Balks will haunt.

The Twins are just seven games into their season and, already, two balks from their starting pitchers have proven costly.

The second, which was called on Joe Ryan on Thursday, moved runners to second and third in the fourth inning. With the infield drawn in, they both came around to score as a Brendan Rodgers single that got past a diving Carlos Correa to break open a tied game.

The Twins, with an offense that virtually disappeared after the early innings, would never lead after that, dropping their home opener 5-2 to the Houston Astros in front of announced crowd of 36,783 fans at Target Field on Thursday afternoon.

“It’s not a mistake you’re going to see Joe make very often,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “I don’t want to say ever again, but maybe never again. You might never see him do that again.”

The game couldn’t have started much better for Ryan and the Twins (2-5). The starter struck out all three batters he faced in the first and the Twins jumped out to a two-run lead in the bottom of the inning.

Matt Wallner jump-started the offense, tripling off the wall in center field. He scored on a Correa ground ball. After Byron Buxton beat out an infield hit and stole second, he scored the second run of the game on a Trevor Larnach RBI knock.

But the Twins couldn’t do much else off Astros (3-4) starter Hunter Brown, who lasted six innings and struck out eight in his outing. At one point in the game, Houston pitchers retired 15 straight Twins batters, a streak that was only broken up by an eighth-inning error.“Today, probably of all the games that we’ve played this year, we ran into some excellent pitching,” Baldelli said. “When you have guys that really have very good stuff and execute at the same time, it becomes tough. … You’ve got to have a few big moments and guys put great swings on tough pitches to make it happen ad we didn’t do that today.”

The Astros, meanwhile, erased the Twins’ lead almost immediately with Ryan surrendering back-to-back home runs to Christian Walker and Jeremy Peña to begin the second. Two more runs scored in the fourth after the costly balk and a fifth run scored in the sixth on consecutive doubles off reliever Louie Varland.

The balk was Ryan’s second of his career and it came as the pitch clock was winding down while Ryan and catcher Ryan Jeffers were trying to get on the same page.

“We were going through every pitch but the one I wanted to throw,” Ryan (0-1) said. “And the clock had already been down. It’s on me. I’ve got to step off there and use the disengagement, get the right pitch.”

Instead, he said, he lifted his front foot before his right foot “by a hair,” and a balk was called.

Houston scored its five runs without the help of nine-time All-Star Jose Altuve. The veteran, now playing left field for the Astros, struck out five times for the first time in his career, the last coming in the ninth with some of the crowd on its feet cheering.

It was the only thing the hometown fans had to cheer about for much of the day.

“After really the first couple of innings, it didn’t come together offensively,” Baldelli said. “We’re looking at some good arms. Everyone they put out there is a high-end type of arm, but we’ve got to do a little bit better than that offensively.”