Royals complete three-city road trip on upswing with 6-5 win over Twins

The Kansas City Royals closed out a three-city road swing in Minnesota on Sunday by turning a series win into a finishing flourish. At Target Field, they scored enough early and held on late for a 6-5 victory over the Minnesota Twins, a result that capped a 10-game road stretch that had started with trouble and ended with renewed confidence.

Noah Cameron set the tone on the mound, giving the Royals what they needed most after a rough stretch. In six strong innings, he allowed just three hits and one unearned run, with no walks and seven strikeouts. Minnesota jumped ahead in the second inning after Bobby Witt Jr.’s error created an early scoring opportunity, but Cameron kept the damage limited and gave Kansas City a chance to respond.

Kansas City’s offense answered with a mix of patient at-bats and timely contact. The Royals tied the game two innings later with back-to-back doubles from Vinnie Pasquantino and Nick Loftin, a simple rally that moved runners into scoring position without forcing the kind of swing that can turn a close game into a chase. Then in the fifth, their middle of the order added more structure: Witt struck out, but Maikel Garcia responded immediately with a go-ahead opposite-field single, and Starling Marte capped the inning with a three-run homer, his first long ball of the season, to turn the lead into a four-run cushion.

Even with Minnesota threatening, the Royals did not abandon the small-ball approach that had begun to show up more often during the trip. They added another run in the eighth when Carter Jensen brought a run home with a sacrifice fly, stretching the lead and forcing the Twins to keep generating traffic to have any real chance late.

The final frame still produced drama. In the ninth, Josh Bell hit a three-run homer off reliever Beck Way, cutting the deficit to one. Victor Caratini followed with an RBI single against Lucas Erceg, setting the tying run on second base and the winning run on first. Erceg eventually recorded the final out, but the Royals still had to earn the last step of the win rather than simply manage it.

The broader takeaway was how Kansas City finished the trip compared to how it started. The Royals began by getting swept in Texas, a stretch that extended a six-game losing streak, and they still faced seven more games in two cities before returning home. Things shifted in Cincinnati with a series win, and in Minnesota the Royals played well enough to win three times in four games. With Sunday’s victory, they ended the road swing 5-5, which is only a neutral mark in the standings, but it represents a meaningful swing in direction after the early setbacks.

What to watch next is whether Kansas City can turn that late-trip steadiness into consistency at home. The combination of Cameron’s control, Marte’s timely power, and the Royals’ ability to stack runs in a structured way gave them a blueprint for what “good baseball” looked like on Sunday. The late inning scare also underlines the central question for the season ahead: can the bullpen execute cleanly when the opposition is swinging for momentum, even if the first eight innings have gone well?