In a Way, the Twins Made the Playoffs Last Night

One of the things we ask of baseball is, not to dissociate us from the real world or spare us from it, but to give us a break from the otherwise unrelenting awareness of the gap between how the world is and how we want it to be. Great thinkers from the Buddhists to the Stoics to the best philosophers of the 20th century stressed that that awareness is where all human suffering lies. We can't turn a blind eye to that gap, permanently, but we need a rest from our weary knowing, sometimes. Baseball is never better than when it's providing us that respite.

Baseball is never worse, though, than when it's shoving that gap right into our faces, making it even more stark and obvious and excruciating than it is while we navigate the rest of our day. Right now, Twins baseball is baseball at its very worst. Fans want the team to win, and to qualify for the postseason, of course, but we all come to the game with our eyes open on that front. We all know wins can't be guaranteed. What's making watching the Twins so miserable, lately, is our inescapable awareness of the chasm between what the organization is and what it ought to be. Target Field is a jewel, and when the team is in contention, it should be brimming and buzzing and alive with excited fans. The Minnesota front office has assembled a team with several players whose ceiling is superstardom, and they should have the club in contention.

And yet, the team has underachieved. We can save most of the blame game for another time, but this team isn't playing the way it should. That falls on the players, and on their manager, and on the front office's inclination toward conservatism, but most of all on ownership's foolhardy avarice and calamitous lack of real business savvy. There's somewhere between $35 million and $50 million that belongs on the field, in Twins uniforms, that is moldering away in the pockets of a family of clueless billionaires, instead. If it had been invested in this team over the last year, they would have already secured a playoff berth, instead of being on the verge of elimination--even if they had still underachieved.

There's good news, though. Given the above, this might sound embittered or sarcastic, but it isn't. This is a genuine upside, of the kind Buddha and Seneca and Camus and Tversky would all encourage you to seek: In a way, the Twins are already in the playoffs. You can rebel against the impulse toward despair and rage and resentment, if you want, and embrace the fact that everything we really want out of the postseason is already coming to Target Field over the next few days--at bargain-basement prices, to boot.

What makes the playoffs worth pursuing? Why are they the objective of every fan base and every player? It's partially because qualifying for them is a prerequisite for winning the World Series, of course, but we're all realistic enough to understand that the odds are against winning it all even once a team makes it to October. That's been true ever since divisional play began, more than a half-century ago. Now, in the 12-team playoff era, it's undeniable, and essential to understand.

No, we like something more about the playoffs than the glimmer that comes into view on a far horizon once you clamber up onto that stage. It's the raising of the stakes of the game that changes it. It's the brightness of the lights and the national attention and the desperation that makes its way onto the field. Players can't hold anything in reserve anymore, and neither can managers. There can be no more shrugging or flushing tough losses. Everything matters. In life, hardly anything feels better than knowing you're doing or witnessing something authentically important, and whereas regular-season baseball is always of negotiable importance, the playoffs matter. Every pitch, every swing, every fielded ball, every umpire's call, every emotional response and every change in the direction of the wind has meaning and urgency.

That's where the Twins are. With five games to play, they need four or five wins. Tuesday night's loss pulverized their margin for error, making all the games left playoff levels of do-or-die. Their season is on the line, right now. We might fairly hope, though we can't quite know, that several people's jobs are on the line. All that vividity and nerve-jangling danger is here. The Twins are a daily story everywhere that baseball is discussed, and they'll play on national TV this Saturday against the Orioles. All that's missing is the bunting on the railings.

Well, that's not quite true. Because the Pohlad family has so methodically demoralized their customer base, there's one other vital, joyous ingredient of playoff baseball missing: the crowd. The few people who actually attended Tuesday night's game all agreed that the atmosphere was something worse than underwhelming: it was actively depressing. Playoff baseball is outrageously expensive, but fans will pay it, because those games are earned and they can be fully confident that all the other seats will be full and all the outs will be fiercely contested. It's easy to get in cheaply at Target Field this week, and given that the stakes and the odds are so clearly marked out, we can safely assume that the team will keep fighting as hard as they can to get the wins they need.

In the world I want, we could all melt together into this moment, and Target Field would be full all week, because the Twins have earned this quintet of de facto playoff games--for worse, with this month-plus of harrowing collapse, but also for better, with a summer of tremendous baseball. Yet, I can't blame the fans who will stay away in droves, because the world I want is not the one we have, and this team won't stop reminding us all of that fact. No one wants to pay any amount of money to have their most hardwired soft spot poked over and over, even if it comes with some chance of seeing stirring, high-octane baseball.

For the players who have to summon the energy and focus to attempt this heavy lift, it sucks. Having a small and unenthusiastic crowd makes their job harder. It's not the fans' fault, though. The untouchable, disinterested owners of the team have set up everyone below them in the chain of command to fail, and as a result, watching even this quasi-playoff week of baseball isn't off to a fun start. In the world I want, the Pohlads would realize that this is all their fault and try hard to ameliorate the problem in the future. In the world we have, a lot of irrevocable damage is already done, and the mountainous beds of money on which that family luxuriates make them partially unaware of and wholly indifferent to the ways they're making the world worse--including this way.