Picking up the Pieces

Sports, like all great theatre, appeal to us because they package all of the wonderful and terrible feelings of real life into a few hours at a time,  mostly leaving out the boring parts. Failing that, it makes the boring parts feel less boring because everything else feels too important to be boring.

However, the wonderful thing is that none of it is important. It's all "men in pajamas playing projectile fetch." When a game is over, we can move on.

Except, like in real life, we cannot always move on. When things go wrong, we feel alone and broken, and we want answers. We can try believing that it's because we're cursed somehow — by where we live, by the opponents in our teams' paths, or just by being — but the truth is that there are no curses. Sometimes, a good team loses to another good team. And sometimes, it happens again and again and again.

The advantage real life has over sports fandom is self-determination: When faced with the reality of inherent meaninglessness in the former, one can rely on themselves and those closest to them to create their own meaning and happiness. When faced with the same reality in the latter, one must rely on strangers and physics.

I wish I could believe that the Twins were destined to lose three straight — sorry, 13 straight — to the Yankees because it was predestined from the start. I wish I could believe any of the other lazy narratives that are sure to be applied to this team: that they weren't clutch enough, that they relied too much on home runs in the regular season, that they didn't have enough playoff experience, or that their 101 wins were a mirage. Any one of those possibilities would make it easier to move on because there at least would be a reason why this keeps happening to this team.

In Game 1, Rocco Baldelli probably should have made someone other than Zack Littell the first pitcher he summoned from the bullpen. But Littell had performed well in the second half of the regular season, generating far more grounders and flies than line drives and lowering his ERA from 5.40 at the break to 2.68 by season's end.

Littell walked Aaron Judge and hit Brett Gardner, and Tyler Duffey couldn't escape the 5th without letting the two of them score.

Cody Stashak had pitched well in the regular season, too. It didn't matter. The Twins' most fly ball-prone pitcher gave up five fly balls, and two left the yard. Baldelli let Kyle Gibson pitch woefully in the 7th, and it was over.

In Game 2, Randy Dobnak allowed six base runners in the first two innings and then loaded the bases in the third before exiting for Duffey. Duffey triggered the game-killing implosion by giving up two well-hit balls for RBIs, hitting Edwin Encarnación, and allowing a grand slam to Twin-killer Didi Gregorius. The rest of the bullpen took over and let in no more runs, but there was no overcoming the 7-run deficit.

In Game 3 though, the Twins did everything they needed for eight innings.

Jake Odorizzi pitched at least as well as Luis Severino, and probably better. Odorizzi gave up a wall-scraping home run and an RBI single against the shift, which came when he was a strike away from getting out of an inning. Severino loaded the bases without recording an out in the 2nd, then won an eight-pitch battle with Miguel Sanó and struck out Marwin González and Jake Cave.

When Baldelli gave his Taylor Rogers the ball in the 6th, he retired the side on eight pitches. The Yankees hit him harder in the 7th but only got a run out of it.

D.J. LeMahieu, Judge, Encarnación, and Giancarlo Stanton were 1-for-15 with four strikeouts. That one hit: a soft blooper from Stanton that fell just in front of Max Kepler for a single. With the exception of Gleyber Torres, who finished off a monster series, the Twins held the Yankees' best hitters in check.

The Twins hit nine of the game's 12 batted balls that exceeded 100 miles per hour. Those nine batted balls resulted in three hits. Minnesota's expected batting average, according to Statcast, was .298, compared to New York's .205. Their actual batting averages: .257 and .306, respectively.

The Twins' three hardest-hit balls of the night were all outs: Nelson Cruz's double-play groundout in the 1st (105.3 miles per hour), Jorge Polanco's lineout to a diving Gregorius in the 9th (106.1 miles per hour), and Sanó's lineout in the 6th that would have scored a run if Judge was two inches shorter (107.9 miles per hour, the hardest-hit ball all game).

Until Sergio Romo faltered in his second inning of work in the 9th, the Twins outplayed the Yankees. Their best swings weren't resulting in hits, and the hits they got came at the wrong times. And for that, their season is over.

The Twins will be back, certainly. Their core players are in their primes. Derek Falvey and Thad Levine's half-in, half-out strategy of giving short-term deals to free agents last winter, as well as a number of players hitting free agency this winter, leaves them with a lot of room in the budget. If the Twins pick up Cruz's $12 million team option (which they should), they will have less than $32 million committed to next season's payroll entering the offseason. Some of the top prospects in a deep farm system, like Brent Rooker, may debut in 2020. Recent graduates of the system, like Brusdar Graterol, should take bigger roles in the team. Though the Indians haven't aged out of their window, and the White Sox should eventually present a threat, the Twins are your favorites in the AL Central for the foreseeable future.

But it's hard to think about what's next when what just happened confirms every pessimistic Minnesotan's first reaction to success in sports: That soon, it all will fall apart, and we'll be left desperately searching for reasons why.