Five shutout innings, only one hit allowed, strikeout after strikeout whenever he was in jeopardy — it’s exactly the sort of big-game performance Twins players would have predicted for Tuesday’s Game 3 of the American League Division Series.

The twist they didn’t see coming: It wasn’t Sonny Gray at his best.

Gray, making what could turn out to be his final start as a Twin, was uncharacteristically hittable, giving up four runs in the first inning and five overall to pitch the Twins to the brink of elimination with a 9-1 loss to the Astros at Target Field. The Astros crushed four home runs — two upper-deck blasts by José Abreu among them — piled up 14 hits, and handed the Twins their most lopsided postseason loss in 21 years.

Game 4 in the best-of-five is Wednesday at 1:07 or, if the Rangers-Orioles series has ended in a Texas sweep, 6:07 p.m. The Twins, trailing 2 games to 1, will start Joe Ryan; Astros manager Dusty Baker has not yet settled upon his starter.

Whoever Baker chooses, that starter could hardly be more clutch than righthander Cristian Javier was Tuesday. Javier surrendered a first-inning double to Max Kepler but no other hits in his five innings; he walked five Twins and hit another, yet held the Twins hitless in seven at-bats with runners in scoring position.

Perhaps the result shouldn’t have been as surprising as it seemed. Javier, despite a so-so regular season with a 4.56 ERA, set a new Major League record Tuesday by making his third consecutive postseason start of five or more innings with one or zero hits allowed, including the Astros’ combined no-hitter against the Phillies in the World Series last October.

Javier created jam after him for himself, but always managed to dig himself out of trouble. Five of his nine strikeouts, for instance, came with a Twin standing on second base, allowing him to strand seven runners in just five innings.

Meanwhile, Gray hardly looked like the Cy Young contender that he’s been all season. Four of the first five Astros he faced reached base, two on singles (including Kyle Tucker’s run-scoring liner into left field), and Jordan Alvarez’s hot smash that glanced off Alex Kirilloff’s glove for an error. And with Alvarez and Tucker on base, gray left an 84-mph sweeper knee high and in the middle of the plate, a pitch that wound up 442 feet away, three rows into the upper deck.

It was only the ninth home run allowed by Gray in his 11-season career to travel that far; Abreu had one of the other eight, too, back in 2015.

Gray kept putting himself in trouble after that, too; five times, he opened an inning by allowing a hit, the first time in his 276 career starts he had ever done that. He managed to work out of trouble in three of those innings, but in the fifth, Gray left another mid-80s sweeper in the middle, this time to Alex Bregman. It had the same fate, landing in the left-field seats, albeit about 90 feet shorter.

That marked the first time in Gray’s 58-start career as a Twin that the righthander had allowed two home runs in the same game, a franchise record.

Gray was relieved by a pair of starting pitchers, Kenta Maeda and Bailey Ober, and neither had much better luck against a Houston lineup that has few soft spots. Maeda gave up a walk and a pair of singles in the sixth inning, including Bregman’s second run-scoring hit.

Ober surrendered two homers, too, one to Alvarez — who also doubled twice, giving him six hits, all of them for extra bases and four of them homers, in 12 at-0bats during the series — and another 440-footer to Abreu.

The carnage left the Twins needing back-to-back victories to advance to their first AL Championship Series since 2004.