Lots of ways to describe the Twins collapse, but to me perhaps the most vivid is suggested by this tweet from Aaron Gleeman, who covers the team for The Athletic. On May 24, the Twins beat the Tigers, 2-0, in a game at Target Field. The win lifted their record to 27-16, eleven games over .500. They lost their next two games and were never again eleven games above .500. They hung around first place into September, because divisional rivals Detroit and Kansas City were hapless, and the division's better teams, the Guardians and the White Sox, were, like the Twins, stuck around the .500 mark. These circumstances tempted some, certainly including me, to think that the Twins were possibly the best team in baseball's weakest division. But if you throw out those first 43 games, the Twins have to be grouped with the Tigers and Royals, not with the Guardians and White Sox. Here are the records of the division's 3rd- through 5th-place finishers over the season's last 119 games:
Twins 51-68
Tigers 51-68
Royals 50-69
I know, the first 43 games count too, but, from the time the weather warmed to the end of the season, the Twins were as bad as anyone in baseball's worst division.
Yes, injuries. I was watching one evening a week or two ago when, trailing by a run with the opponents batting in the bottom of the eighth inning, the Twins brought in a new pitcher, which elicited from play-by-play guy Dick Bremer the hopeful comment, "If Thielbar [or whoever it was] can work out of trouble, the Twins have due up in the ninth the middle of their order." I can't remember if the pitcher got out of the jam, but it hardly matters, because "the middle of the order" was Gio Urshela, Jake Cave, and Gary Sanchez. You can imagine the fire power lurking in the bottom of our batting order, on the off chance one of those guys reached base! Actually, Urshela had a nice year for the Twins, but he's not anything like a major league cleanup hitter. Cave and Sanchez? Nothing against them, but neither one hit .215 or had an on-base percentage of .285. By this point in the season, of course, the team on the Injured List could have beaten the team we were putting on the field, as Team Can't Play included outfielders Buxton, Larnach, and Kepler, middle infielders Polanco and Lewis, first baseman Kirilloff, catcher Jeffers, and most of our best starting pitchers: Maeda, Mahle, Paddack, Dobnak (and relievers such as Coulombe, Alcala, and Stashak).
I don't know what to say about injuries. If you're hurt and can't play, you're hurt and can't play. See what I mean about having nothing to say? But I will say that guys sure seem to get hurt a lot! I feel guilty about enjoying professional football, as it's obvious the players are damaging themselves, but maybe I should feel similarly about baseball? Also, my dim fan's impression is that when a guy gets hurt, there is an official announcement concerning the nature of the injury and how long the player will be sidelined. Then, if it's two weeks, the two weeks pass, and then two more weeks pass, and when a month after that he still isn't playing, I've mostly forgotten the guy's on our team as there has been no updated diagnosis or prognosis that I'm aware of. It's as if The Injured List is a waiting room in another galaxy.
I'm happy that Luis Arraez won the batting championship (though I can also imagine Aaron Judge complaining in his soul that he was deprived of the Triple Crown by a banjo hitter). The other Twin postmortems I've seen invariably name Jose Miranda as a bright spot, and who would disagree, but is rookie reliever Jhoan Duran invisible? He appeared in 57 games, pitched 67.2 innings, allowed just 14 earned runs (about one every five innings), had 8 saves, no blown saves, 18 holds, a WHIP of 0.98, and 5.6 strikeouts for each walk issued. Deserves a mention!
Pitchers and catchers report for spring training in about four months.
Comments