Everything clicks for suddenly streaking Twins in 11-1 rout of Guardians

CLEVELAND – Jonah Bride collected three hits and drove in a run, Mickey Gasper added a pair of singles and an RBI, Kody Clemens lined his first double of the season, and we’ll pause here to remind you that yes, these are the Minnesota Twins. And yes, they are winning.

So many unfamiliar faces generating unfamiliar outcomes at Progressive Field.

OK, the Twins’ 11-1 rout of the Cleveland Guardians, already matching their number of victories in this ballpark last year, featured some names you’ve heard of, too. Edouard Julien and Ryan Jeffers homered, for instance, Carlos Correa and Byron Buxton each bashed a pair of hits, and Bailey Ober displayed the type of cruise-control pitching that makes him so counter-intuitive in these days of strikeouts-above-all baseball.

“He’s so efficient. He can pitch deep into a game because he can get guys swinging at pitches that they probably don’t want to swing at,” Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said. “He plays that game very well. It’s a cat-and-mouse game, but it’s one that he’s really comfortable with.”

He is, and the Guardians were not. Ober struck out only two batters but also only allowed three Guardians to reach second base and just one to advance any farther. He pitched into the eighth inning and registered his fourth consecutive quality start.

BOXSCORE: Twins 11, Cleveland 1

MLB standings

Last summer, Ober reeled off a streak of 15 such games, the Twins’ longest roll since the Johan Santana days. Is he in that sort of groove again?

“A little bit, yeah. I feel like I’m kind of there with execution right now,” said Ober, who after giving up eight runs in his season-opening start in St. Louis has allowed only seven in five starts since. “Now it’s kind of staying in that same mentality that I’m going to expect to pitch pretty deep into ballgames. It helps to have a lead so I can just attack these guys and not necessarily have to nibble.”

He certainly had that lead from the moment he stepped on the mound. Julien bashed the first pitch of the game, a middle-middle fastball from Guardians starter Gavin Williams, more than 400 feet over the center-field fence. Three more hits in the inning, capped by Jeffers’ RBI double, made the lead 2-0. Three more hits and a pair of walks in the second inning grew that lead to 4-0.

In fact, his teammates’ habit of lengthy rallies — they scored two or more runs in five different innings — was a bigger problem than the Guardians for Ober.

“Some of them got pretty long. I went into the weight room and threw a few times during different innings just to keep loose,” he said. “You have to try to keep moving and not let everything stiffen up. It’s definitely an adjustment.”

You want an adjustment? How about being down two infielders and an outfielder, literally plugging in players whom other teams had just cut, and producing the highest run (11) and hit (17) totals of the season?

“Guys are coming in and being asked to do things every other day, or every third day — it’s not so easy, but they’re stepping in and stepping up,” Baldelli said of the no-name heroes. “When you combine well-struck balls with making sure that you’re swinging at the right pitches, it goes really good. Very nice. Very fun baseball to watch.”

It’s the Twins’ fourth consecutive victory, their first road win since April 9 in Kansas City, and brings them to 6-6 against teams with winning records (when they played the Twins). Minnesota, 7-15 just one week earlier, is now 13-16 and feeling a bit less snakebit.

“We’ve been playing good, especially at home, and now we’re on a pretty good roll,” said Julien, whose leadoff home run was the fourth of his career. “We’ve just been having a good approach against the starters and scoring runs against the starter.”

Ten Twins collected hits, many memorably so. It was the second three-hit game of Bride’s career, the second two-hit game of Gasper’s career and Clemens’ first hit as a Twin. Jeffers’ home run in the eighth inning was the first by a Twins catcher — they were the only team without one — this year.

“I liked everything. Every guy did something offensively,” Baldelli said. “The at-bats were fantastic from the start. … These guys are doing their jobs very well right now.”