Late Saturday, after rain, lightning, high winds and perhaps locusts rapidly descended on Target Field, the Twins were one out away from losing for the seventh time in eight games.
They trailed the Giants by two runs in the bottom of the ninth, on a night the Guardians would rally to win and with September looming.
With two outs and one on in the ninth, Luis Arraez walked. Then Carlos Correa drove in a run with a single. Then Jake Cave tied the score with his own RBI single, sending the game into extra innings and toward a Twins victory.
Sunday afternoon, the Twins were down by a run in the fourth when Cave hit a two-run homer. He would hit a two-run double in the fifth, producing four RBI in the Twins' 8-3 victory over San Francisco.
In 16 hours, Cave, a reserve outfielder who has spent most of the season with Class AAA St. Paul, made possible two crucial victories. A couple more weekends like this, and he will be dubbed the Cavior, and all who board the Green Line will be required to wear graying beards and pay lefthanded.
"There's always pressure in those situations," Cave said. "You've just got to try to keep your heartbeat as low as possible. It's not always that easy."
Winning, in modern baseball, takes more than a village. For the Twins, it takes a two-city metropolis linked by public transit.
Cave wasn't the only occasional St. Paul Saint to contribute on Sunday. The Twins used 14 players. Six, including starting pitcher Aaron Sanchez, have spent time this season in St. Paul, and of those six, only one is in the big leagues because he has earned an everyday job — budding star Jose Miranda.
Cave has bounced between the big leagues and the minors ever since he joined the Twins organization in 2018. He's mostly been Byron Buxton's body double, but this year, despite the Twins' constant callups, Cave didn't play in a big-league game until Aug. 2, even though he put up strong numbers in St. Paul.
From Aug 2 to Aug 26, he had six hits. From late Saturday night to early Sunday morning, he had three, and would have had four if LaMonte Wade Jr., who competed with Cave for at-bats with the Twins in 2019 and 2020, hadn't robbed Cave of an extra-base hit with a difficult sliding catch near the left field line in the second.
In each of the past two games, Cave found himself on base, pounding his hands together and gesturing to a celebrating dugout. It's the calm before the nerves that helped him get there.
"A lot of tricks," he said with a smile. "Some work better than others. You know, it's just my job. This is what I do. I'm a professional baseball player and I'm paid to come up and in situations that a lot of people wouldn't be able to keep their heartrate down. Sometimes, we can't either. So you take deep breaths, self-talk, stay with what you're doing. Know what I mean?"
Few do. Baseball is one of those rarefied professions in which the top .1% of performers become rich as a Buffett (Jimmy or Warren), and the rest of the top 1% might live out of an apartment in an unchosen town while awaiting a call to the bigs.
Cave had a long wait this year. He might have arrived just in time.
"I've always been a person that thinks there's a lot of people who are out of the game now that say that they got screwed," Cave said. "In reality, they might have been in some places they didn't want to be and they didn't perform. I didn't want to be in AAA, but not performing was not going to help me or anybody."
Late Saturday night, he called his family on his drive home. Too wired to go to bed, he watched "House of the Dragon" on HBO, and waited for the adrenaline to subside. He had another game to play, and he might again find himself walking to the plate at Target Field, trying to calm his ambitious heart.
