Twins 5, White Sox 2: Raining on Michael Kopech’s parade

On Monday, the White Sox knocked Steven Gonsalves out of his MLB debut after just four outs.

Tonight, Michael Kopech’s first big-league debut only lasted two innings.

Fortunately, it was for a better reason. A 55-minute rain delay truncated Kopech’s night after just two scoreless innings. Jose Berrios continued after the delay for Minnesota, and maybe if Kopech also didn’t have to wait out of the bottom of the second, he could’ve stayed in the game.

Instead, Kopech and Sox fans had to settle for a two-inning teaser, and he showed enough to leave everybody wanting more. He struck out four over two innings, pitching around two inning-starting singles in the first, then freezing Joe Mauer on his last battle of the game.

With Kopech’s day cut off, the White Sox bullpen had its second long day out of the last three, and everybody in the stadium was overserved by the end of it.

Dylan Covey took the loss in this one, the result of no good deed going unpunished. Three days after throwing 102 pitches in a start, he almost got the game from the seventh inning through the ninth. He ended up one out short, leaving runners on first and second for Jace Fry, and Eddie Rosario’s flare dropped in front of Adam Engel for the go-ahead single.

The last two plays typified the effort over the last two innings.

On Rosario’s single, Engel — who didn’t get the cleanest break to the ball —  five-hopped a throw to third base, which Yolmer Sanchez let skip by him. Rosario beat the throw to second, and the throw back to third didn’t catch Joe Mauer off the bag.

Then Jorge Polanco shot a single past a diving Sanchez. Two more runs came home, but Polanco was thrown out by plenty at second to end the inning.

And yet it couldn’t beat what the White Sox and Twins teamed up to do in the eighth. Adam Engel led off with a single, only to get picked off — yet Mauer ran him most of the way to second, so far that he had nobody to flip the ball to. Tim Anderson then laid down a sac bunt, and Trevor May slipped fielding the ball, and the throw from the seat of his pants carried Mauer off the bag.

Anderson took off for second for some reason, and this time Mauer threw to second with plenty of time for Anderson to reverse course. Because Anderson was stuck, Engel tried for home, where he sustained a rundown long enough for Anderson to advance to third.

Not that it mattered, because Sanchez and Matt Davidson both struck out to end the inning.

In between, Avisail Garcia gunned down Jake Cave at the plate for the second out of the ninth, keeping the game tied. It was professional throw, catch and tag beating a good send. I don’t know how that play got in there.

Oh, and the fans who remained to the end of the game all started imitating Ric Flair for some reason.

While the rain delay forced lots of relievers into the mix, the first seven innings were rather conventional. Nicky Delmonico put the Sox up 1-0 with a homer, and Yoan Moncada tied it at 2 with a right-handed homer off lefty Gabriel Moya.

Then again, the Twins’ two-run fourth foreshadowed clownery. Davidson couldn’t make a diving stop on either of the grounders hit past him, the second of which scored a run. The guy who hit the second single, Robbie Grossman, then got caught in a rundown trying to steal second with Cave on third, and he extended the rundown long enough for Cave to score without a throw.

Bullet points:

*Jose Abreu was out of the lineup tonight, and he’ll be out of the lineup for a couple of weeks after undergoing outpatient abdominal surgery.

*The middle of the lineup looks less fearsome when it’s Davidson, Daniel Palka and Avi Garcia. They combined to go 1-for-12 with eight strikeouts.

*Joe McEwing managed his second straight game as Rick Renteria remained in Minnesota. He was discharged from the hospital during the afternoon after checking in on Monday for lightheadedness.

Record: 47-78 | Box score

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