Zebby Matthews shaky in return as Twins lose again to Rockies

DENVER — The Colorado Rockies, who entered Saturday 34½ games out of first place, sold 42,131 tickets for a mid-July game with the Twins. Makes sense, though — this series must look to Rockies fans like the closest thing to sure wins on the 2025 schedule.

Ryan McMahon smacked a two-run homer for the second straight night, Ezequiel Tovar crushed a tiebreaking three-run homer to straightaway center field, and the Rockies enjoyed their biggest offensive outburst in a month, handing the Twins their third consecutive loss to a last-place team, 10-6 on Saturday night at raucous Coors Field.

“The bottom line is we’ve got to play better baseball, and we haven’t been able to do that consistently this year,” said Twins shortstop Carlos Correa, who contributed two hits and a walk but struck out as the potential tying run to end the eighth inning. “There’s 60-some games left (64), and we’ve got to figure out a way to put ourselves in a better position. And everybody in this clubhouse — coaching staff, every player in here — we’ve got to do better. We’re not doing a good job.”

To make their disappointment even more acute, the Twins grabbed an early 3-0 lead over the Rockies, then watched it disappear under an abundance of hard-hit balls and two-out RBI. Ryan Jeffers doubled to open the second inning, Kody Clemens followed with a triple off the center-field wall, and Correa smoked a double into the right-field corner. When Matt Wallner followed with a one-out single through the Rockies’ drawn-in infield — his first hit of the season with third base occupied — it appeared the Twins would finally join the rest of MLB in adding to the Rockies’ run at a historic number of losses.

Not so fast, said righthander Antonio Senzatela, whose 13 losses this season are two more than any other major league pitcher.

Once Senzatela (4-13) escaped that second-inning ugliness, he frustrated the Twins for five brilliant innings, facing only 16 batters, one over the minimum, during that time. And he made quick work of them, too. Senzatela threw 25 pitches in that second inning, then just 27 over the next four innings. The Twins helped with a half-dozen one-pitch at-bats over that span and never advanced a runner to second base against him.

“We got into swing mode in some ways. We got really aggressive,” Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said. “When you see that, you think: ‘Well, why? Why did that happen?’ Over-aggressiveness can be just feeling yourself a little and wanting to do more and just trying to get big instead of being satisfied hitting hard drives.”

BOXSCORE: Colorado 10, Twins 6

MLB standings

Zebby Matthews, making his first Twins start since he suffered a strained right shoulder in early June, was game but hardly unsolvable for the Rockies, who improved to 50 games below .500 (24-74) with the victory. Matthews (1-2) allowed one or two hits in all five innings he appeared in and surrendered five runs — each of them coming with two outs.

“Yeah, we definitely didn’t finish innings the way you like to. Two outs, letting those runs in,” Matthews said. “I was staying focused, trying to execute pitches. Obviously, I didn’t do that quite like I wanted to.”

Well, he wasn’t the only one. Eight of the Rockies’ 10 runs scored with two outs.

“We were so close to getting out of stuff and then gave up a big swing. It was tough,” Jeffers said. “There were a lot of baserunners today. The reality of playing here is a lot of stuff falls. You’re going to have traffic, and we just didn’t get out of it.”

Ryan Ritter’s second-inning double, for instance, scored Tovar with the Rockies’ first run. McMahon’s home run into the bullpens tied the score. And after Matthews gave up back-to-back singles to Mickey Moniak and Hunter Goodman to open the fifth inning, he was removed in favor of Brock Stewart, who needed only five pitches to get two quick outs.

Stewart’s sixth pitch, however, was a 96-mph fastball in the middle of the strike zone, and the 23-year-old Tovar unloaded on it. It traveled 433 feet, more than enough to sail over Byron Buxton’s glove as he reached over the wall in a game effort to catch it.

It was the third home run that Stewart has allowed this season, and given his high-leverage role in the Twins bullpen, it’s no surprise that each of them has given the Twins’ opponent a lead they didn’t have moments earlier, and ultimately a win.

“It’s going to be challenging when you give up multi-run homers. Yeah, we have to find ways to simply avoid that,” Baldelli said. “They had the big swings when they needed big swings.”

Justin Topa allowed the Rockies to widen their lead with two runs in the sixth. The Twins threatened by loading the bases without a hit in the eighth against reliever Juan Mejia, and Clemens again delivered with a two-run double. But Correa struck out to end the inning.

“Didn’t pick up the slider, so it was a tough at-bat,” Correa said. “He made two great pitches where I felt I could not do anything with them, and then he threw a really good slider that looked like a fastball.”

Goodman added a two-run homer off Anthony Misiewicz in the eighth inning — with two outs, of course — to widen the Rockies’ lead once more, and the Twins responded with an RBI double by Harrison Bader in the ninth.

But Colorado’s 16-10 advantage in two games over the Twins — the first time this season the Rockies have won back-to-back games at Coors Field — is their second-biggest two-game run total of the season. All in front of packed houses, 79,890 combined fans over the first two games, including the biggest crowd to see the Twins this season since Opening Day in St. Louis.

Meanwhile, the loss ended the Twins’ streak of three straight series won. The three-game set concludes Sunday at 2:10 p.m. Central.