Twins Video
The first piece of context this article needs is the fact that yours truly is not Minnesotan. Heck, I’m not even from the United States. But I’m not a character here. I’m stating this because said context is important. Whoever is reading this needs to understand that this is an article by an outsider who’s been following Minnesota sports and observing Minnesota sports fans' behaviors for years.
The headline of this article is an honest question. Do you love the Twins? From what I’ve been observing for years, I think the general answer to this question would be “yes” on the surface. But, for many, that answer is not accompanied by loving actions. In other words, I think many Minnesotans say they’re Twins fans and “love” the team, but, in practice, they don’t.
Here are two reasons why I feel that way:
Poor attendance
The Twins were terrible for almost a decade. It’s understandable that after that many bad seasons – including a record 103-loss campaign in 2016 – Twins fandom may have lost its excitement about this ballclub. However, they’ve also been a pretty good team since 2017. Yet, fans have still been reluctant to pack Target Field regularly for an entire season.
In the Target Field era, the Twins have made the playoffs five times, including four American League Central titles. Their overall winning percentage is .485 despite having four consecutive seasons (2011-2014) with a winning percentage of .432 or worse. Most of their success in the Target Field era started in 2017, with three of those four division titles and a winning record of .528 since then.
Yet, the Twins have a worse average attendance in that span than the Colorado Rockies.
The Twins’ average attendance from the opening of Target Field until the end of the 2023 season is 29,046 fans per game, while the Rockies, one of the most terribly-managed sporting organizations on the planet, average 34,225 fans per game in the same period. The Rockies haven’t had a single season in that span with less than 31,334 attendance average. The Twins haven’t had a single season over 28,322 since 2013.
The Rockies comparison is just one example. The Twins have seen worse teams have better attendance than them for years now. After some early success during the first three years of Target Field’s existence, Minnesota has ranked in the bottom half of attendance numbers in all but one of the nine seasons with normal attendance (2020 and 2021 not considered). The only time they didn’t was in the 2019 season and they ranked only 15th. They ranked in the bottom third of the league in five of those nine seasons. This season, they probably will be ranked 23rd.
There is a list of excuses Twins fans come up with for poor attendance. Some are completely understandable, but some just sound far-fetched. The top two are “It’s too cold when the season starts” and “Fans will show up when kids are not in school.” Sometimes, there are excuses based on previous seasons' performance: “They’ve been bad for almost a decade,” “They lost 103 games last year”, “They didn’t make the playoffs last year.”
Your team being bad one season kind of justifies attendance drops (except for the Colorado Rockies, apparently). But only if the opposite is true as well: if your team does well one season, there should be an attendance rise the following year. That hasn’t been the case for the Twins. Minnesota saw its attendance drop the following year in each season, and they've had a winning record since the opening of Target Field (2010, 2015, 2017, and 2023). Maybe this wouldn't have happened in 2020 after the fantastic 2019 season, but COVID-19 hit, and now we'll never know.
The 2024 season felt doomed before it even started when the team announced the payroll slashing late last year. The lack of big offseason moves made it even worse. As a result, fans averaged less than 22,000 a game in the season’s first three months. Some might say that the aforementioned circumstances justified it, but I don’t think that’s fair to a team that just months before ended the club’s playoff curse by snapping the 0-for-18 losing streak and winning the franchise’s first playoff series in over two decades.
Another reason why this year’s attendance drop isn’t fair (and the timing couldn’t be worse to mention this) is that the 2024 Minnesota Twins are not a bad team. They collapsed at the end of the season, yes, but they were also in the fight for the American League’s best record until mid-August. They might not make the playoffs after having over 92% odds of making it, but they can still mathematically finish the season with 86 wins. We believe a lot could’ve been done better by the owners and front office both in the offseason and the trade deadline. However, none of that changes the fact that the 2024 Twins are a good team. Considering only full 162-game seasons, the Twins are about to have back-to-back winning records for the first time since 2010.
General social media behavior and perception of the team
The whole point of this article can’t be made simply with poor attendance. Even though I don’t think this year’s poor attendance is fair to the players, I absolutely understand why one would simply choose not to attend games as a form of protest against the team’s ownership. But there’s more.
As I said, I get to observe fans’ behaviors on social media. And here’s something that blows my mind: there’s a scary number of so-called “Twins fans” online who straight-up seem to hate this team. If you take a moment to scroll down through Twins Daily’s Facebook feed, you’ll see that almost every post has reactions with a laughing emoji. The most shocking example for me are the game recaps of losses. Call me crazy, but if your first reaction to your team losing a game is laugh, you should consider asking yourself if you really like that team or not.
Basically, anything positive that is posted about the Twins or their players all across the internet can be met with a negative spin. The Byron Buxton hate is terrifying, especially when he’s having a great (and, most importantly, healthy) season. You already have the “Royce Lewis is made of glass” crowd. You have the Fire Rocco Club, which will always find a way to blame Rocco Baldelli for every single loss.
And don’t get me wrong. Fans can criticize whatever and whoever they want. But it’s easy to see when that’s done with absolute loathing and despise. A lot of those people I’m referring to seem to be absolutely disgusted by the Minnesota Twins. That’s not the same with Timberwolves and Vikings fans. They obviously criticize the teams and the players, but you generally don’t feel they have any hate when you read most of their social media comments. I certainly think you won’t see as many Timberwolves fans reacting to their losses with laughing emojis as Twins “fans.”
Timberwolves and Vikings fans demonstrate sincere joy when their teams win. When the Twins win, it feels like most their fan base doesn’t feel happy about it. The feeling seems to be that the team did nothing but their obligation. And they better not lose the next one.
It’s not my place to tell anyone how to be a fan or to judge if you’re a “real” fan or not. But you can tell a lot about people's actions and you are always entitled to have an opinion about about those actions. This article is just something to think about.
And I have a series of questions and comparisons to wrap this up and make you think: Do you really love the Twins? If you’re a Minnesota sports fan, are you harsher on the Twins when they have bad moments than you are on the Timberwolves and the Vikings? Or I can go even further in these comparisons: when a family member that you love screws up, do you point and laugh at them? Do you completely turn your back on them?
Feel free to only think about those questions or to use the comment section below to express your thoughts about them.
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