Rangers roll past Twins for 16-4 victory

Phil Miller, The Minnesota Star Tribune on Jun 10, 2025

Published in Baseball

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It’s as if all this is scripted. The moment the Twins’ pitching rotation is diluted by shoulder injuries, they’re facing their former right-hander who would really look good in a Twins uniform right now.

Drama, comedy, tragedy — you decide. All the Twins know is, it kind of hurts to get beat by an old friend.

Tyler Mahle, who pitched only nine times during the two seasons he spent with the Twins after a big trade with Cincinnati, made his 13th start of the season for the Rangers on Tuesday and cruised to a 16-4 victory at Target Field.

The oft-injured Mahle wasn’t especially sharp, at least after starting with three shutout innings, allowing 10 hits and four runs over 5 2/3 innings. But his ERA stands at 2.34 after 77 innings this year, and he kept the damage from mounting as the Rangers kept providing more and more cushion for him to work with.

That damage came courtesy of Simeon Woods Richardson, pressed into MLB service again by Zebby Matthews’ shoulder injury, and the lonesome end of the Twins’ bullpen. Woods Richardson allowed seven runs, six earned, over 4 2/3 innings, allowing seven hits and walking three.

Justin Topa relieved him and recorded four outs, giving up three runs on four hits. And Jorge Alcalá, who has allowed runs to score in nine of his 22 appearances this year, watched his ERA balloon to 8.88 by giving up six runs while retiring only five batters. No Twins reliever struck out a batter, either.

Wait, Mahle starts and Jorge Alcalá gives up a fistful of runs? The Twins better hope that’s not a premonition, because the last time they witnessed that combination, it was the first game of their 12-27 collapse of 2024.

Woods Richardson was up to the task early on, holding the Rangers scoreless for three innings. But when Byron Buxton misplayed a Jake Burger fly ball — Buxton’s first error since May 1, 2021, and his first that wasn’t a throwing mistake since May 20, 2019 — things began to unravel. A walk, a double and a single drove three runs home.

Things got worse in the fifth inning, when three straight two-out hits by Evan Carter, Josh Jung and Adolis Garcia knocked Woods Richardson out of the game, the sixth time in nine starts this year that he has failed to complete five innings.

The Twins did their best to stay in it but couldn’t match the Rangers’ firepower, especially when Texas began blasting Alcalá for a six-run eighth. Ninth-place hitter Kyle Higashioka drove in five runs, and third baseman Josh Jung drove in four.

The Twins did manage a pair of runs in the fourth inning on back-to-back RBI singles by Ty France and Royce Lewis, added another on Ryan Jeffers’ two-out single in the fifth, and a final one on Matt Wallner’s solo home run, his fourth since being activated 10 days ago, in the sixth.