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A raging Rocco Baldelli was supposed to wake the Twins up, and make them remember who they are. That was last Sunday; they lost Monday night to the hapless Halos. They won the next two days, though, and then a returning Byron Buxton was supposed to give the team a semblance of its real identity back. That was Friday night; they got thwacked by the Reds. The next big red button in the line was to reactivate Carlos Correa, which the team did Saturday; they got well and truly shellacked by the Reds.
Things just aren't working, right now. That's not news. The most troubling trend, though, isn't that the team's grand gestures seem to keep coming to nothing. It's that they keep losing, and losing in dispirited, dispiriting, helpless-looking, hopeless-looking ways. It doesn't feel like this team has a big comeback in it, and so every time they fall behind, it might as well be a loss, even when there are plenty of outs left in the game, in theory.
Some of that is an illusion, of course. That's how baseball works. We can feel a certain way, watching a team play over a few weeks or even a couple of months, but reality is not obligated to conform to our feelings. The Twins are 36-70 in games in which, at some point, they trailed. That .340 winning percentage is actually above the league average in such games.
They haven't come back from a deficit greater than four runs all season, which is interesting, but it's not exactly shocking. The Brewers, to grab another random good team, have not come back from down by more than three all year. Having a good pitching staff means rarely falling behind by such a wide margin at all. Some teams, too, choose not to chase wins from behind, which means a lot of low-leverage relievers parading in when the team is behind in the middle innings--even by just a run or two. Baldelli is a big believer in that managerial paradigm.
Then, too, there's the fact that the Minnesota bullpen hasn't turned out to be as deep as we all hoped. If a team has seven or eight reliable relievers, even the least of them can keep them in the game and facilitate the occasional comeback. This year's relief corps has not been that kind of group. When Baldelli sighs and flips his mental switch from the 'A' bullpen to the 'B' bullpen, the guys upon whom he calls more often turn the game into a blowout than freeze the opponent where they are.
The Twins have lost 32 games by at least four runs this year, including the last two. Unless the Red Sox storm past them to claim a playoff spot, no team will qualify for the postseason with more such defeats on their record. The Brewers have only lost by that much 16 times. The Guardians have only lost that way 23 times. It's been an unfortunate habit of this team not only to fall behind, but to let things get out of hand once they do.
In 37 games this year, the Twins have trailed by at least three runs after six innings. Only six teams--none of them any good at all--have been in such a lousy position going into the final innings more often. Minnesota is 1-36 in those games. All season, in 47 games in which they trailed by at least two tallies after seven frames, the Twins have no wins. The only other teams not to win a game in which they were more than a run behind with two innings to play are the White Sox, Nationals, and Blue Jays.
The funny thing is, from the seventh inning to the end of a game, only the Diamondbacks average more runs per game than the Twins. Removing extra innings, the Twins score 1.59 runs per game from the seventh onward, joining Arizona, the Royals, the Yankees, and the Padres as the only teams putting up more than 1.5 runs per contest during that phase. Why can't a team who scores that much come back from down even a couple of runs, even once or twice? Why can't they finish off close wins?
Some of it is managerial choices, although they're sound ones. Some of it is roster construction, constrained by bad ownership choices. Some of it is, surely, dumb luck. The frustrating feeling that another part of it is some shortfall in terms of heart or offensive intensity is probably another illusion, like the idea that they don't come back at all when they fall behind. That one, though, is harder to shake. Sometimes feelings carry a reality of their own, and sometimes there's a reality that numbers don't capture neatly. The Twins aren't good at making comebacks. They'd better change that reality, though, because they need some gut-check wins down the stretch, and the deficits keep coming.
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- Jerr and tarheeltwinsfan
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