The pink eyes beat the White Sox.
A guy with a red tongue helped, too.
Before his team played the White Sox on Sunday, Twins manager Rocco Baldelli used words like “gunk” and “blurred” to describe the eyes of two of his players, while hoping he wouldn’t need to use them. Then he used them.
Willi Castro’s pinch double in the ninth inning sent the game to extra innings. Joey Gallo scored on a “sacrifice fly” that barely left the infield to tie the score in the 10th. Ryan Jeffers got the winning hit in the 12th inning, giving the Twins a 5-4 victory and a series sweep.
Castro and Gallo have pink eye, also known as conjunctivitis. They spent much of the game in the indoor batting cage, quarantining themselves. Jeffers, the starting catcher on Sunday, had a pitch ricochet into his chin, making him bite his tongue, drawing blood.
Gallo’s vision was so blurred that when he batted in the 11th, with runners on first and third and two outs, the hulking slugger bunted for the first time this season, popping out to first. “I figured I had one shot at it before they realized I couldn’t see,” Gallo said.
Castro and Gallo both said they were shocked by the brightness of the sun after emerging from their lair, and Castro reacted slowly to a long fly to center field before chasing it down on the warning track.
“Yeah, if you don’t have no eyes, you’re not going to be able to see the ball or nobody, you know?” Castro said. “I just think the first day was really awful. I couldn’t see anything.”
So Gallo and Castro kept to themselves for most of the game … and when it ended. As his teammates streamed onto the field to congratulate Jeffers on his winning hit, Gallo kept his distance. In the postgame handshake line, he bumped elbows or offered air high-fives.
Can he see? “Not as good as I’d like,” Gallo said. “But good enough, you know?”
He woke up Friday with red eyes. “I didn’t think anything of it,” he said. “I just came to the field and was making a joke with a trainer — ‘Hey, I think I’ve got pink eye.’ They took it way more serious than I thought they would. He was like, ‘Willi has pink eye.’ “
The Twins continue their quest to field-test every possible human ailment. By late Sunday afternoon, they had emptied their bench and were considering using pitchers to play positions.
Then they won a game that, for much of this season, they could have been expected to lose.
They failed to reward starting pitcher Bailey Ober for his seventh consecutive quality start (six innings or more, three earned runs or fewer). They put 11 runners on base through seven innings without scoring. They struck out 15 times.
They won, in part, because Gallo made a play that did not require perfect vision.
He was the Twins’ automatic runner in the bottom of the 10th inning. The White Sox had scored to take a one-run lead. Gallo immediately advanced to third on a wild pitch, then Kyle Farmer hit a high pop to very short right field.
Chicago second baseman Zach Remillard weaved under it, then right fielder Oscar Colas called it but fell as he made the catch.
“He hit it, and I was kind of halfway, reading it, because it might drop,” Gallo said. “Then I saw him coming to the ball. I was like, ‘Oh, he’s going to make this play.’ You always just get back to the base because you never know what is going to happen.
“I was going to just deke him and make him throw home because if he overthrows it. … I saw him awkwardly catch it, go to the ground, and my instincts took over.
“I put my head down and ran. I was going home, and I was like, ‘Well, hopefully, this pays off because if this doesn’t, I’m going to look like an idiot.’ “
Two innings later, he was trying not to rub his eyes at what he had seen, while offering his teammates no-contact handshakes. It was a strange day.