Thinking Twins

With 88 wins the Twins boast the fifth best record in Major League Baseball. This is great: interest in baseball is reviving, Twins Territory is thriving and the team is driving toward a pennant which would mark their first appearance in a Division playoff series in nine years. However, a statistic that’s a little scary is that it seems the Twins’ success is only equal to their opponent’s lack of success. That’s a little scary because the Twins are the only team among those top five with a losing record against opponents that have records at, or over, .500. OK, so you’ve looked at the standings and the stats and you found another first-place team that can’t beat lesser teams so you say, “Hey, pal, St. Louis is in first place and, like your hotshot Twins, they also can’t beat good teams.” Yeah, but the point is that I’m talking about the top five teams in baseball and not the top nine. And also, seriously, no one likes the Cardinals unless you happen to live in St. Louis and even then it’s iffy.

The New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers record against good teams is an amazing .583. The Houston Astros record against good teams is .576 and Atlanta beats up the bums 57.3% of the time. The Twins, our lovable hometown heroes, play like Godzilla against the bad teams, crushing them a jaw-dropping 74% of the time, but when they’re across the field from a good team they play like… well, they play like the Twins of pretty much the last 10 years, managing to squeak out an embarrassing .460 winning record.

(If we want to break it down even more and look at our record against left handed pitchers then it just gets uglier so we don’t want to do that because we want to enjoy what’s happening and not think about too much of the bad stuff).

In the meantime, we’re not going to be playing many teams in the postseason with records below .500 so while I wouldn’t tell anyone not to believe that there’s magic in baseball – because we all know that there is – it might be a good idea to keep some padding handy should that Playoff Wagon come to a sudden and screeching halt.

To make things even worse, the team announced today that star center fielder, Byron Buxton, will be having shoulder surgery and will be out from five to six months. Buxton is a big reason we’re where we are today and hiss loss creates a huge defensive hole that will very difficult to fill.

Like I said though, there’s magic in baseball, so we’ll what we shall see.