By Yours Truly
http://throneberryfields.com/2017/09/28/so-whats-in-the-wild-card-for-the-twins/
The great baseball trivia questions of the rest of this century will include, “Name the American
League team who clinched the second wild card after trading their closer at the non-waiver
trade deadline the same season. Hint: They’re also the first team to lose 100+ one year and
make the postseason the next.”
Nice to see you again, Minnesota Twins. You who also added veteran starter Jamie Garcia four
days before the same trade deadline, when you were at .500, then got a solid start and a win
out of him, then shipped him to the Yankees and your All-Star closer Brandon Kintzler at the
deadline after losing your next four following Garcia’s W.
You who had almost all of baseball questioning the location of your marble—singular—when
you didn’t move Brian Dozier in the off-season following the hundred losses. They’re still
questioning it now since Dozier at this writing is worth 4.3 wins above a replacement-level
player.
They’re trying to figure out how your marble turned into some kind of crystal ball after
shortstop Jorge Polanco went from being baseball’s worst hitter in July to the seventh-best
player in the game in August.
For that matter, they’re still trying to figure out how you collapsed all around in July and then
shot the lights out in August, the best August in the history of your franchise. As in, nowhere
in Washington or in Minneapolis had you ever had an August like this year’s.
Sure the American League is loaded with so-so teams overall. Even those hale and hearty
Angels who scratched, clawed, dug, crawled, kicked, and shoved their way toward being about
an inch or three from snatching a wild card despite losing Mike Trout for about a third of the
season.
Unfortunately, losing Trout for that third of the season is probably the main reason—aside
from a pitching staff decimated by injuries for a second straight season, and an offense
otherwise that didn’t seem to know the meaning of consistency, Trout or no Trout—that the
Angels are gone for the season.
But this is how things have been for the Twins of late: They could lose to the Indians Wednesday
night but the Angels did them a clinching favour by losing to the White Sox—who’ve been going
nowhere but rebuild land since Opening Day—in the tenth inning, the White Sox walking the
Angels’ faint postseason hopes off when Nicky Delmonico squared up Blake Parker’s splitter
and split the air traveling over the right field fence.
Theoretically, the Twins could have started celebrating their wild card this past weekend. The
Angels met the Astros in an absolutely must-win series and opened with the Astros using Yusmeiro
Petit as a pinata while Justin Verlander, their new toy from Detroit, pitched one-hit baseball for
seven innings and won his fourth straight start in Houston silks. Before they beat the Astros in
the getaway game they’d lost six straight.
The Angels didn’t exactly surrender, but losing that set with the AL West champion Astros just
about put paid to their season. And rang the register big enough for the Twins, who have to wait
for the finish before knowing who they get in the wild card game, with the Yankees and the Red
Sox slugging it out like the not-so-olden days and three games separating them in the American
League East.
The Twins answered their trade deadline woes with a little in-house reinforcement in the head.
From manager Paul Molitor down, they leaned on their veterans to steady the clubhouse—from
mainstay Joe Mauer to this year’s acquisition Bartolo Colon, from ancient relief pitcher Matt Belisle
to aging catchers Jason Castro and Chris Gimenez—and watched their youth like Polanco, Byron
Buxton, and Eddie Rosario flip the afterburners on.
“This is a totally different team,” says Dozier. “Even though it is a lot of the same guys, most of
the same guys, it just feels like 23-, 24-, 25-year-olds, they are not 23 anymore. Even though
it is a year difference, so many guys grew up 10 years. It is a totally different mindset. The
maturity level is off the charts of what it used to be. For us older guys, it made us into better
leaders.”
Some Twins observers think Molitor taking the proverbial bull by the foreshank after Garcia and
Kintzler were moved onward built the afterburner switch. He held a team meeting on behalf of
making sure his men didn’t let surrealities like that get the better of them.
“I said that, ‘People who make those decisions have a job to do, and they are going to make
those decisions in what they feel is in the best interest in our team, both short-term and long-
term. It is not our place to question it’,” the skipper says he told the club. ‘”Anytime as a player,
when we lose someone or something happens, the best course of action is to look at what you
could’ve done differently to prevent it from happening. Don’t look outward. It is a good time
to take a little inventory’.”
A little inventory. Right now the Twins are feeling stocked to the last cranny above the rafters.
If history has any say, be reminded that once upon a time the Twins went from dead last in their
division one season to World Series winners the next. These Twins might like to think they can
become the first team to go worst-to-Series winners in two different centuries.
Assume the Twins win the wild card game. The best bet for their opponent would be the Yankees,
despite the Yankees finishing their season with one against the Rays tonight and three against
the Blue Jays on the weekend. The Red Sox get to finish with four against the Astros, but so far
the Red Sox have had the upper hand, having won two of three with the Astros in June, a time
when we still thought the Astros were the season’s best team.
That’s where thoughts of the Twins going to and prevailing in a division series at least may dissipate,
considering they’re 2-4 against the Yankees this year, and the Yankees are 18-7 thus far this month.
(The Red Sox are 16-9 thus far this month.) Because they’d face the best team in baseball in a
division series. A team against whom they’ve split the current series so far but have been 7-11 to
date.
A team who clinched the AL Central by way of beating the Royals the same day the Twins couldn’t
beat the Blue Jays.
The odds are stacked against the Twins the way the IDS Center would stack against Mary Richards’s
and Rhoda Morgenstern’s Victorian place on Kenwood Parkway. They might not just make it to the
penultimate champagne, after all, but for now even a Slurpee might taste good enough to dream.
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