All signs point to the Minnesota Twins 2021 season being a complete waste.
They’ve lost countless games after having a lead late, they are 0-7 in extra inning contests (all ending in 10), and their best player is hurt…again.
It would be easy to jump off the wagon now, and many fans already have based on some of the interesting comments I’ve read on social media, but I’m sticking with this team.
The biggest problems this team has had in 2021 has been their inability to generate runs from the 7th inning on, their starting pitching–even when good–doesn’t pitch deep enough into the game, and their bullpen has been taxed, inefficient, and frankly absolutely dreadful.
The good news is, the last two games against the Rangers, the Twins bullpen has hung in there. In those contests the Twins bullpen allowed only 1 earned run in 8 innings of work, and Colome, who seemed to have already been written off by team management and left for dead by the fanbase despite being newly signed just this offseason, was responsible for two of those innings.
So here’s how we are going to spin this:
It’s still early, it’s just late-early.
The bad news is it looks the the Division might have two or three solid teams at the top. The good news is all those teams (at the time of writing this) are only 3 games above .500 and none of them seem to be in the mood to runaway with it.
And the Twins will have plenty of shots at all of them this year.
The starting pitching needs to go deeper. The Twins don’t have a good enough bullpen for Rocco Baldelli to only get 5 innings a night from his starters. He doesn’t have four guys on the team that are gonna go out there and shut down one inning a piece. In order to turn this around, and there is still time to do so, Rocco is gonna have to start taxing the arms of his starting pitchers.
Of which I still believe that they have four quality starters who would invite that challenge.
The Twins will also need to put Buxton on the shelf for a couple weeks to let him fully heal. They can’t keep putting a band-aid on it and running him back out there to play. The guy only knows one way to play the game. 100%. Hard. Lay out. Sell out. Etc. How many more times do we need to see him trying desperately to leg out an infield hit and pull up lame while running to first because he is playing with lingering leg injuries which haven’t fully healed.
I think the Twins can whether the storm of him being out for a couple of weeks. They’ve had plenty of injuries so far this year and have yet to submit their ideal lineup card this season because of it. Even with all that in the background, plus the disaster of a bullpen they’ve trotted out there so far this season, the Twins have had a legitimate chance to win 25 of their 30 games. Of their 19 losses, 8 have come by surrendering runs in the 9th or later.
This is a still a good club, but it has been a hard luck team that has gone through injuries, covid, a slow start from their ace Maeda, and bullpen troubles every night, in the first one-fifth of their season.
I believe they can get healthy. I believe they can fix this by pitching their starters longer, which will help their bullpen perform a lot better in both the short and long terms.
And I still believe this team can get back into the thick of things and make a playoff push down the road.
It’s starts tonight with Detroit. A team without much expectations coming into this season, and they haven’t disappointed. The Twins will hopefully use this series as a spring board toward more consistent success.
I still believe in this team.
Let’s go Twins.
I still got you on my bucket list.
