Twins top Angels 10-5 to snap four-game skid

MINNEAPOLIS — The September Slump has been replaced, for one night at least, by Home Run Derby at Target Field.

Kyle Farmer, Matt Wallner and Carlos Santana each homered on Tuesday, and the Twins scored as many runs in the first five innings as they had in their last five games combined, snapping a four-game losing streak with a 10-5 victory over the Los Angeles Angels.

The 10-run outburst marked the first time since Aug. 21, 18 games earlier, that the Twins had reached double figures.

Farmer capped a four-run second inning against Los Angeles starter Griffin Canning by slugging a middle-of-the-plate changeup 10 rows up in the left field bleachers. It was Farmer’s team-high third home run of September — remarkable for a player who hit only two in the season’s first five months.

An inning later, Wallner blasted an 0-2 fastball from Canning onto the right-field plaza, at 444 feet the second-longest homer by a Twin this season. (Byron Buxton’s 457-foot rocket in Arizona last June was the longest.)

And in the fifth inning, following Trevor Larnach’s two-out walk, one of four times Larnach reached base, Santana took over the Twins’ home run lead by cracking his 21st of the year, and third this month, over the scoreboard in right-center.

Each home-run hitter was rewarded — hmm, given its age, that’s clearly not the right word — by getting to carry the team’s months-old “lucky sausage” during a congratulatory lap through the dugout. Heaven knows what the unrefrigerated meat smells like by now, four months after its first appearance in the Twins’ clubhouse, but it’s probably a measure of how desperate the Twins are for runs during their late-season slump that nobody seemed to care.

Especially since the win, only the Twins’ fifth in their last 16 games, allowed them to remain six games behind the Guardians in the AL Central, and 2 1/2 games behind the Royals in the wild-card race.

The Twins tacked on a couple more insurance runs in the sixth, with Wallner missing his second home run of the game by just a few feet. He settled for a two-run double.

No Twin has raised his game more over the past month than Pablo López, who collected his fifth consecutive victory and improved to 15-8. Lopez, who hasn’t left a game he was trailing since Aug. 6, became the first Twins pitcher in five seasons to reach 15 victories. Jake Odorizzi, 15-7 in 2019, was the most recent.

López allowed four runs over seven innings, or more than he had given up in his last four starts combined — but all were unearned, thanks to a fifth inning extended by second baseman Edouard Julien’s two-out fielding error in the fifth.

Taylor Ward followed with an RBI single, and López left a first-pitch sinker to Zach Neto across the middle. It landed about halfway up the vines in center field, a 428-foot blow.

But Lopez shook off the sudden rally to pitch two more shutout innings, striking out the final three hitters he faced to give him 10 whiffs for the game, the third time this year he’s reached double digits.

Louie Varland pitched the final two innings for the Twins, and allowed a ninth-inning run by walking Charles Leblanc, who immediately moved up to second base on defensive indifference. Jordyn Adams singled him home, spoiling Varland’s attempt for his first scoreless outing since June 11.

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