It's A Marathon, Not a Sprint

Recently I wrapped up an off-season writing project: hand-writing a post-game report for every game the Twins played in 2022. All 162 matches. No exceptions. Beyond the insanity of it all—and it truly was a nightmare at times, with evenings of madness laughing into the void—these games offered a quiet consistency; whispering between the outs and runs; giving hints about the nature of the game that strike deep into baseball’s core. Patterns emerged. It would be foolish to proclaim that I now carry the weight of secret baseball knowledge, but allow me to explain some of what I saw.

Unlike most other sports, baseball isn’t a test of skill as much as it is a battle of endurance; ask any manager in spring training and you’ll hear a gorgeous harmony of health, with references to players and the preservations of their fragile ligaments almost meaning more than the games themselves. Today can be lost; tomorrow remains in sight. It’s this truth—or, perhaps truism—that guides the sport. 162 games remain undeterred, played whether ready or not. Sure, a team must focus on building their victories at some point, but no one remembers the April losses if they begat September wins, and those wins can only happen when the team is healthy and at full strength. 

This was a point the 2022 Twins missed. Their acceptable 50-44 first-half record evaporated into a 28-40 second-half slog, emphasized by a brutal 11-22 stretch following the month of August. They finished third in the division and earned no postseason credit. 

That team didn’t intend to collapse, as no wise franchise predicts their own demise, but it’s clear that a squad’s true ability can often only reveal itself late, far late in the season, not in the soggy months of April and May. 

But, perhaps that team was not yet as lukewarm as we think; many—and I do mean many—of their losses came via late-inning blowups, specifically against the Cleveland Guardians, specifically with Emilio Pagán meddling in some capacity. Indeed, an astounding eight defeats occurred when the Guardians happened to score just one more run than the Twins. Minnesota only won one such match: a 1-0 squeaker on June 23rd that apparently just missed the baseball gods’ attention. Maybe it’s no surprise that the team ended with a slightly positive Pythagorean win/loss record of 82-80. 

This isn’t to say that the Twins will happen to win more games as fortune rubbernecks their victories, handing them a more equitable total of near wins in 2023: baseball is still built on disorder. It could very well happen that Cleveland again wins entirely too many games via close calls, and we all spend the offseason huffing at the injustice of it all; the sport is funny like that. 

As I wrote more about the season, it became clear that the 2022 Twins were really the 2018 Twins in disguise. A crappy disguise, but one nonetheless. That 2018 squad, fresh off a 2017 playoff appearance, never got it together, trudging through months of mediocre ball before detonating by trading Brian Dozier, Eduardo Escobar , and Ryan Pressly in the hopes that grass would be greener in the future. They finished the year with 78 wins, just as the team last year did. 

Things did improve, as losing 14 (!!!) games on walk-offs isn’t something that tends to happen twice; the record-setting home run total the following year probably helped as well.

This is all to say that baseball is a freaky sport. We (over)analyze minute details, theorizing matchups and breakouts just to shrug our shoulders when Sandy Alcantara goes to town on our team because, well, that’s how it goes sometimes. You can draw out statistics as long as you want, but if the other guys’ hits are falling more than yours, you’re probably going to lose. Looking at the broad, over-reaching movements is great and informative, but those shifts don’t occur in a single-game environment: that is still left for the messy, gross randomness of life to run wild. And, because us humans are emotional creatures, it’s easy to get swept up in the flurry, angry at today because we can’t yet see tomorrow.

So get mad if you want to; it’s your fanship to do what you please with, but know that this game isn’t a day, or a week, or a month: it’s a full season—162 games where everything wacky and absurd happens in the details, ultimately only becoming clear as the final few matches fall in September. They may lose today, and tomorrow, and the day after that; but the season remains young and inexperienced, not yet sure what it wants to be at this stage of its life. It will reveal itself at some point—it always does—but that time is far from this point, and worrying about it will only grey your hairs. So—as my father would like to say—always remember that it’s a marathon, not a sprint.