Jorge Polanco's 451-foot blast was the Twins' lone run, but it was enough to carry them to their eighth straight home victory.
MINNEAPOLIS — Target Field is turning into Death Valley, at least for visiting teams.
Sonny Gray returned to the Twins' rotation with four shutout innings on Saturday, four relievers held Oakland to one hit over the final five innings, and Minnesota ran its streak to 23 consecutive innings at Target Field without allowing an earned run.
Jorge Polanco's 451-foot blast was the Twins' lone run, but it was enough to carry them to their eighth straight home victory, 1-0 over the Athletics.
Visiting teams have scored only 37 runs in the season's first 14 games at Target Field, a 2.64-per-game average that's the lowest in the American League. During the Twins' eight consecutive wins in Minneapolis, no team has scored more than four runs, and they've managed one run or fewer five times.
Gray's return after missing three weeks with a strained right hamstring was the day's most heartening development for the Twins, but it was tempered by a worrisome development in their lineup. Byron Buxton left the game after seven innings, apparently after feeling some soreness in a knee.
Still, the day was a triumph for Twins' pitching, which never allowed an Athletics baserunner to reach third base. Gray, scheduled to make a rehab start for Class AAA St. Paul on Saturday but activated by the major-league team a couple of hours before game time instead, allowed two singles and walked two hitters, but never put more than one runner on in the same inning. He hit 93 mph with his fastball, induced 16 swing-and-misses among his 66 pitches, and struck out seven of the 15 A's hitters he faced, five of them looking.
Danny Coulombe, Griffin Jax and Jhoan Duran took it from there, surrendering only one hit, a two-out Christian Bethancourt double off Jax in the seventh inning. Though a two-out walk and hit batter in the ninth put him in jeopardy, Duran struck out Bethancourt to end it. With five strikeouts, Duran earned a two-inning save, only the second by a Twins pitcher in a one-run game over the past three seasons.
Oakland starter James Kaprielian, who returned from his own rehab stint last week after suffering elbow soreness last month, was perhaps even more impressive than Gray, lasting 99 pitches in his second MLB start of the year. But his 99th pitch was his undoing — it was a 2-2 curveball low and across the middle, and Polanco unloaded on it. The second baseman drilled it into the Delta Sky Suite club above center field, only the eighth player in Target Field history — oddly, all Twins — to reach that target.
Minnesota finished with only five hits, but recorded its second 1-0 victory of the season.
