It all comes down to one game in the Bronx. After 162 regular season games, the Minnesota Twins are the first team in MLB history to lose 100 games and then make the playoffs next season. Their reward? A single-elimination game against an old nemesis. A team that has stood in their way dating back to the early 2000’s. A team that is despised from sea to shining sea. The New York Yankees.
Dating back to 2002, when the Twins avoided contraction and won their first of six AL Central championships, Minnesota’s collective record against New York is 31-78 (.284 winning percentage). In 2002, ‘03 and ‘09 the Twins did not win a single game against the Yankees. They have not taken a series from New York in that 15-year span.
“It’s a tough situation, going into one game,” said Twins manager Paul Molitor, “and the flip side — if there wasn’t a one-game scenario, we wouldn’t be playing at all. You gotta take your shot.”
I’ve always been a proponent of the one-game Wild Card playoff. It creates an added emphasis for a team to win its division, because they are guaranteed a five-game playoff series. But it also includes all teams that had a good regular season — so a team in a good division doesn’t get completely left out.
For instance, this season every AL team and all but two NL teams with a winning record will make the playoffs. The 83-win Milwaukee Brewers and 86-win St. Louis Cardinals will both miss the postseason this year, despite having winning records, but the Brewers were not eliminated until the final weekend — by the Cardinals.
The top-seeded Wild Card team may be upset that a club with an inferior record is allowed to eliminate them from the playoffs in one game, but therein lies the incentive to win the division
The top-seeded Wild Card team may be upset that a club with an inferior record is allowed to eliminate them from the playoffs in one game, but therein lies the incentive to win the division. The 93-win Arizona Diamondbacks might be upset that the 87-win Colorado Rockies have a chance to eliminate them, but it creates an inherent incentive next season for the Diamondbacks to beat up on the 104-win Los Angeles Dodgers that will be the No. 1 seed in the senior circuit.
Similarly, the 91-win Yankees might not feel that they are just as deserving as the 93-win Boston Red Sox, but they were in the running to win the AL East until the final weekend and have a very winnable game in front of them.
The Twins are 2-4 against the Yankees this season. Both wins came at home, by scores of 4-2 and 6-1, respectively, and they lost all three games in the Bronx by a combined score of 18-6. A one-game playoff is essentially a coin flip, but this has the feeling of a game where you call heads and get tails, or vice versa.
Twins fans looking for a sign of hope, however, need look no further than the 2-1 loss in the Minnesota’s first game at Yankee Stadium. Ervin Santana gave up two runs on seven hits in a 5.2-inning performance, but the Twins could not manage more than two runs against former Twin Jaime Garcia, who is 0-3 with a 4.82 ERA since being traded to the Yankees this season.
If the Twins offense, which has greatly improved this season, can do its job and Santana can repeat his performance, they have a chance. They will be facing Luis Severino, who they chased after he gave up three runs in three innings, and they are able to form a unique roster for the Wild Card game and then change it if they advance to the ALDS, so they can use Sano as a DH and deploy an army of relievers to keep the Yankees offense at bay.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KK653JkKSI
Molitor says he’s run multiple scenarios through his head, but in the end he’ll just have to adjust to whatever happens in the game. “It’s unavoidable that you think about it,” he said. “Reality is that very few actually happen the way you might try to plan for or imagine.
“The specifics come in the moment because of where we’re at in the score, and who’s up and all those things that you can’t exactly plan for, but I think you have to have a little bit of a plan. That’s just part of going into a game like this.”
Molitor says that this is what he signed up for when he took the job. He enjoyed being in the heat of a playoff race, liked spending the past few games determining who will be on the 25-man Wild Card roster once they clinched and feels he will thrive under pressure once the first pitch is thrown in the Bronx.
“It’s consuming, but when I took this job, this is something that I wanted to experience in this role, and so now I have that opportunity,” he said. “I’ve tried to enjoy it as much as I can, there’s just a lot of things to work through, including game scenarios. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the right people, looking at rosters and all those things. It’s gonna come down to guys going out there and playing well and pitching well, but I like that I’m in the position to have to make these decisions.”
The stakes are high for the St. Paul born manager, who spent the final three seasons of his Hall of Fame career with the Twins and has been a coach in the organization since 2005. Win and it will be hard for first-year executives Derek Falvey and Thad Levine not to give him an extension. Lose and they may let his contract expire, even with all the team has done in the regular season.
The Twins will be measured by how they do against the Yankees going forward. New York has a talented young team that should be in the postseason for years to come, just as they were during the 2002-10 stretch when Minnesota went 7-21 in the playoffs, including a 2-12 record against the Yankees, under former manager Ron Gardenhire. They are going to have to overcome the Yankee curse at some point, so they might as well start this season. After all, anyone can win one baseball game. Even the Twins in New York.
