Sonny Gray retired the first 16 batters he faced on Saturday night, mowed through the Pirates with a nine-pitch, a seven-pitch and a six-pitch inning, and had the Target Field crowd believing they were witnessing a perfect game.
And he was arguably outpitched.
Gray’s periodic habit of dominating for several innings only to suffer through one rough inning foiled his perfect game. But Pirates righthander Mitch Keller took advantage of baseball’s swing-happiest team, racking up a dozen strikeouts including three in a row with the bases loaded, and led Pittsburgh to an ultimately lopsided 7-4 victory over the Twins.
The Guardians’ loss to Detroit maintained the Twins’ AL Central lead at five games, but it was a disappointing finish to a night that started so promising.
Gray opened the game with a nine-pitch, nine-strike first inning, missing back-to-back-to-back strikeouts only when Andrew McCutchen poked the final pitch of the inning, a sweeper across the middle, to Max Kepler in right field.
The veteran righthander appeared in complete control for five spotless innings, inducing routine fly balls and weak grounders. He struck out seven, five of them on three pitches.
But as the announced crowd of 23,822 sensed that Gray might make history, it all unraveled. With one out in the sixth, Pirates shortstop Liover Peguero poked a first-pitch sinker toward third base. Jorge Polanco charged it, grabbed the ball on its third bounce and rushed a throw to first base. The ball sailed past Donovan Solano as Peguero arrived at the bag, and he took second.
When the “1” appeared in the scoreboard’s hits column, the fans booed official scorer Kyle Traynor.
Their annoyance didn’t last. Catcher Jason Delay followed with a clean single, a sinking liner to center, and second baseman Ji Hwan Bae drew the game’s first walk. Suddenly Gray — staked to a two-run lead on the strength of a pair of two-out RBI doubles, one by Kepler in the first inning and another by Christian Vázquez in the fifth — was in danger of losing his lead.
He struck out Bryan Reynolds on three pitches to record a second out. But McCutchen, the former MVP and five-time All-Star, grounded a two-strike single up the middle to score Peguero and Delay and tie the score. Ke’Bryan Hayes then dropped a liner in front of left fielder Joey Gallo to drive home the third run and give Pittsburgh the lead.
Keller, who had retired 10 consecutive Twins earlier in the game, made it stand up, even when Polanco drew a walk to open the Twins’ sixth inning, and Carlos Correa and Kepler followed with singles to load the bases. With his own lead at stake, Keller struck out Royce Lewis on four pitches, Solano on three, and after falling behind Gallo 3-1, zipped a 97-mile-per-hour high-and-away fastball past him for his 12th and final strikeout.
Both teams added a run in the seventh, with Bae greeting reliever Dylan Floro with a two-out RBI double, and Polanco matching him against reliever Colin Holderman with a sacrifice fly to score Vázquez, who had doubled.
In the ninth inning, McCutchen then hit a 438-foot blast into the upper deck in right-center, a three-run homer off Jordan Balozovic. Those three runs became critical when the Twins put the first three runners on in the bottom of the ninth, scoring a run. But the rally was quickly squashed as Correa grounded into his major league-leading 24th double play.