On April 12th, the Minnesota Twins were trying to catch their breath on a scheduled off-day after losing a couple of clunkers to the Seattle Mariners. They had just lost their first series of the season but were still treading water at 5-4.
Little did they know, that would be their last day with a winning record.
Was that the turning point in what has devolved into a disappointing, punchless first quarter of the 2021 season?
If so, what exactly threw this team off the rails?
Maybe it has something to do with their old bully, Alex Rodriguez.
Last month, it was announced that A-Rod and his business partner, Marc Lore, had entered an exclusive negotiation window to buy the Minnesota Timberwolves. The date of that announcement? April 12th.
Maybe it was subconscious, but it’s almost like the Twins heard that news, and the ghosts of failures past crept back into their psyche. It was like the biggest bully from their high school decided to buy the house right next door. They might as well have replaced Target Center’s giant, light-up Bullseye the Dog sign that faces Target Field with a massive glowing A-Rod wagging his finger like Dikembe Mutombo.
Calling him a bully is not an exaggeration. Rodriguez’s stat line proves that he viewed the Twins as a punching bag throughout his career. He was the hot-shot jock, and the Twinkies were a scrawny kid that he could stuff into a gym locker.
In 150 career regular-season games against Minnesota, A-Rod slashed .320/.390/.620 with 51 home runs and 130 RBI. That’s a huge sample size of traumatic memories for Twins Territory.
Indeed, there may be no greater villain in the history of Twins baseball. However, the current group of Twins may have found a new nemesis: themselves.
In the last 30 games, their defense and pitching have hemorrhaged runs. From errors in the field (19 since April 12th) to giving up far too many home runs (1.6 HR/9 is the most in MLB) to passed balls behind the plate and even a botched rundown or two, the Twins can’t seem to stop hitting themselves.
Small mental mistakes at seemingly the most inopportune times have led to multiple implosions.
This club can’t seem to get out of their own head, and maybe that’s because the Big Bad Wolf still owns plenty of real estate in it.
You’d think the sale of a completely different franchise should have nothing to do with the Twins. The logic just doesn’t add up.
But logic would also tell you that a team with this much talent should not be this bad.
This is a team whose core broke the single-season home run record in 2019. They won back-to-back division championships. Their pitching staff accumulated 33.3 WAR over the past two seasons, the best in MLB. They added an ace pitcher, Kenta Maeda, who placed second in the Cy Young race last year. They built a foundation of young players such as Max Kepler, Miguel Sanó, and Jorge Polanco, who they signed to team-friendly extensions so that they could have the flexibility to splurge on a free agent who would put them over the top. Then they followed up on it by inking Josh Donaldson, a premier free-agent bat, just as fans have clamored for all these years.
They were good and, more importantly, they were fun to watch.
Twins baseball had been mostly enjoyable and successful since Rodriguez retired on Aug. 12th, 2016. From that day through the end of last season, the Twins had a 277-256 record and made three postseason appearances.
It’s like they finally got invited to the post-prom party at the rich kid’s house, and their peers started to learn their name.
Yet here we are in mid-May, and the Twins have a putrid 9-22 record since the Timberwolves’ sale was announced, with injuries to key contributors still mounting. The team is going through some bad growing pains, with their biggest bully right across the street to remind them just how badly they’ve been hurt before.
Maybe A-Rod’s dominance against the Twins in the playoffs planted the seeds for new tormentors to take his place. After all, he hit .390/.435/.683 against Minnesota in 10 postseason games, belting three home runs along the way. Teams such as the Houston Astros and Chicago White Sox saw their vulnerability and decided to pounce. Whatever success the Twins had since A-Rod’s retirement feels like years ago, just a memory in their yearbook that nobody signed.
It started getting late at that post-prom party, and a new crop of bullies pushed the Twins into the pool. Now they keep waiting for their feet to reach the bottom so that they can push themselves back up to the surface. But instead, they just keep sinking.
Hopefully, their thrilling win on Tuesday night can represent them emerging from the depths, soaked in the losses of this horrid first six weeks of the season. If this is the point where they turn things around, they’ll have to do it with the bully across the street, watching every step along the way.
