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Ten years ago, in 2006, the Twins were at the apex of a successful run in the AL Central. They won 96 games with an upstart squad that featured the American League's MVP, batting champ and Cy Young. They would have had the Rookie of the Year, too, if Francisco Liriano didn't tear his UCL.
Terry Ryan had guided the franchise to its healthiest point in more than a decade and the future looked awfully bright.
Things weren't so rosy for the Royals. They were enduring a third straight 100-loss season and were amidst a stretch of 17 finishes below .500 in 18 years.
That June, Dayton Moore took over as Kansas City's general manager.
It's been a long and slow road, but under Moore's administration, the team has transformed from baseball's laughing stock to its shining pinnacle. To watch the Royals now, the idea that they were a bungling catastrophe in the not-so-distant past seems preposterous.
The last couple of weeks have been perfectly emblematic of how enchanted this ballclub has become. Two Sundays ago, Alex Gordon and Mike Moustakas collided in the outfield while chasing a fly ball behind third base. The results were calamitous: Gordon had broken his wrist and Moustakas had torn his ACL. In a split-second, Royals had lost two key staples in the lineup – one for at least a month and one for the year.
What has happened since that fateful incident? Oh, the Royals have just won eight of 10, scoring 68 runs in the process. They're crushing the ball all over the field, leaving opponents muttering. The bullpen is impenetrable as usual. The rotation has been no one's idea of stable, but it doesn't even matter. Like I said, the Royals can do no wrong.
On the very opposite end of the spectrum, we have the Twins. The same day Byron Buxton injected a mild spark of excitement into this nightmarish campaign by returning after a blistering stint at Triple-A, Miguel Sano went down with a hamstring injury, almost on cue. One day later, the Athletics completed a sweep of the Twins in Oakland, Minnesota's eighth in a season that is just two months old (that isn't counting the shortened two-gamer against the Baltimore in early May). In 2014, when they lost 92 games, the Twins were swept seven times total.
Sano had been the best producer in a bad lineup, save for maybe Joe Mauer. Ideally, others would step up in the slugger's absence over the next few weeks, but then, no one has really stepped up on this entire roster over the first third of the season.
And that's where the Twins now stand. If the 2016 season continues in the direction it's headed, it will not only be the organization's fifth 90-loss effort in six years, it will be a 110-loss debacle that easily surpasses any precedent in franchise history.
The game of baseball – with its meticulous nature, its marathon seasons, its rules for competitive balance – will always be one of ebbs and flows. Peaks and valleys are to be expected. But the paths that the Twins and Royals have followed represent some of the most extreme examples you will come across.
Is there a lesson to be learned from all of this? I don't know. Hopefully it doesn't take the Twins as long to dig themselves out of the dregs as it did the Royals. History doesn't dictate the future so we needn't immerse ourselves in parallels between the current swoon here and the one that lingered for so long in KC, even if those parallels are sometimes conspicuous.
It's also worth noting that it took Dayton Moore the better part of 10 years to turn the Royals from a cellar-dweller to an unstoppable force. And Terry Ryan is the same man who put the Twins in that enviable position they were at when Moore took over.
When he was seven years into his stagnating rebuild, few would have said that Moore was the man for the job. Now, no one would suggest otherwise. That's not so much a defense of TR, but a call for perspective. This situation is a lot bigger than the GM, no matter how much you want to simplify it.
That's why I personally believe that the first step to getting this Twins franchise back on track is a rethinking of the front office structure rather than reactive firings to appease an angry fan base.
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