Detroit needed one game out of three and got it the hard way. The Tigers topped the Twins 11-6 on Wednesday night, salvaging the finale of a three-game set with a five-run 12th inning that started with a Spencer Torkelson home run and ended with Javier Baez clearing the bases. Two swings, one inning, whole series rescued.
Run the box math backward and you see how thin this was. Detroit finished with 11 and scored five in the 12th, which puts the game 6-6 after eleven innings. Eleven innings of nothing separating these two, and then the roof came off in about fifteen minutes.
What happened in the Tigers' 12-inning win over the Twins
Torkelson led off the 12th with a two-run shot, which tells you the automatic runner at second was already standing there when he came up. Under the extra-innings rule, a leadoff homer in the 12th is a two-run homer, and it flips a tie game into a two-run lead before the inning has a chance to develop. That is the swing that broke it.
Baez followed the door being kicked in with a bases-clearing double, and 6-6 became 11-6. The Twins did not answer in the 12th. Series over, plane boarded, one game banked out of three.
| The 12th inning, in numbers | |
|---|---|
| Score after 11 innings | 6-6 |
| Tigers runs in the 12th | 5 |
| Torkelson home run | 2 runs, leadoff |
| Baez double | bases clearing |
| Final | Detroit 11, Minnesota 6 |
Why the Torkelson home run matters for Detroit
Because of who hit it. Torkelson came to Detroit as the first pick in the 2020 draft, the kind of selection a franchise builds a decade of promises around, and his career has been a long argument between the projection and the production. Nights like this one are the argument going Detroit's way. A leadoff swing in the 12th of a game your team has already lost twice that week is not a stat-padding at-bat. That is the swing where somebody has to be the guy, and he was.
Baez is the other half of the story and the more complicated one. He arrived on a big multiyear free-agent deal and has spent his Detroit years being either the most electric player on the field or the most maddening, sometimes in the same at-bat. A bases-clearing double in the 12th is the version everybody signed up for.
checked the almanac: detroit has held the top overall pick three times in the draft era, and two of them came two years apart, casey mize in 2018 and torkelson in 2020. the whole rebuild was supposed to look like this inning.
What comes next for the Tigers and Twins
For Minnesota, this is the kind of loss that lingers longer than the standings suggest. You take the first two games of a home-style series script, you hold a good club even through eleven, and then one inning erases the whole week's feeling. Nothing in the record book says a five-run 12th counts double. It just feels that way in the clubhouse.
For Detroit, the value is smaller and realer: they did not lose three straight, and they got the finale in the least likely way available to them, from two bats they need to be dangerous in September. Extra-inning wins do not prove much about a roster. They do tell you a dugout was still awake in the 12th.
What I am watching next is whether Torkelson carries this. One home run is one home run, and I have been burned plenty of times treating a big swing as a turning point. But a hitter who has spent his career being measured against a draft slot just delivered in the most public inning available to him, and I want to see the next two weeks of at-bats before I decide what it meant.