The Minnesota Twins Are Losing, And It's All Going According To Plan

I met LeMay when I was 13 and moved up to junior high school. Soon I was spending afternoons at his house playing "Axis & Allies" and listening to him go on at great length about military aircraft. As I moved pieces around the board he'd tell me about the latest FK-X11 fighter or the new Vitamin B-12 Bomber. We'd get a snack, and he would praise attack helicopters. As I waited for my incorrigibly tardy mother to rescue me, he improvised paeans to the P-51 Mustang.

What I am saying is LeMay really liked planes with guns, and had mistaken me for someone who had more than a passing interest in the subject. He also seemed to read my way of politely nodding while frantically looking for an escape route as signaling, "No, please, go on. Encore." What I rapidly learned was that there was no other subject for LeMay. Aircraft eclipsed any other possible topic of discussion. Comic books. TV shows. Girls. He was an expert bore. Screening calls then took more effort than it does now, but I rapidly figured out how to be unavailable when LeMay rang.

For a long time now, the Minnesota Twins have been as single-mindedly tedious as LeMay. They've started this season 0-7, and while that might not yet be an ironclad reason to write them off, it's easy to take it as another sign that this century will continue to be a loss for them. A 25-year gap between championships doesn't really rate on the Cubs scale of suffering, but when it comes to putting compelling players on the field, the Cubs and virtually everyone else have the Twins licked. A weak American League Central division allowed the Twins to consistently make the playoffs from 2002-2010 despite deep flaws that the team refused, as if on principle, to address. Five first-round playoff exits in six tries provided proof that the Twins were great at being good, but not very good at being great.

The rebuilding hasn't clicked despite adding some promising prospects to the big-league roster over the last few years and emerging from four straight seasons of 90-plus losses last year. The Twins' 0-7 start might be nothing more than a slump, and surely wouldn't look quite as bad had it occurred at midseason. Still, they're one loss from a historic danger zone. Since 1900, only 17 teams have started a season 0-8 or worse. Just one of them pulled things together to post a winning record. None reached October.

Year

Team

Record

Finish

Baltimore Orioles

0-21

54-107 (7th)

Chicago Cubs

0-14

68-94 (5th)

Washington Senators

0-13-1

38-113 (8th)

Detroit Tigers

0-13

61-93 (7th)

Detroit Tigers

0-11

55-106 (5th)

Chicago White Sox

0-10

67-95 (8th)

Atlanta Braves

0-10

54-106 (8th)

The good news is that the Twins do have talent, and it seems unlikely that they belong with the above teams. But the outcomes for the teams that managed to pick up a win before getting to 0-9 or 0-10 aren't a lot better.

Year

Team

Record

Finish

Brooklyn Dodgers

0-9

57-69 (5th)

Boston Braves

0-9

57-82 (6th)

New York Mets

0-9

40-120 (10th)

Houston Astros

0-9

85-77 (3rd)

Detroit Tigers

0-9

43-119 (5th)

Cleveland Indians

0-8

51-102 (8th)

Boston Red Sox

0-8

71-83 (7th)

Detroit Tigers

0-8

50-104 (8th)

Pittsburgh Pirates

0-8

60-94 (8th)

New York Mets

0-8

51-111 (10th)

Houston Astros

0-8

76-86 (4th)

Consider what starting the season in an 0-7 hole means. Over the last five years the median AL wild card winner had 91 wins. The Twins already have to play at a 95-win pace over the rest of the season to get there. Even if the Twins win their next game, none of the seven previous teams who stopped their season-opening losing streaks at seven made the postseason. Five of them lost 90 or more games. But, hey, every season is different.

One of the biggest problems with the Twins, though, is their dedication to staying the same. They've struggled not just to win, but to acquire players who could move them up in the standings and put on a good show while doing it. Their mediocrity reflects a deeply held organizational philosophy, and that philosophy has not changed in the face of all this losing.

Put aside their weird aversion to strikeouts in a strikeout-dependent age… actually let's not, because it's so weird. From 2000 on, Twins pitchers have struck out fewer batters than any team except the Rockies, and they're dead last in strikeouts per nine—this despite Johan Santana striking out over 235 batters a year from 2004 to 2007. It's no better, or more fun to watch, on offense. Since Joe Mauer began to decline in 2014, the club has been severely short of MVP-candidate position players. Per Baseball-Reference, during what we will call the Gardenhire Lapsarian Period (2011-2015), there have been 240 player-seasons of 4.0 WAR or greater. The Twins have had four of those: Mauer in 2012 (4.3) and 2013 (5.3), Denard Span (5.0) in 2012, and Brian Dozier (5.2) in 2014.

Similarly, there have been 104 pitcher-seasons of 4.0 WAR or greater. Just two of them have been Twins, Scott Baker in 2011 and Phil Hughes in 2014 (both 4.3, both far from Cy Young territory). Après Johan, a lot of firmly struck doubles. Just four Twins pitchers have had even 10 career WAR with the team since the turn of the century; all of them are long gone. Jose Berrios, a 22-year-old whose fastball can reach 97 mph and has struck out 9.6 batters per nine innings on his trip through the minors, is at Rochester, waiting for service-time issues to evaporate—at which point the Twins season may already be lost. When Berrios does arrive, it's hoped he'll give the Twins a different look and a little swing and miss excitement. But the rest of the team's rotation is neither young nor particularly talented, and, as Santana demonstrated, one strikeout pitcher is not enough.

The Twins' young outfield of Eddie Rosario, Byron Buxton, and Miguel Sano could be as productive as any in the game, and two of the three are strong defensively as well. Each, though, has issues. It's a news story when Rosario takes a walk, so he has to hit for a high average to reach base at even an average clip. Last year his on-base percentage was just .289 in a league that reached base at a .318 clip and though he flashed enough power and defense to keep him worth playing, a further dip in batting average would change that math significantly. Buxton, who not long ago vied for the title of best prospect in baseball, has previously been held back by injuries but what's really troubling, in his brief big league stint, is his alienation from the strike zone. In 53 career games he has struck out in more than a third of his at-bats and drawn just six walks. It's risky to generalize about these issues—Alex Rodriguez's 1994-1995 debut featured similar strikeout-walk ratios, as did those of Starling Marte, Carlos Gonzalez, Carlos Gomez, Matt Kemp, and Jose Altuve, to name a few. Still, until Buxton adjusts, it's fair to worry that he will go on the much larger pile of prospects who were devoured by poor plate judgment. Sano is also at risk of winding up in that category. His rookie year helped assuage concerns that strikeouts prevent him from accessing his massive power, but so far this year he's whiffed in 13 of his 22 at-bats.

As for the rest, Dozier is a very good player, and Mauer could be one again. Korean import Byung-ho Park is an unknown quantity. Everyone else is just there. The Twins have other prospects, such as outfielder-first baseman Max Kepler, who is presently getting what's expected to be a brief look. But giving Kepler a chance would mean unplugging one of the youngsters ahead of him, or Mauer, or Park. Given Minnesota's dismal start, the required threshold for such a change could be shrinking. Yes, that would be a panic move, but sometimes panic is justified.

It would be easier to stay patient with the Twins' outlook if they weren't so unhurried about addressing it, and so resolutely bland. Since their post-2010 collapse, they're second to last in the AL in home runs, third-to-last in the league in on-base percentage, and fourth from last in successful stolen bases. Then there's the aforementioned pitcher strikeout problem. The Twins have said they've learned to love the K, but they haven't added strikeout pitchers, and throwing erstwhile starter Trevor May into the bullpen instead of acquiring one of the high-velocity arms that now shorten games for so many teams seems like one of the offseason's missed opportunities, as well as a misallocation of resources. But power arms cost money, and the Twins are neither able to find them nor willing to buy them.

The Twins need Buxton to run the bases the way he did in the minors, Sano to launch balls over buildings, Berrios to infuse some next-gen electricity into a pitching staff that has no business vying for the title of oldest in the league. They need these things not only because they will help them win again, but because it will help them actually become interesting.

I'm not sure what happened to LeMay. After I said, "Oh, that's the call waiting" 90 seconds into a dozen or so consecutive phone calls, he got the message that I did not want to spend three hours talking about the Harrier jump jet. I'm sure he went on to marry an aviation-fixated woman and generate a couple of monofocused kids. Then again, for all I know he could be working in the Twins' front office. That's their biggest problem—he'd fit right in.