You're Minnesota.
A couple months ago I wrote a report that I called “You’re Chicago,” and yesterday’s getaway game in Minnesota made me think of it.
It’s easy to look at Texas 6, Minnesota 5 through Rangers-colored lenses and celebrate a team really needing a win battling out of the corner to take it, but imagine you’re a Twins fan.
As of July 17, you were 50-40 and holding down home field advantage for the Wild Card Game.
Since then, no team in baseball has had a worse record than your 7-16 — and that’s even with two wins to start the Rangers series.
You have a chance to sweep Texas, with Cleveland coming in next, giving you the chance to build momentum before a huge 10-day roadie in New York, Baltimore, and Tampa.
After a big comeback win on Tuesday despite being down, 2-0, in the eighth, and then spanking the Rangers, 11-1, on Wednesday, you jump on emergency call-up Chi Chi Gonzalez, who’d been knocked around by AAA hitters at a .303 clip since his return to Round Rock a month ago, in the bottom of the second. The Rangers are basically without an available long man, so when you rack up 10 bases in the space of five hitters (homer-single-single-double-double) off the rookie and had a 4-0 lead after recording only four outs, things look pretty good.
Twenty-five Gonzalez pitches in, and you’re licking your chops at the prospect of Adam Rosales having to face Miguel Sano and everyone else twice.
And then?
Gonzalez lasts another 4.1 innings, and doesn’t allow another hit. And in the meantime, Ervin Santana can’t hold the big, early lead, as Mitch Moreland hammers a two-run blast in the fourth and, after a run-scoring Prince Fielder single in the fifth, Moreland doubleds in a pair to turn the game all the way around, giving Texas a 5-4 lead.
Aaron Hicks singles in a run off Keone Kela in the sixth, but Shane Robinson gets greedy, trying unsuccessfully to score from first on the play when Delino DeShields lazies the ball back to the infield. Tie game. Home game. Deep breath.
What looks like a serious Rangers threat in the seventh dies quickly. After DeShields works a 3-0 count, Santana fills the count but ultimately surrenders a single to right, and on the next pitch Shin-Soo Choo shoots a ball safely to right field as well. DeShields cuts the bag at second and sprints for third, and the big boys are due to come up.
But Eddie Rosario fires a tremendous strike to third, cutting DeShields down, and three pitches later Fielder bounces into an easy 6-4-3 to end an inning that seemed to be on the verge of blowing up.
Then the Rangers take a lead in the eighth, with Moreland (on National Lefthanders Day) again in the middle of things. After Adrian Beltre and Moreland singles put men on the corners, Elvis Andrus of all people drives a Casey Fien pitch deep enough to center field to bring Beltre home, the seventh pitch of an at-bat that started out 0-2.
Still, you’re facing a beleaguered Texas bullpen, and if you can so much as get one man on in the eighth or ninth, Joe Mauer will hit. Get two men on in that space, and Sano bats. Three, and Trevor Plouffe, who’d homered to start the scoring in that big four-run second, would get a chance, if Minnesota hadn’t walked off by then.
But instead, Jake Diekman — in spite of starting three straight hitters off with ball one and getting drilled in the hip by the first hitter he faced — and Shawn Tolleson each retire the Twins in order.
Ballgame.
Minnesota won the series, but half an hour into that one a series sweep looked like every bit of a foregone conclusion. Five hits (and four runs) in the space of five batters off Chi Chi Gonzalez . . . and then no hits off the rookie by the remaining 18 Twins hitters he’d face.
And though the Indians visit next, the Twins draw Corey Kluber and Carlos Carrasco on the front and back end of that three-gamer.
Say what you will about the way Texas competed to salvage a game and how good and seemingly necessary that win was, but if you’re Minnesota, that’s just a brutal loss for a team that had shown signs of regaining its footing after a lengthy skid.
As for Texas, the club now returns home, where it’s won seven of eight. Tampa Bay is here for three, after which it’s Seattle, and when we convene on Monday for Newberg Report Night (latest auction/raffle update), it will apparently be Cole Hamels back on the mound, as long as his intervening side session goes without incident.
Texas played .633 baseball in May. If the club plays at that clip over the remaining month and a half, it will finish with 87 wins.
And a possible playoff berth.
The Rangers go into this weekend series half a game behind Minnesota in the Wild Card chase, and while the way Tuesday in particular went, Texas fans have the right to feel like an opportunity to pass the Twins was absolutely squandered, Minnesota fans certainly have to wonder how it is that their team didn’t put further distance between itself and the Rangers, and leap over Baltimore into a tie with the Rays on the doorstep of the second Wild Card spot.
The chance was there to put Texas away Thursday afternoon behind a veteran pitcher whose offense had put a rookie hurler on the ropes, with little in the way of inning-eating help behind him, and it didn’t happen, and if you’re the Twins — a team that hasn’t been anywhere near the playoffs in five years and that hasn’t won a playoff game in 11 years or a playoff series in 13 — Texas 6, Minnesota 5 is one that really has to hurt.