Doumit homers from both sides, Twins beat Royals

Doumit homered from both sides of the plate and drove in four runs to lead the Twins to a 7-5 victory over the Kansas City Royals on Sunday.

Doumit became the third Twins player to go deep from both sides in a game. The others were Chili Davis (1992) and Roy Smalley (1986).

"That's great company," Doumit said.

And the home runs were no-doubters.

"I had a pretty good idea" that both were out, Doumit said.

Doumit homered to lead off the second inning swinging left-handed. He opened the sixth with his ninth home run, batting right-handed against reliever Tim Collins. It was Doumit's sixth career multihomer game, the second this season.

Hitting .354 in his past 26 games, Doumit also had a two-run single with two outs in a four-run third to match his career high for RBIs.

"Home runs are always great, but with the bases loaded, him driving it the other way was huge," Twins manager Ron Gardenhire said. "I thought that was an impressive at-bat. It was a fastball away and he stayed on it and didn't try to do too much with it and shot it the other way. That was a big hit for us. It was a big day for him and for us."

The Twins signed Doumit to a $3 million, one-year contract as a free agent in the offseason.

"We're really happy we got a chance to get this guy," Gardenhire said. "It's paying dividends for us. He's a force in the middle of our lineup. He can do a lot of things — outfield, catch, DH, first base a little. And he can swing the bat.

"I knew we had to get him in there today some way or another. We were looking at lot of different routes. I wanted to keep Doumit's bat in there and it worked out pretty good."

Samuel Deduno (1-0), who made six relief appearances the past two years with San Diego and Colorado, picked up his first big league victory. He limited the Royals to one run and six singles over 6 1-3 innings.

Lorenzo Cain's sacrifice fly in the fourth scored Mike Moustakas with the only run off Deduno, who was making his third major league start.

"His ball-to-strike ratio was a lot better," Gardenhire said. "He threw the ball over a lot more. He was very effective and got us deep into the game."