Minnesota Twins drop San Francisco Giants 2-1, thanks to Joe Ryan’s arm and Trevor Larnach’s bat

You hate to take joy out of other people’s suffering, but the Twins probably wouldn’t mind if Joe Ryan’s flu bug hung around awhile.

“I felt horrible,” Ryan said Saturday night after pitching six shutdown innings against the Giants and leading the Twins to their seventh consecutive victory, 2-1.

“I feel like I’m really worn down,” said Ryan, who was floored by an “intense” bout of the flu earlier this week that delayed his Thursday start by two days. “I felt super dehydrated.”

He also should feel like one of the chief architects of the Twins’ return to health because after a 7-15 start to the season, Saturday’s victory improved the Twins to 20-20 on the season. It’s also their second consecutive victory when scoring fewer than four runs; they were 0-17 this year before Friday’s 3-1 victory.

And they did it with the help of a few players whose own slow starts to the season haven’t stopped them from contributing to victories. When Heliot Ramos led off the eighth inning with a double off the right field wall, then advanced to third on a flyout, Christian Vázquez and Royce Lewis — a combined 9-for-66 on the season — combined to snuff out the Giants’ lone threat.

With Ramos a few steps off third base, Vázquez caught a high fastball from Cole Sands and fired the ball to Lewis, who flopped the tag on Ramos before he could dive back to the base.

“It’s a game-winning play, that’s what it is,” Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said. “It takes an immense amount of confidence to make that play. You can’t have a speck of uncertainty or fear to make that play. That’s what we love about [Vázquez]. He does so many things right.”

Few players have done as many things right as Ryan this year. Saturday’s performance — two hits, one run over six innings — marked the sixth time in eight starts that Ryan has given up zero or one run, and it’s the fourth time he didn’t issue a walk. The righthander retired 18 of the 20 batters he faced and made only one mistake: a 1-2 second-inning fastball to Ramos that Ryan left in the middle of the plate. It landed three rows deep into the bleachers in left-center, giving San Francisco a brief lead.

“There were definitely pitches in there where I was like, ‘Don’t swing!’ And they mostly didn’t, and so it worked out,” said Ryan, who blamed his illness for an occasional lack of feel. “It was good to not have them slap me in the face.”

BOXSCORE: Twins 2, San Francisco 1

MLB standings

In addition to seven strikeouts, Ryan also forced the Giants to hit six infield pop-ups, each of them a quick, harmless out.

“When you come back from not feeling like yourself, you kind of have to refind your form,” Baldelli said. “But it didn’t take him very long. He dominated the strike zone like he normally does. In a lot of ways, he looked completely fine.”

The Twins offense didn’t produce much off San Francisco righthander Logan Webb, either. But Trevor Larnach made sure it was just enough. After Vázquez led off the third inning by drawing a walk, Larnach bashed Webb’s first pitch to him, a sweeper on the inside corner, into the seats in right field.

Webb didn’t give up another hit, much less a run, until the seventh inning, but Ryan made sure it didn’t matter.

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The Twins drew an announced 23,812 for the rare weekend night game in May, but they were missing one spectator for much of it. Baldelli was ejected in the sixth inning for backing up Carlos Correa’s complaints about plate umpire Adrian Johnson’s strike zone.

“Three straight hitters — you think I’m making that up?” microphones for Fox Sports’ broadcast picked up of Baldelli’s rage. “It’s been like that the whole … game!”

It was the 16th ejection of Baldelli’s managerial career but didn’t keep the Twins from celebrating their own revival afterward.

“It feels great. Vibes are really good. It doesn’t feel streaky, either,” Ryan said. “We’re beating good teams, and we’re beating them with quality baseball. So that just adds another layer of confidence.”