At the beginning of the 90s action movie Cliffhanger, Sylvester Stallone is desperately trying to keep a character from falling to their death as the glove they're wearing slowly slips off. There's a moment of hope but ultimately the glove comes off and the character plunges into the abyss below.
That charater is the Minnesota Twins, and fans are Sylvester Stallone trying to hang on for dear life even though it's pretty clear what is about to happen. The Twins have cratered over the last month, plummeting from being just 3.5 games away from having the best record in the American League to being on the brink of missing the playoffs altogether.
Pablo Lopez helped hammer a nail into the team's coffin on Sunday in one of his worst starts of the season. He was lit up by the Red Sox, allowing seven runs on nine hits in just four innings of work. Lopez gave up six runs to Triston Casas alone after a pair of three-run home runs in the first and third innings.
It was a brutal day for Minnesota's best pitcher, which just about sums up how this stretch run has gone and how deserving the Twins are of the final Wild Card spot they're about to lost a grip on.
Pablo Lopez had a brutally honest reaction to allowing seven runs to Red Sox
If it wasn't clear already, Lopez was tagged with a loss on Sunday in the first game of a doubleheader the Twins needed to show up for. That wasn't the case in the first game, and while the offense didn't offer any assistance, it was the horrible start by Lopez that dug them into a hole that's looking more and more like a grave.
After the game, Lopez got honest about what happened.
“There’s no sugar-coating it,” López said. “Not the performance I was looking for, especially with what this game means. Game 1 of a doubleheader, didn’t provide the length, didn’t provide the quality. And we know what this game also meant with playoff implications.
That's both admirable to hear, as there's no hiding from what happened, but also another sign of how cooked the Twins are.
Minnesots is simply out of answers at this point; the team has been running on fumes since August and has a roster held together by duct tape and bubblegum. The heat of a playoff race has scorched them and proven to be too hot to handle as the Detroit Tigers surge into the final Wild Card spot Minnesota has clung to for most of the month.
At this point it would be a borderline shame of the Twins snuck into the postseason only to become canon fodder for the Houston Astros. The Tigers are who the Twins were last season, a scrappy young team that is hitting its stride at the right time. That's the team we deserve to see in the postseason, not the corpse of a Twins team that once looked like a contender but is now bottoming out at the worst possible time.
Lopez hasn't had a great season, but when the ace of the pitching staff is allowing seven runs on nine hits in a must-win game, that tells you all you need to know.
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