Not as bad as it was last year, or 1977.

16 hours ago, RpR said:

Not as bad as it was last year, or 1977.

Can't comment on 1977, but agreed that last year was way worse. We were in the driver's seat to clinch a wild card spot until early September. That collapse was epic. 

This year the season was over around mid June. 

The 2025 collapse is even worse when you consider that the same collapse happened just last year.  This means that the team refused to learn the lessons of 2024.  The team refuses to adapt.  The game plan (and the team) was virtually identical.  Failing over and over and over, tells us that the Twins management/coaches are intransigent, insular, and unable to learn from mistakes. Insanity. 

They think they are the smartest guys in the room,--with some secret superhero powers to overcome systemic failures.  The Pohlad's are their enablers, having bought into this secret bullcrap. Until they deal with this, we are destined to repeat the losing seasons...we are going to be the next White Sox or Rockies.  You can blame Falvey for this insanity, but you have to remember that the Pohlad's are the enablers.

I certainly believe that Falvey's choices are constrained by the Twins small market budget.  That's just as true for Milwaukee and Kansas City.  There are plenty of successful ways to handle a small market budget...but Falvey has one focused plan in his head and refuses to deviate.  His trades and Free Agent choices have been mostly failures.  Most of his big-time acquisitions/trades have been horrific failures (Lynn, Hughes, Happ, Shoemaker,  Wade, Donaldson, Rogers, Rooker, Rortvedt, Mahle, Correa, etc).   Cruz was the one great move. 

These moves are crucial to small market teams.  His draft picks have been good but there are some really super bad ones mixed in there...like Sabato, Noah Miller, Cavaco, etc. 

Overall, the plan on Falvey's part has failed far more often that it has worked.  And, add in the inability to turn high draft picks into high performing MLBers, it's a recipe for sustained failure.  Until Falvey can change, we are in for more failure, regardless of who the head coach is.

This year's collapse seemed more self inflicted by ownership and Falvey, as nearly the entire bullpen was traded away. I'd love to see a breakdown of how many of the second half losses occurred in the last 3 or 4 innings. It sure appeared to me that we wasted more than a few decent outings by starting pitchers. The combination of a depleted bullpen, lack of timely hitting, and shaky defense made for one of the worst Twins teams I've seen assembled in decades. And I can't really see how this becomes a selling point to a potential buyer.

The only real plusses I saw in the field were some promising starting pitching, a sudden interest in stealing bases, and of course Buxton's awesome season. Can't wait to see a full season from Keashall too.

You could call it a two-year collapse, starting in September of 2024. They finished the season 12-27, then followed up with 70-92. That's 82-119, or a winning percentage of .400 over 201 games. That's just remarkably bad. That's a total organization failure (or surrender.) When Joe Pohlad says he wants to win, what does that mean?

It feels like the FO thought the 2024 late season collapse was a fluke and that they were right to run out a similar lineup in 2025.  If you squint, you can kind of see it--  if Correa, Buxton and Lewis are healthy, Lopez, Bailey and Ryan + a deep reserve corps + above average bullpen should regress positively toward a winning record and compete toward winning a weak division.

I think we can now say, 2024 wasn't a fluke.  Even with Buxton healthy and Lewis somewhat healthy, the pitching sputtered, the vaunted pitching depth turned out to be at least half quicksand and the bullpen was not good enough to make up for it.

The real collapse in 2025 was mid-June to July 31.  After the trades, we're in rebuild mode and those AAA and AAAA guys got some advanced talent exhibition games, which is good to assess some new acquisitions, guys on the cusp and so on.  There were some hopeful signs amongst starters and hitting, but the patchwork Frankenstein's monster of a bullpen dragged everything down.

I would be curious also to see how their Aug + Sept games in 2025 would have looked if they had a league average bullpen.  I bet they would have gone close to .500 in that span.

I still have to scratch my head at the influx of stolen bases during the 2nd half of the season. This rationale that it wasn't done earlier due to the slow players (e.g. France) being traded just doesn't pan out. Many of the players (believe a team record was tied or set) were in place the 1st half....just started to steal bases.