Monstrous home runs rescue Twins in 10th after bullpen gives away four-run lead to Red Sox

BOSTON – This being Fenway Park, the comparisons tend to be straight out of Cooperstown mythology. Didn't Jim Rice once crush a home run that landed a block and a half up Landsdowne Street? Isn't there a grainy black and white somewhere of Mickey Mantle topping the light tower, his blast still rising?

This being 2021, Miguel Sano's addition to Fenway folklore comes with facts and figures and radar analysis. Sano's third-inning home run off Red Sox righthander Nick Pivetta, Statcast's algorithms determined Wednesday, left his bat at 116.7 mph, traveled 495 feet into the next ZIP code, and caused a gazillion looks of disbelief as it sailed over the farthest reach of the storied Green Monster and into the night beyond.

"It might be one of the 10 furthest balls ever hit in this stadium," calculated Twins manager Rocco Baldelli after the Twins' tumultuous 9-6 victory. "I haven't seen even a small portion of the home runs hit in this stadium, but I don't know how a human being can hit a ball much further than what Miguel Sano did today."

But it's almost as if the ghosts of Ted Williams and Babe Ruth intervened to prevent Sano's longest-in-the-majors-this-year blast to be properly memorialized. Because two mere-mortal home runs in this game were far more dramatic: Kyle Schwarber's missile into the center field seats off Alex Colome to tie the game in the ninth, and Josh Donaldson's tiebreaking rocket off Colome's former Twins understudy, Hansel Robles, into the Red Sox bullpen in the 10th.

OK, add Jake Cave's three-run follow-up, too, since those runs turned out to be necessary to hold on and end the Twins' four-game losing streak.

"Just because the Red Sox tie the game up doesn't necessarily mean the game is over. Far from it," Baldelli said of the roller-coaster finish. "Those two big home runs, I mean, those are difference-makers."

Well, so were Colome and Robles, perhaps the two biggest culprits in the Twins' bullpen failures this season. Perhaps there was some irony, then, in the Twins' surviving the implosion of one by victimizing the other.

Colome needed just six pitches to cough up the Twins' hard-earned two-run lead in the ninth inning. Kiké Hernandez led off with a double to straightaway center field, and Schwarber clobbered Colome's next pitch, tying the score and sending the crowd of 28,923 into a frenzy. It was the second consecutive blown save and sixth on the season for the Twins' righthander.

Then Robles, unloaded to Boston at last month's deadline, served up a five-run inning to his old team. Donaldson and Cave silenced the rowdy crowd with their home runs during the Twins' biggest extra-inning outburst since 2018.

"I don't have many at-bats off Robles, but obviously we've seen him pitch before," Donaldson said. "He threw me the first-pitch changeup, and I felt like I saw it pretty good. He came back with a fastball," and it wound up landing 415 feet away, about 10 feet shorter than Cave's encore.

Good thing they added on, too, since Ralph Garza surrendered two runs, including a solo home run to Hernandez, in the bottom of the 10th.

BOXSCORE: Twins 9, Red Sox 6 (10 innings)

But for all the histrionics at the end, it was Sano putting a baseball into orbit that impressed his team, and perhaps his opponents.

"I heard the sound of the bat [from] the dugout, and all of the guys just kind of looked at each other like, 'Did you guys just see that?' " said starter Bailey Ober, who pitched five scoreless innings. "It was pretty cool."

The burly first baseman has homered in three of his past four games, but none of them could match this one for sheer gargantuan awe. In fact, according to MLB's Statcast measurements, the rocket was the longest home run in MLB this season, and the second-longest ever hit by a Twin since the radar-based measurement system went online 14 years ago.

The longest? A blast that Sano hit in Target Field against Chicago's Ross Detwiler in 2019, a home run that traveled, by Statcast's reckoning, 1 foot farther.

"It's probably the furthest ball I've ever seen hit on a team I played for," Donaldson said.

"That should count for two."