Last week, the Twins’ 13-game winning streak came to an end at the hand of the Brewers. I don’t professionally write about baseball, so I’ll leave the detailed breakdown to Jay Jaffe at FanGraphs. I’ll instead focus on how this streak felt as a fan.
It was magnificent.
It’s difficult to shake off the final month of last season. The Twins were poised to make another run into the playoffs with a healthy group of players and a pitching staff that hasn’t been this excellent since the Johan Santana days. It fell apart in a tremendous blur of ineptitude, leapfrogged by the rest of the AL Central.
There was restructuring among the coaching staff, a young core ready to make another step forward, and a cautious optimism in spring training. The Twins were looking good until the season started for real, when they reeled in much the same way they had in late August and September. Our pitchers were getting blown up across the board, and our hitters were seeing the ball as well as they would a pea against a green screen. Correa kept hitting into double plays, again, and Lewis pulled his hamstring right before the season began. I was buoyed only by the Giants—my second team—getting off to a surprisingly hot start, so I could shift my attention elsewhere.
Then Kody Clemens hit a walk-off home run and for two weeks the Twins kept winning. Every starting pitcher threw a gem, or close enough to one that our bullpen that had finished shaking off early season rust and cobwebs could finish the job. We remembered what it took to win a baseball game—namely, score runs. Everyone pulled their weight before and after Buxton and Correa collided. It felt fun. It felt sustainable. These games weren’t won by fluke errors and happenstance. They were remarkably well-played.
Unlike the sausage situation from 2024, nothing weirdly superstitious came of all this.
The streak broke on a Sunday afternoon in Milwaukee in large part due to a highlight catch by Jackson Chourio, but that didn’t slow the turnaround. The Twins managed bad weather against the Guardians and took two of three games against the Royals this weekend, walking off both. They probably won’t get another thirteen game winning streak, but getting in a groove of winning series, particularly against the AL Central, makes all the difference.
I’ve happily been brought back from mild despair protected by a false veneer of ambivalence to the cautious optimism that abounded during spring training. We’re two months into the season so it’s no longer too early, we can confirm the Twins are not an awful team—it’s hard to be when your starting rotation and bullpen are each nearly best in the majors—but a considerable stretch of the season remains. Injuries could still abound, our younger pitchers could fail to anchor the backend of the rotation, and situational hitting could dry up at any moment. Even so, I’m having fun watching baseball. I’m locked into this season and am excited to see if the AL Central can repeat its healthy representation in the playoffs, ideally with the Twins securing a berth this time around.