PHILADELPHIA – Joey Gallo is the Vesuvius of baseball, lying dormant for what seems like an eternity, then suddenly and shockingly erupting with a fury.
Citizens Bank Park was his Pompeii on Saturday.
Gallo, long since swallowed up by an offensive drought of historic proportions, blasted two home runs into the outfield seats, knocked another pitch off the right-field wall for a single, added a career-high fourth hit in the ninth and helped the Twins shake off a slump of their own. Minnesota racked up four homers overall, Pablo López quieted a crowd of 40,117 with six shutout innings and the Twins snapped their losing streak at four games with an 8-1 thrashing of the Phillies.
For Gallo, even a four-hit night — which also included a walk and, gulp, zero strikeouts — was a long time coming. More than four months, in fact. Gallo’s most recent three-hit game was back on April 2 in Kansas City, in the season’s third game. In the interim, Gallo has suffered through a series of extended slumps, but none as horrific as the last couple of months. Gallo entered Saturday’s game with only two hits in August and just eight (in 67 at-bats, or .119) since July 1. He was 4-for-43 since July 18 and 4-for-4 on Saturday.
On a team that suffers regular offensive blackouts, that has been shut out twice this week, a sudden Gallo turnaround provided plenty of relief for a frustrated Twins clubhouse.
He wasn’t the only contributor, of course. Even Phillies starter Taijuan Walker, who was briefly a free-agent target of the Twins last winter, chipped in, walking six Twins and hitting another in five erratic innings. His three first-inning walks produced Minnesota’s first run without a hit.
Matt Wallner whacked a fourth-inning curveball from Walker into the right-field stands, his eighth homer of the season. Two batters later, Gallo lifted a low-and-away splitter high in the air the opposite way. It kept drifting deeper and finally landed in the first row in left.
The Twins later punished relievers Gregory Soto and Yunior Marte with a five-run putaway inning in the seventh. Carlos Correa opened the inning with a screamer into the seats in left-center, his 15th of the season, and 12th solo shot. Wallner later singled home Max Kepler, who had doubled, and Gallo capped the inning with a 412-foot cannon shot into the second deck in right field, reclaiming the Twins’ home run lead from Kepler with his 20th.
That was more than enough for López, who has been as hot this month as Gallo has been cold. The righthander allowed only four hits, just one of them — Bryce Harper’s sixth-inning double into the right-field corner — in six innings, striking out six. He got some help in blanking the Phillies from center fielder Michael A. Taylor, who made his third diving catch in two nights to rob Nick Castellanos of a hit that would have scored Harper.
Instead, López departed with his fourth shutout outing of the season. In his last four starts, López has a 1.45 ERA and a strikeout/walk ratio of 35-to-4.