The Year That Never Was

[Matt Braun]

It is now the first day of the Championship Series and Fall has officially nestled itself deep into our bloodstreams. Maybe it’s the quaintness of the familiar cool breeze running through the hairs on our skin once again or maybe it’s the warm fortress that our homes have now morphed into, but something has created a sentimental mood that can’t be shaken.The 2020 Twins were set to be unique in the lineage of other Twins teams. Josh Donaldson was the biggest free agent the team had ever acquired, Kenta Maeda was one of the first truly great starting pitchers the team had traded for, and the offense was coming off a season in which they bashed 307 homeruns. For the first time in an era, it felt as if we had a team that could shake off the mistakes of teams past and absolve the sins of many failed postseason runs.

 

Instead, a new reality imposed itself on us.

 

While we were all punching our tickets to spring training in Fort Myers-the warm oasis that promises endless opportunities-an unfortunate truth became evident. This was not to be a typical season. All of baseball, the rest of the sports universe, and the world at large hit the pause button. Events were canceled or postponed and our homes became the bunkers from which we were forced to live in for an uncertain amount of time. Time had now stood still.

 

The next few months proved to be an uncontained mess of anxiety. At times it seemed like a baseball season wouldn’t happen and at others it felt as if the entire idea of playing baseball was futile. It would have been a fun distraction from the misery and anguish happening everywhere in the world, but would that really be a good thing? Is ignoring our problems the way to handle them?

 

Nevertheless, a season came to fruition. It was to be 60 games long with only regional opponents in the schedule and 16 teams would get to reach the playoffs if they performed well enough.

 

This was about the worst thing that could have happened for the Twins. 60 games ensured that random, weird occurrences would clog the road in front of them. That’s the beauty of 162 games. There’s no hiding behind a few good players who could carry a team in the short term and beating up on bad teams would only open you to being exposed against better competition. In 60 games, though? Who knows. Even the Marlins made the playoffs. The Marlins for crying out loud.

 

The 162 game season also provides ample time for player evaluation. Bad players have great streaks just as great players have bad streaks. 162 games allows for the equilibrium to be found and for the truth to be wrangled from the mess. There’s no such legitimacy in 60 games. An otherwise great player like Christian Yelich struggled relatively while random players like Dominic Smith flourished. Such occurrences speak more to the random nature of the game than the true talents of each player.

 

And randomness is a team's worst nightmare. Especially for a team looking to add talent at the trade deadline.

 

Luck is a mirage. It loves to promise one thing only for a different reality to become apparent afterwards. Yet, this is all a team can utilize when assessing players in 2020. The end result was a pretty quiet trade deadline. The Padres were the only franchise to carry the load as they acquired players like Mike Clevinger and Austin Nola to aid in their conquest of the NL West.

 

The Twins, though? Like other competing franchises, they did nothing. They sat idly by and put their faith in the players they already had.

 

It’s hard to blame them for this move. No self-respecting franchise makes impact decisions based on a 30 game sample size. Not in this era. All the team could reasonably do was sit and watch as an ultimately pointless trade deadline reached its conclusion and hope that they had the right players for a playoff run.

 

It didn’t have to be like that.

 

A normal season with normal games, normal rules, and normal, well, normality would have changed all of that. The team had already shown that they were fully in a win-now mode with the acquisitions of Kenta Maeda and Josh Donaldson. What would the next step have looked like? Another true ace? An Andrew Miller-type reliever who could have helped dominate in the playoffs? Just one more big bat in the lineup who could have come up clutch in a do-or-die playoff scenario? All we can do is speculate.

 

We know how this played out in real life. Donaldson didn’t play in the playoffs due to a re-aggravated injury and a clearly hurt Byron Buxton was forced to start just one game (a full season would have allowed more time for these injuries to heal, by the way). The bats stayed cold, the team got swept, and the playoff ineptitude reached historic levels.

 

Perhaps it's the blinding homerism that’s rooted deep into my blood but I haven’t been able to shake the sense that things would have been dramatically different in another present. A present that mimicked a season we’ve seen play out numerous times in the past. There is no Wild Card series in a separate timeline and perhaps the new opponents would have dropped a game or three against the Twins. Maybe they avoid an Astros team that is now clearly more of a contender than they received credit for. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

 

For now all we can do is live vicariously through similar franchises like the Rays and re-watch old memories of the 1991 World Series victory and dream on what could have been.

 

What could have been.

 

And what actually happened.

 

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[Darius]

I think it’s burns me more that the Astros are in the ALCS than the Twins aren’t.

 

They shouldn’t even be in the playoffs. They got to play the hapless Twins and the overrated As without their best player.

 

Must be nice to have good luck raining from the sky on you even when you do your damndest to screw things up.

[D.C Twins]

Oh the year WAS unfortunately.... and it looked strikingly similar to the conclusion of many previous years.

[mikelink45]

I cannot give in to this angst - they stumbled to the division championship.  Everyone said that they had the easiest wildcard opponent.  They scored 2 runs total for two games.  Sorry we got what we deserved.  Everyone played 60 games and some went through covid set backs - like the team you noted - the Marlins.  

 

The ASTROS struggled through 60, but woke up in the playoffs.  Our bats stumbled through the season with an excellent record and still could not wake up in the playoffs. 

 

We got what we deserved.  Now lets fix next year.