Twins eliminated from playoff contention

MINNEAPOLIS — It’s hard to believe that it was less than a year ago that the Twins were playing October baseball and exorcising their organizational demons with the long-awaited postseason success that certainly looked like it could serve as the building block for even greater heights to come.

That now feels like a universe away.

It would have been nearly impossible to imagine that, in a world in which three American League Central teams would be playoff-bound in 2024, these Minnesota Twins would not be in that bunch — much as it would have been laughable to think that a Tigers team that was 11 games behind the Twins on Aug. 10 would eventually leave Minnesota in the dust.

But the seemingly impossible became cold, hard reality on Friday, when a 7-2 loss to the Orioles formally eliminated the Twins from playoff contention at the end of a stunning 12-25 collapse in their past 37 games.

“This will bother me forever,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “I will think about it a lot and I will use it to motivate myself in a lot of different ways going forward because I never want to experience that again.”

That’s the third-worst record in baseball in that span since Aug. 18, better than only the 97-loss Angels and the 121-loss White Sox, a downturn all the more abrupt considering that, over the previous 103 games, dating back to April, they had owned the best record in baseball.

The Twins plummeted so quickly that this wiped out what had been a 5 1/2-game playoff cushion as recently as Sept. 5, when they owned a 95.4% chance at a playoff slot, per Fangraphs. The fact that Minnesota owned every possible tiebreaker against Kansas City, Detroit and Seattle somehow didn’t end up mattering at all.

It’s the kind of collapse that will bring reflection, reckoning — and, perhaps, reaction.

Friday’s decisive result laid bare the core reasons that laid the foundation for this collapse.

The offense, mostly healthy, simply didn’t hit. The Twins mustered four hits in a must-win game, marking the 22nd time in their last 28 games in which they were held to four or fewer runs. They averaged only 3.73 runs per game amid this 37-game collapse.

“I ran out of gas,” Royce Lewis said. “I’m trying my best. It’s a different grind.”

That’s something that Lewis had reiterated at various points toward the end of the season — that he and the young players hadn’t experienced such a long season, that they were physically catching up.

But Carlos Correa disagreed with that reasoning.

“Everybody runs out of gas at the end of the year,” Correa said. “The season is damn long. The guys that stay resilient and the guys that stay strong mentally are the guys that succeed. We did not do any of those things. Being tired is an excuse that’s not valid at this point.”

The bullpen simply ran out of trustworthy arms. Needing to keep the game close with a 2-0 deficit, the Twins had to turn to Caleb Thielbar, who allowed one run, then to Kody Funderburk, who allowed four more.

The Twins perhaps opened the door to this sort of scenario — unlikely as it may have seemed — when team leadership said on the record early in the offseason that the Twins would be looking to shed payroll, with ownership adding in February that they had to “right-size” the business, leading to an Opening Day payroll slashed by $26.4 million compared to last season.

The front office played its part, too, as its external pitching acquisitions entering the season — Anthony DeSclafani, Josh Staumont, Steven Okert, Jay Jackson and Justin Topa — were ineffective or injured. The Twins’ lone Trade Deadline acquisition, Trevor Richards, didn’t make it a month before being DFA’d.

And while it’s tenuous to measure the impact of a coaching staff and leadership within a clubhouse, there’s no denying that a team ending the season with a healthy Correa, Byron Buxton and Lewis was clearly far less than the sum of its parts when things mattered most, especially on offense.

“For sure, there will be changes,” Correa said. “There will be a lot of changes. But, we’ll let the offseason tell us what those are going to be, and we adjust to them and move forward, hopefully for the best.”

Both Baldelli and Correa noted they needed time to process what had happened, to get past the shock.

And once they do, deeper searching will begin.