Well, that wasn’t good

Well. That was a bummer. About 28 hours or so after the playoffs began for the Twins, the playoffs ended for the Twins. A quick exit after a shortened season.

The Twins were finally favored to win a series, and they managed to be the first team eliminated. But, let’s focus on the positives: not only were they the first team to be eliminated in the first ever (and hopefully last ever) 60 game season, they were also the first major sports franchise to ever lose 17 and then 18 consecutive playoff games. That’s a lot of firsts.

During pandemic times, perhaps it’s best to accept whatever comes our way, and setting records, however undesirable those records may be, is still setting records. It’s still accomplishing something that no team has ever accomplished before.

What doesn’t kill us will make us stronger (although that’s usually what people who don’t stare down death tell those who do, so it seems unfairly easy for them to say). Anyway, the Twins are clearly testing our love for them. We true fans won’t bend, nor will we fold. Though, perhaps it’s too soon to even use the word “fold,” given what we’ve just seen. We’ll still love them. Always and forever, kind of like this playoff losing streak.

Perhaps what doesn’t kill us won’t actually make us stronger, but it may just make us stranger. It’s been such a strange year, maybe the Astros should just go on to win it all. I realize this seems counterintuitive and just…well…counter. In my case, it’s also completely hypocritical, since I just wrote about them a couple of days ago, concerning how much I loathed their cheating. But you know what, why not them, why not now?

An asterisk season deserves an asterisk team.

Perhaps some of you watched the Presidential debate last night and were already trying to remove the stain of that from your memories, as another unprecedented couple of hours took center stage during an unprecedented and completely forgettable year. Chaos, confusion, old guys yelling at each other. If Eddie Rosario had been there, he would have been kicked out. Though, apparently, if George Springer had been there, he wouldn’t have been. Why? Why? Why? How did we get to this point in our history? Chaos? Confusion? How about some constancy?

So, in light of all that seemingly bad stuff…we have the Twins, providing all of us with a beacon of playoff consistency to light up an otherwise darkened landscape. In truth, the Twins provided all of us, with much needed consistency in this world of chaos and confusion. I’m not going to dump on them, I’m going to thank them for providing me a strong and stable base from which I can navigate another day. Someday, as a Minnesota sports fan, our dreams will come true, or the world will actually end…but either way…someday this will all change.

Finally, the Twins get great playoff starting pitching from Kenta Maeda and Jose Berrios and, the offense goes completely dormant. As the great SNL character Rosanne Rosanna Danna might have said: “It’s always something.” If she had been a baseball analyst, maybe she would have said “if it’s not one run on Tuesday, it’s one more run on Wednesday…and one run probably isn’t going to win a lot of games.”

We should’ve known this would happen. We’re Minnesota fans. We have only ourselves to blame for thinking it would end in some other fashion. The sun rises, the sun sets, the Twins lose in the playoffs and the Vikings don’t improve their offensive line. Constancy provides stability of thought and no city, and no state provides their fans with more constancy than Minnesota franchises provide their fans.

So, I have chosen to embrace the moment. The stability of a franchise that will provide us with years of regular season success, followed by post-season failure that history suggests is ours alone now. We own it, so let’s embrace it.

As the common man on KFAN has been known to say… “if you’re going to be bad, be biblically bad.” The Twins aren’t biblically bad, of course, but if we only counted the playoffs…well…it’s worthy of a conversation. Floods, famine, no paper products, pestilence, old men yelling at each other, and playoff losses, it continues to be a rough year, and the world’s shortest playoff appearance didn’t help.

For all those Twins fans suffering out there, trust me, with age comes wisdom...or at least resignation. I know you are hurting, I used to hurt with these losses too, but in the end, it’s really just a game, and frankly, the longer you support Minnesota teams, the more prone you’ll become to acceptance rather than pain. In the end we’ve all got bigger problems. Which, I guess, isn’t a particularly happy way to end a pep talk, but, the truth is, have you watched the news lately? Baseball was a valued distraction these past two months, I’ve enjoyed it, even though I truly hoped for a bit more than I got these last two days.