Detroit Tigers at Minnesota Twins

MINNEAPOLIS – Very little stays constant over six months of baseball. It’s rare that all facets of a team go well or poorly at once. There’s never been a team that only wins or loses one way. But one thing has been true all year for the 2026 Twins: the best version of this team rakes. They are raking again.​ For the second straight night, Minnesota blew out the visiting Tigers, this time by a 15-2 count thanks in large part to a 10-run sixth inning. It was their second straight double-digit output, after going five weeks without one. The top of the order has produced in recent weeks even through a relative overall dry spell. Now the sluggers in the middle of the order are heating up, and on top of that, Minnesota has added a pair of dynamic young players to the 8 and 9 spots. Even with Byron Buxton on the injured list, the current version of the Twins' lineup looks awfully dangerous, and not a minute too soon. “Our lineup was No. 1 in baseball for a long time,” said Royce Lewis, who hit a monstrous three-run homer to straightaway center. “It’s hard to stay No. 1 no matter what you’re doing stats-wise in this league and in this game, so it comes in waves. And I could tell as a team, we were all kind of just in that downward wave and it’s going to be really nice to go into this final stretch and everyone’s starting to get hot.” Lewis’ blast, a 427-foot shot that chased starter Troy Melton, was the defining blow in a 10-run sixth inning that turned a fairly comfortable lead into a rout. It equaled their biggest inning of the year and gave them consecutive double-digit games for the first time since June 2-3, 2025. Kody Clemens got it all going with a solo homer in the first, and some defensive shenanigans helped the Twins put three on the board in the fifth against another hard-throwing young Tigers starter in Melton. It turns out that would have been enough for Connor Prielipp and the Twins bullpen, but the home team was nowhere near done. When Lewis hammered a three-run homer to straightaway center in the sixth, Minnesota was only getting started. A Luke Keaschall RBI single and Brooks Lee’s sac fly stretched the lead to 9-1, and Ryan Jeffers hit his third homer in three days to make it 12-1. Kaelen Culpepper’s two-run single was the final blow in the 15-batter, 10-run, eight-hit outburst. “Very impressive,” said manager Derek Shelton. “Melton’s got good stuff and we just continued to add on. I think if you look down our lineup, everybody contributed in som