Gary Sanchez hit a first-inning grand slam, Byron Buxton homered twice and the Minnesota Twins belted six home runs en route to a 10-4 victory over the Seattle Mariners on Sunday afternoon in Minneapolis.
Carlos Correa, Max Kepler and Jorge Polanco also homered for Minnesota which won for the first time in three games this season. Sanchez also had an RBI double to finish with five RBIs and Buxton and Polanco also each finished with two hits.
Bailey Ober (1-0) picked up the win allowing four runs on four hits over five innings. He walked two and struck out four.
Mitch Haniger homered, doubled and drove in three runs and Adam Frazier went 2-for-5 with an RBI and a run scored for Seattle. Marco Gonzales (0-1) suffered the loss, allowing six runs (two earned), including three home runs, on six hits over two innings.
Buxton was coming off a 436-foot two-run home run in the eighth inning of Saturday’s 4-3 loss to the Mariners. For his encore Sunday, he sandwiched solo home runs down the left-field line in his first two at-bats around Sanchez’s 446-foot blast to give Minnesota a 6-0 lead after two innings.
Sanchez’s first homer of the season came after Frazier kept the five-run first-inning alive when he mishandled Alex Kirilloff’s grounder for an error to load the bases with two outs. Sanchez then hammered a 2-2 sinker into the third deck in left.
Seattle cut the lead to 6-4 in the third on an RBI bloop single by Frazier — driving in J.P. Crawford, who had doubled — and Haniger’s three-run homer.
Kepler extended the lead to 7-4 in the bottom half of the inning with a homer into the second deck in right, and Polanco made it 8-4 in the fourth with a 424-foot blast to right-center. Correa hit the longest homer of the day in the sixth, a 458-foot drive into the third deck in left-center and his first home run with the Twins, to increase the lead to 9-4.
Sanchez ended the scoring with an RBI double into the gap in right-center in the seventh, driving in Gio Urshela, who had walked.
–Field Level Media
