Twins, meet rock bottom

When Ehire Adrianza is pitching mop up duty in the 9th inning of a 2nd straight home loss to the Mets, and fwiw getting shelled,  to top off a 14-4 loss to the 2nd worst team in the National League, that's when you know that a month and a half long slump has reached rock bottom.

I'm done. I'm done giving this team any benefit of the doubt. This collapse is happening, and it's not stopping. That series win in Cleveland last weekend has already been obliterated. The Indians went right back to demolishing the Tigers, while the Twins opened a tough 9 game homestand by frankly embarrassing themselves in the 2 "easy" games. The lead was 5.5 at the break, was bumped up to 6.5, and now will likely be 4 at night's end.

The Twins of 2019 are having a historic collapse. It is HARD to blow a 12 game lead in less than 2 months(I'm very much assuming the Indians pass us before August 1st). When that happens it's legendary. It's the 78 Red Sox(the Bucky Dent game) or the 51 Dodgers(the shot heard round the world). Even the 2006 Tigers needed half a season to be caught by the Twins.

These Mets games are a perfect microcosm of this belly flop. They literally hand the Mets all their runs last night with fielding mistakes and wild pitches. Today Trevor May hangs a curve that gets smashed for a 3 run homerun. Eddie Rosario lazily drops a routine fly ball. Matt Magill surrenders a homerun to Pete Alonso that went almost 500 feet. And both games had the now expected series of bad at bats, extremely un-clutch hitting, solo home runs, and even a little bad baserunning.

The Twins of April and May were not reality. I bought in and feel like I got took. There's always an excuse, either from the team itself or the apologists I deal with on reddit everyday. It's the injuries. It's that we're tired from playing extra inning games. It's the umpires fault. It's bad luck.

No. This team, since touching down in Cleveland in early June, is just a mediocre ballclub. They are 18-18, against a largely soft schedule. They are 7-8 against sub-.500 teams. They are not getting it done in the way a team has to to win a division.

Whatever the reason is, this lineup has been figured out. They are not reliable. They choke with runners in scoring position. When they hit homeruns they're always solo shots. They can't manufacture runs with sacrifices, hit n runs, none of that. They go huge chunks of innings without scoring.

The pitching has kept them in games. The bullpen exploded today but for the most part they've been okay lately. The rotation has not imploded. But neither unit is good enough to carry a team.

But this lineup has horribly regressed. It's 2018 all over again. Nobody is consistently producing in this lineup anymore.

I already declared the division over a couple weeks ago. But now I honestly no longer think this team even hangs on to a wild card. The AL is deep this year. There could be 7 or even 8 teams win 90+ games. And only 5 will play in October. The Twins only have about a 5 game lead over the last wild card spot too. If the Twins are an exact .500 the rest of the season, which seems optimistic, they finish 92-70. No way that gets them in the playoffs in any capacity.

I'm not even in favor of making any trades, at least not for rentals. I'm not trading assets for this team. I'll trade for players who will still be here in 2020, or beyond. But this team is not making an October run. They're not ready.