Somebody should eat the sausage! When the Minnesota Twins eventually lose, somebody should eat the rally sausage. Rocco Baldelli has advised against it, but what does he know? He doesn’t look like Emeril Lagasse to me. The Twins don’t have Gordon Ramsay perched on their dugout steps.
The Athletic’s Dan Hayes dialed up Elias Cairo, a charcutier, and he has no concerns. “I’d eat it,” Cairo told Hayes with a laugh. “In theory, charcuterie, the whole thing is to prolong the shelf life of a product, and the summer sausage is the ultimate product. It’s all science-based. … For something to reach shelf stability, it means it cannot go bad.”
If Cairo is willing to take a bite, Jeffers, Kyle Farmer, or hitting coach David Popkins can toss a slice down the hatch. Sausage isn’t real food anyway. It’s made in an underground lab by scientists in hazmat suits. Anyone who’s seen how the sausage gets made eschews the product. But when the Twins lose, if they eventually lose, they can’t abandon the lips and a-holes that saved their season.
The Twins must make the sausage a part of who they are. What better way than to consume it? We assume that they’ll lose again, although we may not see it happen. But if they do, they’ll need to regain whatever power that sausage provided to play meaningful baseball throughout the season. Beating the Chicago White Sox and Los Angeles Angels is one thing. Staying afloat against the Boston Red Sox, Seattle Mariners, Toronto Blue Jays, New York Yankees, and Cleveland Guardians is something else entirely.
Their 2024 campaign is already off to an inauspicious start. Regardless of team finances, nobody wants to hear that the Twins are cutting payroll a year after they won their first playoff series since 2002. It’s no fun when Jhoan Duran starts the year on the injured list, and Royce Lewis joins him after two at-bats. Carlos Correa just got off the IL; Byron Buxton recently joined it. Brooks Lee continues to have back spasms. Louie Varland and Chris Paddack got off to slow starts.
Now the Twins aren’t on Comcast.
It’s worth parsing through culpability before we learn whether the Twins just beat up on bad teams or started clicking like a team that was just in the ALDS. They have probably lost money in the past four years. Television revenue and season ticket holders drive most of any team’s finances, and Bally’s instability is affecting 12 teams, including the Atlanta Braves and Texas Rangers. Concessions and individual tickets don’t make up for multi-million dollar TV deals.
Season-ticket money drives revenue, though. Teams get the money up front and can invest it. Season ticket holders also create scarcity in the park. There are fewer seats to fill if there’s a season-ticket holder base of 25,000 than if it’s closer to 15,000. However, season-ticket revenue tends to delay a year because fans react to a team’s performance the season before.
To do some back-of-the-napkin math, many people likely would have bought season tickets after the 2019 season. However, teams played in front of empty crowds due to COVID. They played in front of partial-capacity crowds for part of 2021, and a combination of World Series aspirations and a slow start stymied interest in the team. Injuries piled up, creating another disappointing season in 2022, and payroll cuts stymied interest this season.
The Twins have the 19th-highest payroll in baseball ($128.25 million). TV revenue is tied to market size; there are two teams in the three largest markets (New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago), and Minnesota is the 15th-largest market. Therefore, they’re not going to spend like the New York Yankees, New York Mets, or Los Angeles Dodgers. However, in a vacuum, they should be able to spend close to what the Colorado Rockies ($144.50 million) or Seattle Mariners ($141.46) doled out for payroll this year.
That $16 million discrepancy isn’t enough to afford Blake Snell, but it adds valuable depth. The biggest difference between last year’s Twins and the 2022 version is that Minnesota had enough depth to withstand injuries last season. That depth would allow them to mitigate the effects of losing stars like Correa, Buxton, and Lewis – all of whom have injury histories – and give them back-of-the-rotation reinforcements.
However, that’s neither here nor there right now. The Twins can’t unplug their console and reset the season. Still, they did the next best thing by sweeping the White Sox and Angels. “We knew we had an opportunity coming into this stretch to turn the page a little bit and have a fresh start,” Jeffers said. “I don’t think anyone in here expected to go 10-0.”
We can spend endless time discussing how this season’s sausage was made. Multiple actors are at fault. But nobody can get too picky about the process when the result is a 17-13 record after a 7-13 start. What’s done is done. The sausage is as much a part of them as they are of it. At this point, it’s nobody’s fault but theirs if it goes bad. The Twins have made their sausage, and now they must eat it.
