Getting Through the Tough Times

If you’re a fan of the Twins like I am, the last 17 days have been tough. We’ve seen bad starts, blown saves, no offense, and injuries which have resulted in a 5-10 record for our beloved Twins. If this team were the Royals or Pirates, teams who’ve not been expected to win for years, we’d just throw our hands up in the air and dig in for another losing season, looking forward to cheap tickets at the half-full stadium during the summer and checking the team’s home schedule to find out when other team’s we wanted to see were going to be in town (no offense to fans of those teams intended). But this is not the Royals or Pirates. This is a team that has competed for the division title year-in and year-out for the better part of a decade. This is a team that opened up a beautiful brand-new ballpark one year ago, signed the hometown hero to a lengthy and expensive contract and who we all EXPECT to compete. For 10 years it’s been that way and the team has only had one losing season during that time…which makes this past stretch of games all the more painful.

I’ll be honest, after the news about Joe Mauer on Friday morning (things are looking better now), I decided I needed a little mental break and so I really didn’t watch the Twins on Friday or Saturday. I checked in to see the results of their games, but I didn’t want their losing ways and my disappointment in the team to permeate the rest of my daily life. Call me pathetic, but because I write about the team several times a week and am constantly checking up on news about them and reading about them, it gets hard to compartmentalize my thoughts and feelings when things going this poorly for them. Today I came back, watched their early noon game and was pleasantly surprised as they won with a true 2nd-string lineup.

No matter how this team does this year, I will follow them until the last game. Even though it’s tough to see them struggle so much early on in this season, the hope doesn’t die. After the game today, I saw at tweet that made me smile, though I didn’t write down who it was that tweeted it so I can’t properly attribute the source. It said something like, “With the Twins at 5-10, they’ve now matched their start from the 1991 season, and we all know how that ended up.” It gave me a little more hope that this team can turn it around and get back to their winning ways of the last 10 years. Working in the Twins favor is the fact that the Tigers and White Sox have struggled at the same time as the Twins. Though the Royals and Indians are sitting atop the division now, I don’t expect they’ll be able to sustain their early season success and by May or June the cream of the AL Central should rise to the top.

I know this post isn’t particularly deep and that it isn’t full of statistical analysis or any “here’s how they’re going to turn things around” speculation, but I thought it would be therapeutic for myself to get my ‘fan feelings’ out on paper and, perhaps, beneficial for others of you out there to hear from a fellow fan. As the saying goes, “misery loves company” and I’m more than happy to be that company. Now come on boys, let’s get some wins!!