There was a moment in the Minnesota Twins home opener where you could have convinced yourself that they had beaten the math. That the sweep in St. Louis was fluky. Martín Pérez pitching six scoreless on the South Side is an anomaly.
The Houston Astros are a machine. They’re built like a TI calculator and communicate by smashing trash cans. Still, they’re subject to baseball’s calculus. Carlos Correa can only hit so many 100 mph line drives before one falls into the infield. Ty France’s expected batting average (xBA) would manifest into crucial hits. Joe Ryan’s high-riding fastball would disappear like a surfer beneath a Pacific wave.
Matt Wallner led off with a triple, Byron Buxton warped after hitting an infield single, and Trevor Larnach roped an opposite-field single. Ryan had pitched a 1-2-3 first. The Twins were going to send the Astros back to The Woodlands, wondering how a team that had lost to the St. Louis Cardinals and the Chicago White Sox had taken them to the woodshed.
Alas, the Astros lifted off immediately after Minnesota took a 2-0 lead. Ryan was only six pitches into the second, and Christian Walker and Jeremy Peña had hit his offerings out of orbit. Houston piled on from there. Two more runs off Ryan and one off Louis Varland.
5-2 Astros. Opener spoiled.
Don’t read too much into early-season results. Or the outcomes of individual games in general. Remember when the Twins lost six of seven games after a 10-4 start two years ago? They split a four-game series with the New York Yankees, lost one to the Boston Red Sox – and the 71-win Washington Nationals, coming off a 107-win season, swept them.
The Baltimore Orioles swept them at the end of the first half, sending them into the All-Star Break with a 15-2 loss that dropped them to 45-46. The closed-door meeting after the sweep in Atlanta? The 106-loss Kansas City Royals sweeping them in late July? The 78-win Detroit Tigers taking three of four in early August?
That’s not what people remember from two years ago.
They remember Royce Lewis‘s grand slams. Pablo López gems. Finally breaking the playoff curse.
Any manager, any team, should aspire to ensure no individual regular-season game is meaningful. There are 162 of them. Teams slump at weird times; good players hit lasers at fielders. Pérez pitches six scoreless six years after finishing with a 5.12 ERA in Minnesota. Good teams can lose series to lousy opponents.
Washington and Kansas City’s sweep didn’t sink Minnesota’s season two years ago. Baltimore’s 15-2 route didn’t send them drifting off into Mille Lacs in the second half. Instead, a 9-1 Houston win after López’s ace performance and a quiet 3-2 victory in Minneapolis a day later sent the Twins quietly into the night.
The issue with Minnesota’s start isn’t that the Cardinals swept them, and the White Sox beat them 9-0. It’s that they finished last season 12-27, missed the playoffs after a 70-53 start, and then started 4-0.
It makes it harder to believe Rocco Baldelli when he says there’s nothing to worry about after St. Louis tags Bailey Ober for eight runs in 2⅔ innings to complete the sweep. It doesn’t help when they lose 9-0 to the 121-loss White Sox the next day.
However, Baldelli is right. Four regular-season games hardly matter in the scope of a season. Still, they carry more weight at the start of a season after last year’s collapse. They also matter because the Twins will chase the margin of error until they build a win cushion. That’s tough in a game where six pitches can be the difference between an encouraging start and a deflating loss.
