MINNEAPOLIS — It felt like a big welcome-to-Minnesota party at Target Field on Wednesday, with Brooks Lee playing his first big-league game and David Festa making his first home start.

The response from the Minnesota Twins' prospects was decidedly divergent.

Lee collected both his first hit, a fourth-inning line-drive single to center, and first RBI, a nearly identical liner in the seventh inning that brought home Byron Buxton.

But the celebration over the first-rounder's arrival, because of Royce Lewis' latest injury-list stint, was muted by Festa's third-inning blowup, a nine-batter, five-run ordeal that relegated the Twins to a 9-2 loss to the Detroit Tigers.

Festa's second Twins start was just as hard to fathom as his first, when the right-hander didn't allow a hit for three innings in Arizona, then gave up six of them, five of them consecutively, in the fourth.

This time, he looked poised and confident for two innings, Detroit's only hit coming when Buxton dove but couldn't catch a sinking line drive. Festa threw first-pitch strikes to 17 of the 24 hitters he faced, and regularly reached 96 mph with his fastball.

Suddenly, however, he drove his game into the ditch in the third inning, again allowing six hits, five of them in a row, including Tiger catcher Carson Kelly's first career grand slam.

Before he could catch his breath, Festa left his next pitch, a changeup, in the middle of the plate, and Wendell Pérez bashed it into the planters above the wall in right-center.

Two innings later, Festa gave up a triple off the right-field wall to Colt Keith, and Riley Greene drove him in with a blast over the seats and onto the right-field plaza.

Festa has pitched 10 innings in his two starts for the Twins, and in seven of them, he has allowed a combined two hits and one run. The other three? 14 hits and 11 runs, ballooning his ERA to 10.80. And this time, there was no 13 runs of support to rescue him, as there were in Arizona last week.

That's because Tigers right-hander Keider Montero, a rookie whom the St. Paul Saints have beaten twice this season with seven runs in just 6 2/3 innings, had the night — also in his second career start — that Festa had hoped for. Montero wasn't as efficient, allowing a baserunner in all but one of the seven innings he pitched in, but he repeatedly pitched out of trouble.

Only Christian Vázquez, who led off the third inning with his third home run, a fly ball into the bullpens, could drive a run home until Lee connected in the seventh.

Lee received several long ovations from the announced crowd of 25,053, the first as he strode to the plate in the second inning. But Lee didn't swing the bat, taking three strikes among the five pitches he looked at.

He didn't make that mistake two innings later, picking out a high fastball on a 1-1 count and driving it up the middle and over the infield, to rousing applause. And in the seventh, after Buxton doubled to the bullpens in left-center, Lee cracked a first-pitch slider into center to drive in his first run.

With that, Lee matched the two-hit performance he produced against Montero just 12 days earlier, in the Saints' 4-2 win over Toledo.

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