Liriano hits wall as Twins lose opener

MINNEAPOLIS — Francisco Liriano didn't just hit the wall in the sixth inning, he slammed into it and the Minnesota Twins tumbled to a series-opening loss to their October nemesis.

Liriano frittered away his five shutout innings by giving up big hits to Mark Teixeira and Curtis Granderson, and Teixeira's two-run homer off reliever Jesse Crain in the seventh spurred the New York Yankees to a 6-4 victory over the Twins in Game 1 of their division series on Wednesday night.

This was no ambush by the Yankees. It was simply another confident comeback against the team that can't seem to beat them when it counts, as the Twins dropped their seventh straight postseason game to the pinstriped powerhouse.

Overall, they are 2-10 against the Yankees, including first-round losses in 2003, 2004 and 2009.

This one really hurt on a night when they were on their way to beating Yankees ace C.C. Sabathia, with the rest of the rotation struggling behind him.

Liriano finally showed the Twins — and the rest of baseball — this season he could over come that Tommy John surgery by pitching a career-high 191 2-3 innings and winning 14 games.

The road back from the ligament replacement procedure in his elbow has been a long one, since that stellar 2006 rookie season was cut short when his arm started feeling funny from all those whipsaw pitches.

His downfall is often a lack of concentration. He's acknowledged more than once that he has trouble staying focused during critical situations with runners on base, blaming some of his bad innings on that.

Though the entire Twins team stumbled through a post-clinch funk, Liriano's last three regular-season starts were rough. Counting this outing, he has a 7.58 ERA in his last four turns — all of them losses.

Liriano needed 57 pitches to get through three innings, perhaps a harbinger for the fateful sixth. Considering the seriousness of the injury he came back from, and the leaps he made this summer from that laborious 2009 season, the Twins could hardly ask for more from the Dominican lefty.

He had that trusty slider spinning, getting everybody but Teixeira and Robinson Cano to swing and miss at strike three once. After walking Brett Gardner and giving up a single to Derek Jeter to start the third, Liriano settled in and retired 10 straight. He needed only nine pitches to finish the fourth and appeared in command until Teixeira tagged a one-out pitch in the sixth for a double.

"The first two at-bats he didn't miss many spots. The first four, five innings he was pretty dominant," Teixeira said. "The last inning we got him with a couple pitches up in the zone. Maybe missed a few pitches. A guy like him, if he's on, you're not going to hit him and we didn't in the first few innings."

All of a sudden, after rebounding from a rocket single by Cano that ruined the shutout by striking out Marcus Thames, Liriano was clinging to a one-run lead thanks to a sharp single by Jorge Posada.

Then came a soaring drive by Curtis Granderson that glanced off the out-of-town scoreboard in right-center for a two-run triple to give the Yankees the lead. The fans were instantly hushed, quickly deflated after experiencing so many agonizing defeats at the hands of New York.