Twins wait out the rain, then hammer out a win over the White Sox

CHICAGO – When Twins players showed up to the ballpark Wednesday morning, before their series finale against the Chicago White Sox, they were told to expect a lengthy rain delay.

As they sat inside the visitor’s clubhouse at Rate Field, the delay stretched to 3 hours, 20 minutes.

“I was going insane,” said Pablo López, who sat through a 98-minute rain delay before his Opening Day start. “I didn’t know what to do.”

With an uncertain forecast and one indoor batting cage, the Twins all played the waiting game. Players huddled around tables to play cards. Some guys watched other baseball games on TV. Byron Buxton wrapped himself in towels as he sat in the chair in front of his locker and napped before a game for the first time in his career.

Maybe that was the secret to the Twins’ 6-1 victory over the Chicago White Sox. Buxton, on the 10th pitch of the afternoon, clobbered a 466-foot, solo homer into the mostly empty bleachers in center field.

“Had a little extra juice in there from that nap,” Buxton said.

López, too, chose to nap for the first time before a game. He said he’s a person who doesn’t nap at all, but he wasn’t sure how many hours he was going to sit around. He slept for 15 minutes before manager Rocco Baldelli tapped him on the leg with a weather update.

The result: López retired 14 of his first 15 batters, yielding four hits and one run across seven innings.

“We really spent a lot of time with the White Sox and the umpires, their grounds crew,” Baldelli said. “Talked to MLB multiple times today. To be honest, I try not to speculate. We always take the mentality of we’ve got to be ready to play, and prepare to play, no matter how messed up the weather looks. Later on in the day, I probably would have guessed it was less likely we were going to play, but I’m glad we did.”

López set an early tone with quick innings. His goal, he said, was a 10-pitch first inning after he struggled to put away hitters with two strikes in his last start. It was a 12-pitch first inning Wednesday, though it included two strikeouts.

“I talked about it with some of the guys: ‘Let’s just go out there and attack,’ ” said López, who only allowed a solo homer to Brooks Baldwin in the seventh inning. “For the first three, four games, we carried away from that mentality.”

Buxton hammered a slider that didn’t slide from White Sox Opening Day starter Sean Burke in the top of the first inning, then opened the bottom half of the inning with a diving catch on a ball that hung up in the wind.

Carlos Correa admitted he was one of the players who wished they’d postpone the game and make it a doubleheader later in the season. At least until he took the field. Correa, who started the season in an 0-for-18 slump, produced two hits.

When Correa hit a ground-ball single through the right side of the infield in the third inning, he raised his arms to the sky in relief. Teammates jokingly called for the ball to be thrown to the dugout as a memento.

BOXSCORE: Twins 6, White Sox 1

MLB standings

“No frustration, just relief,” Correa said. “I didn’t know what to do any more.”

In the fourth inning, Bader connected on a slider from Burke that hung over the middle of the plate for a three-run homer. Bader, who homered three times in his first 14 at-bats this year, has recorded all his hits against righthanded pitching, which hasn’t been his strong suit throughout his career.

“I know the type of player I am,” Bader said. “There’s obviously more to it than just pure numbers. Most importantly, any time you get a chance to put on a big-league uniform and be in a starting lineup, or off the bench, you get a chance to change those numbers and change that preconceived perception.”

The Twins, despite their miserable first four games, are in a five-way tie for the American League Central lead with a 2-4 record through the first week of the season.