With two months to go, the Minnesota Twins set a record with their ninth five-homer game of the season.
Lucas Giolito was on the losing end of history. He gave up four of them over five innings, including three to Nelson Cruz on three different pitches.
Cruz took him deep on a 2-2 plate-splitting fastball in the first. Two innings later, Giolito threw a decent first-pitch curveball, but Cruz fished it out and hammered it out to center for a 3-1 lead.
Capping it off, Cruz watched a first-pitch slider on the outer half for strike one in the fifth, but when Giolito came back with an elevated changeup in the same spot, he lifted it out to right center for another two-run homer.
(And two batters before that, Max Kepler got on top of an elevated fastball and crushed it to a similar spot for the first of two two-run shots that inning.)
Giolito departed after giving up seven runs over five innings, and Jimmy Cordero gave up the fifth homer to Miguel Sanó an inning later.
The White Sox were able to answer one of those homers, as Yoan Moncada took Jose Berríos into the White Sox bullpen to briefly tie the game at 1 in the second.
Afterward, the Twins played with bazookas while the White Sox chose slappers only.
In one particularly regrettable moment, Leury García bunted Adam Engel to third with nobody out in the third. Engel was lucky to be on second, as he attempted to advance to second on a hot shot that deflected off Luis Arraez's glove. Engel was a dead duck at second by 25 feet, but he reversed course and started a rundown. When Jonathan Schoop couldn't catch him and flipped to Sanó, he did so in too close of proximity to Engel, who stuck out his elbow and initiated the interference.
Yet even with the gift of Schoop's oops and multiple runs to overcome, García moved him to third. Engel never scored, because Jon Jay shanked one back to the mound and Jose Abreu lined out to center.
Ironically, García ended up driving home the second Sox run with the third straight single of the inning, scoring Yolmer Sánchez. (Jay, who had an uncharacteristically ugly game, once again couldn't get a runner from home with fewer than two outs.)
The Twins put the third Sox run on the board in the sixth courtesy of a three-error inning. Yoan Moncada reached when Sanó couldn't stop his grounder, moved to third when he couldn't scoop Schoop's throw on a grounder to second, then scored on an AJ Reed sac fly. James McCann moved to second on Eddie Rosario's vain airmailed throw, then took third when the throw skipped past Mitch Garver.
Bullet points:
*Abreu got doubled up on a deep Moncada drive to left when he failed to retouch second base on his way back to first.
*At the 100-game mark, the White Sox are on pace for 73 wins.
Record: 45-55 | Box score | Highlights
