The Rake Magazine

Well, that was a tough series to watch. A team that we've learned to take for granted when it comes to executing the fundamentals of the game and not giving away ballgames has officially become a colossal disappointment.

It would be hard, really, to even know where to start.

I'll say this, though: Nick Punto's a good teammate and a fine fielder, but he better spend the entire winter working on his bunting, or his future --such as it is-- is as a defensive highlight reel in the Northern League.

It's almost hard to swallow so much bile on the eve of the Twins' long-awaited ballpark groundbreaking, and equally hard to swallow the fact that most of the guys who we learned tonight will be skipping tomorrow's affair --Torii Hunter, Joe Nathan, Johan Santana, and Justin Morneau, among others-- likely won't be wearing Minnesota uniforms when the team actually plays a game in the new park.

I've got Little Jimmy Scott crooning from the stereo and that's never a particularly good sign, at least so far as mood barometers go.

At this point I'm not fool enough to say that's it, but I nonetheless can't deny that I'm mighty tempted to say that's it, even as I've been mighty tempted to say that's it for several months now.

Yet every time I've been mighty tempted to say that's it, this weird, baffling, infuriating team has done something to make me regret, at least momentarily, my lack of faith.

The truth, of course, is that this team really has done very little --at least as a team, and in any kind of a sustained way-- to encourage any real investment of faith or hope.

It kills me that the Twins have now lost four times this season to that goofy slop slinger Paul Byrd. It kills me that Carlos Silva reverted to his spring training form at the worst possible time. Nights like this, in fact, with summer waning and the crickets winding down, it all sort of kills me.

That triple play, though, that did not kill me. I don't care what the circumstances, or which team hits into or turns it, I love a triple play. And that one tonight --a picture-perfect 5-4-3, around-the-horn job-- looked so easy that it really makes you wonder why you don't see one of the damn things all the time. Yet somehow the triple play remains almost as rare as a player hitting for the cycle.

That logo's just fine if you're talking about Johan Santana. You'll need to insert your own mental s, however, if you're referring to the Twins' offense.

Down at the Dome this weekend they celebrated the 20th anniversary of the 1987 World Series championship season. Somehow, despite scoring three runs over three games, the Twins managed to win two-of-three from the Rangers. A weird sort of tribute, really, but by now I guess we just have to accept that this team is what it is: the reincarnation of a 1968 also-ran.

It's been an astonishing season, and Santana's brilliant --that word, of course, sounds trite in this instance, but it's late and my brain is paste-- performance managed to be both thrilling as well as perhaps the saddest example yet of the sort of pressure Minnesota's starting pitchers have been laboring under the last couple months. The guy --like the guys who have been following him in the rotation all year-- has absolutely no margin for error. The fact that he shattered the team's strikeout record and allowed just two hits while pitching with a one-run lead the whole way just shows what a wonder Santana is, and how devastating it would be for the Twins to lose him.

The team the Twins were celebrating this weekend provided a marked --hell, an extreme-- contrast to this current bunch. The '87 Twins hit 196 home runs; three guys (Hrbek, Gaetti, and Brunansky) hit over 30, and Puckett finished with 28. They scored 786 runs, despite which they were outscored by opponents 806-786. The World Champions had just two pitchers (Viola and Blyeven) with double-digit wins, and of the three guys who tied for third with eight victories, two (Juan Berenguer and Jeff Reardon) were relievers. The staff gave up more hits than innings pitched and walked 564 batters. The team ERA was 4.63.

This year's club has hit 92 homers, and scored just 547 runs. They'd have to average more than six runs a game and average almost three homers over their final 38 contests to equal the totals of the '87 club.

On the surface, and even when you really look at the numbers, the pitching on the '07 team is vastly superior to the '87 squad's. It isn't going to show up in the won-loss columns, however. At present only Santana and Silva are on track for double-digit victories, even though the team's overall numbers are more than solid enough to have won, at minimum, a dozen more games. They've got almost a 3-1 strikeout-to-walk ratio, and at this point have walked 241 fewer batters than their counterparts on the championship team. Their earned run average is more than half a run better.

The bottom line is that this team will likely --or, actually, if they're lucky-- finish with a won-loss record very similar to that of the '87 team: 85-77.

And in 2007 that record --assuming the Twins can approach it-- isn't going to be enough to even get the team into the post-season.

Here's a sort of unrelated (but wholly relevant) question: has Joe Mauer, even dating back to little league, ever had a stretch where he's looked this clueless at the plate? Maybe whatever's wrong with the Twins' offense really is contagious.

It's been a mighty strange season, and I'm frankly exhausted. It obviously doesn't take a whole lot of psychic energy to follow a genuinely good team. That's probably not true, though, at least strictly speaking; to really follow any baseball team, day in and day out, takes a tremendous amount of psychic energy. It's a huge investment of time, attention, and emotion.

I guess what I'm trying to say, however, is that a good team more consistently rewards you for that time and attention, and the emotional reserves get replenished on a regular basis, allowing you to hang tough through the inevitable disappointments and occasional small heartbreaks.

I've also always felt that a truly lousy team can be oddly satisfying in its own way. Expectations are diminished, futility is almost masochistically entertaining when it's sustained, and you can sort of sit back, absorb the regular blows, and focus on the peripheral pleasures of baseball: the atmosphere, the development of young players, the incredible athleticism of even marginal stars, and the inning-by-inning, pitch-by-pitch dramas and decisions that make up every game. I've always contended that the teams with the most knowledgeable and loyal fans are the teams that have endured stretches of true futility.

A team like this year's version of the Twins, though? A decent team with a core group of excellent players, a promising batch of young pitchers, and absolutely no depth? A team that is distinguished by nothing so much as it's maddeningly consistent inconsistency? This is the sort of team that kills you.

I mean, you can bitch until you're blue in the face about a shitty team and the sorts of complete organizational overhaul that would be necessary to make it competitive again, but real hope is so unrealistic and the malaise tends to be so general in such cases that it's pointless to even have discussions of the sort we've been having all spring and summer this year. Back in the mid-90s nobody would have wasted any breath pining for the acquisition of somebody like Ty Wigginton, or crossing their fingers that the return of Rondell White could make any sort of a difference.

I suppose you could argue that those discussions and hopes were just as pointless this year, but that's part of the frustration of a team like the 2007 Twins; all we can do is strap ourselves into the slow-motion roller coaster and bitch and suffer as we lurch up and down and yet somehow still manage to go nowhere. It's a rare and queasy experience that can make you feel like you're riding a roller coaster and treading water at the same time.

Since the All Star break the Twins have been one solid, sustained stretch away from surging right back into contention in the Central, but they haven't had one solid, consistent surge in them. And as the Tigers and Indians have done everything in their power to make the division a three-team race, the Twins have been utterly unable to hold up their end of the deal.

And that's been nothing but frustrating.

A history of zero.

Null.

Nil.

Naught.

Nada.

Zip.

Zippo.

Goose eggs.