Twins advance with stellar pitching (and huge pickoff) to meet Astros

MINNEAPOLIS — Entering this postseason, the prospect of a run deeper into October might have seemed unfathomable to a fanbase that knew only playoff heartbreak for the better part of two decades — but the Twins finally shook off the weight of history on Tuesday.

So, why not these Twins? Why not this group?

They’re the ones who broke the losing streak — and they’re finally the team with the pitchers who can finish this job.

For the first time since 2002, the Twins are moving on in the postseason, following their 2-0 win over the Blue Jays on Wednesday in front of a sellout crowd of 38,518 at Target Field. They secured a two-game sweep of the best-of-three Wild Card Series and set up a matchup in the Division Series against the AL West champion Astros starting Saturday at Minute Maid Park.

“I always dreamed of what it would be like to win another series, and I was hoping we’d obviously do this a long time ago,” Twins president and CEO Dave St. Peter said. “It’s been more than two decades, but it’s surreal. I think we knew early on this team was built a little differently than the previous Twins teams.”

It’s simple, really. They got the playoff magic they needed from Correa and Royce Lewis — and plenty of it — but the backbone of it all was the pitching staff that allowed only one run across the two games, the very recipe that brought the Twins to this point, and the strength that so often paves the way for October success.

“I’ve never seen a pitching staff like this in my career,” Max Kepler said. “It gives me the utmost hope to keep this going. Without them, we wouldn’t be here. You need pitching in the playoffs. We’ve been to playoffs before, when the pitching wasn’t like what it was today or yesterday. I have so much hope.”

Only the 2020 Braves allowed fewer runs in a playoff series of two or more games, as they blanked the Reds in a two-game sweep of the NL Wild Card Series.

And if there is such a thing as clutch pitching, Minnesota has it in Pablo López and Sonny Gray, who combined to allow one run across 10 2/3 innings as the most ironclad tandem atop the rotation the Twins have put up since this all began.

López and Gray entered the postseason as two of the top three qualified starters in MLB in limiting damage with men in scoring position. Gray pitched like that as part of his five shutout innings in Game 2, escaping three jams of multiple runners on base.

“It’s unbelievable,” Lewis said. “That’s what they’ve been doing all year. They’re our two horses. When you can ride your horses like that and they can lead us to victory, that makes it that much sweeter.”

That most significantly included the pivotal moment in the fifth, when Gray picked Vladimir Guerrero Jr. off second base with Minnesota up, 2-0. Toronto had been threatening with men on second and third and Bo Bichette at the plate, but Carlos Correa had noticed earlier that the crowd noise would prevent runners from hearing their third-base coach tell them to get back.

The Twins took advantage.

“For me, it was just about executing the play, but for him to have that awareness is what makes him special,” Gray said.

López and Gray made sure the Twins could stay on their pitching plan, and the bullpen did the rest, throwing 7 1/3 scoreless innings — all of them coming in tight, high-pressure situations. Louie Varland, Caleb Thielbar, Brock Stewart, Griffin Jax and Jhoan Duran rose to the moment better than Minnesota could have hoped.

This isn’t one of those Twins bullpens of old that had soft spots and soft-tossers; it’s a group of guys with big-time stuff for big-time moments — like when Thielbar shrugged off a potential go-ahead double that landed inches foul and induced a key 6-4-3 double play off the bat of Matt Chapman to strand the bases loaded in the sixth.

There might have been some trepidation when the fire and lights of Duran’s stadium introduction gave way to a lengthy mound visit during which the training staff attended to a cut on his thumb — but minutes later, he finished striking out the side with a 101.3 mph fastball that might have seemed inconceivable to Twins fans of the past but has now simply become part of the routine.

“We’re just really good at baseball,” Emilio Pagán said. “We all believe that. We don’t say it arrogantly. We don’t say it like we’re better than anybody else. We’re just really good. The organization has done a great job and put us in a lot of spots to be successful.”

Down the stretch, it was so easy to get caught up in the thrills of Lewis’ grand slam heroics and the emergence of fellow rookies Edouard Julien and Matt Wallner that the pitching staff that had been the core of this team’s success from start to finish might have gotten overlooked.

But if this series was any indication — and, frankly, if playoff history is any indication — it’s the pitching staffs that make October baseball tick.

The Twins had a great one, finishing fourth in MLB in WAR as a staff, per FanGraphs, including the second-best rotation WAR and a bullpen that they fortified down the stretch by adding electric raw stuff from Varland, Stewart and Chris Paddack.

This Wild Card Series was a battle of two of the best pitching staffs the AL had to offer — and the Twins left little doubt that they had the better of the groups at Target Field this week.

The only question that remained was whether these pitchers would falter under the bright lights of the playoffs. Duran had, in fact, admitted that the pressure of the Twins’ clinching game against the Angels a few weeks ago made him nervous.

“I saw the guys being themselves,” López said. “Just because the stage got bigger, the lights got brighter, they didn’t change their approach. They still wanted to get strike one, get ahead, stay ahead. I mean, regardless of who was in the box, they made the pitches they wanted to make when they wanted to make them.”

They’ve passed their first test — and they’re bringing their confidence with them to Houston.

“We’re over that initial hump,” Ryan Jeffers said. “I think we play free from here on out. We’re over that nervousness. We’re over that, ‘We’ve got to win a game. Now, we’ve got to win a series.’

“Now, it’s like, ‘Let’s just go have fun.’”