Slammed Shut

Reds 8

Twins 4

The Twins have been in the midst of their second playoff-blowing meltdown in 3 years for close to a month now. What looked like a true division race dissolved into "well maybe we can still get the 2nd wild card" and now has sunk to "well maybe we can hold on to the last wild card"

The collapse continued on Friday night, during probably my last 2024 trip to Target Field.

In come the mediocre Reds, who I picked to win the NL Central this year but who have long since been out of any playoff contention. These are the teams you HAVE to beat, particularly at home, if you want to make the playoffs.

But there we were again, having terrible at bats against some nobody pitcher, and unable to score.

Bailey Ober was pitching well. His only blemish through 6 innings was a solo homerun that the wind kind of carried out.

At last, the Twins feeble offense scored in the 5th. Byron Buxton, in his 1st game in a month, lasered a homerun to left. So we had at least tied it up.

But, one of the trends of this year's meltdown has been blowup innings by pitchers, and boy, did we get one in the 7th.

Ober gave up a leadoff triple to Spencer Steer (of course), who was then scored on a squeeze play. A run scoring double and a walk followed. Ober bounced back to strike out the next 2, and looked ready to get out of the inning with no more damage.

But another of the trends of the meltdown has been nonsensical, boneheaded decisions by Rocco Baldelli. And here he made another by choosing THIS spot to pull Ober, replacing him with Jorge "Homerun Factory" Alcala.

It was disastrous. Alcala walked his 1st batter to load em up, and then the Reds young star Elly De La Cruz emptied them with a gargantuan grand slam that made it 7-1 and felt like one of those dagger moments for a season.

The Twins got a few runs back in their 7th, 1 from Willi Castro, and 2 from Brooks Lee. But the hole was too deep. The Reds added one run back, and our last 2 innings at the plate were 1-2-3. To add insult to injury, our scoreless 8th was against Emilio Pagan.

This is just not going to end well. The Twins have a road trip coming up at Cleveland and Boston, and I would be stunned if they come home still in a wild card spot.

It's a bad team. They don't hit. They don't pitch, and even when they do, Rocco undermines them. They stink in the field. They don't do any of the little fundamental things right that would indicate quality managing.

It's going to be extra humiliating when the Royals and Tigers get in ahead of them. Two franchises that actually made World Series while the Twins were in that 0-18 abyss. And now they both did rebuilds and are better than the Twins again. And all we have to show for it is a wild card series win.