming and eight games remaining before the Trade Deadline.

“We all see what the date is, the time that is coming,” said Byron Buxton, who hit a leadoff homer off Shohei Ohtani. “We know the situation. So yeah. It’s definitely thought about for sure.”

The Twins have eight games to convince the team’s front office to add pieces for a run at the postseason, rather than trading veteran players away in a nod toward the future. Just to be at .500 at the Deadline, they’ll need to go 6-2 in those games, with two more remaining at Dodger Stadium and three more against a Red Sox team that has surged in July. And while they will do all they can to focus on each individual game, no one can deny the weight that rests on these games.

“If you want to paint it as a dramatic sort of situation, you can,” manager Rocco Baldelli said prior to Monday’s game. “You can do that. You can say that maybe the next couple weeks of baseball might change the course of the season in one direction or another. Yeah. So be it. That’s the reality of it. That’s what we have to own. We have to do our part to keep our group playing well and together and not worry about it in a negative sense. Think about it in a positive light and try to go in the direction that we want to go.”

Monday’s game was not a step in that direction. The Twins once again got off to a great start thanks to Buxton’s homer, but as has happened too often this year, they gave the lead right back. David Festa walked Mookie Betts on five pitches to open the bottom of the first, and Ohtani immediately made him pay by crushing a two-run homer on a hanging changeup. The Twins didn’t score again until the ninth despite multiple opportunities, while the Dodgers added three more homers.

“We didn’t really do the job when there were people on base, even though we had pretty good at-bats when there were people on base and did some good things,” Baldelli said. “It didn’t line up for us, really, today.”

Carlos Correa put a scare into the home fans with a ball to the wall in center with two men on in the ninth, but James Outman robbed him of the potential game-tying homer. It was that kind of night.

There’s no great shame in losing to the reigning World Series champions, of course. But the defeat followed a stretch of missed opportunities against the listless Pirates and Rockies, and it continued a trend that has seen Twins starters have great difficulty keeping the ball in the park when they leave Target Field.

Festa made quite a few good pitches, but too many mistakes. He was tagged for three homers in 5 1/3 innings.

In the Twins’ last nine road games, their starters have allowed 16 home runs, and at least one in every game. The team is 2-7 in those games. During a nine-game homestand over the same stretch of time, Twins starters allowed a total of three homers and the team went 6-3.

Meanwhile on the offensive side, it was more a matter of good process but very little to show for it. The Twins had opportunities all night. They had hard-hit balls go for naught. They were, on multiple occasions, inches from a potentially game-changing hit.

But that hit never came, and so they took a costly loss.

“We're trying to play winning baseball,” Correa said. “We're trying to win every single night, and the effort everybody is putting in this clubhouse, inside here and when we go on the field, is 100 percent. We're trying to play the best baseball we can and we're going to keep doing that.”