{"id":276235,"date":"2023-10-03T12:01:15","date_gmt":"2023-10-03T17:01:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/?p=276235"},"modified":"2023-10-04T08:32:11","modified_gmt":"2023-10-04T13:32:11","slug":"the-end-of-postseason-drought-would-be-great","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/?p=276235","title":{"rendered":"The End of Postseason Drought Would Be Great"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Minneapolis — Pablo L\u00f3pez<\/a> will deliver the first pitch of the 2023 American League Wild Card Series<\/a> on Tuesday. Scattered around the stands of Target Field, Richard Adair, Leah Olson, Matt Pettersen and John Tantzen will be watching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It will have been 6,937 days since the Minnesota Twins last won a playoff game. They have lost 18 consecutive postseason contests in that span since Oct. 5, 2004, marking the longest playoff losing streak in not only baseball history, but in the history of American \u201cBig Four\u201d sports.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adair, Olson, Pettersen and Tantzen have been there for every one of those losses at home. (Except for the 2020 American League Wild Card Series, which fans were not allowed to attend due to the COVID-19 pandemic.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

October baseball should be cause for jubilation, for hope. It\u2019s the reward for players and fans alike at the end of a grueling, 162-game war of attrition. Any team left standing can wipe out everything that came before, get hot and go on a long run.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Any team but the Twins, it\u2019s seemed for a long time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYeah, I have a feeling of dread,\u201d said Pettersen, a teacher in Amery, Wis. \u201cWe\u2019re going to get in, and it\u2019s fun to watch them win in the regular season and stuff. \u2026 And even though the pitching is better than it has been, I just have this feeling that, you know, we\u2019re not going to be able to win any games. I definitely have that there.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI always kind of feel like that Michael Scott [from \u2018The Office\u2019] meme of, \u2018I\u2019m ready to be hurt again,\u2019\u201d said Andy Johnson, a Twins fan and social studies teacher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A tinge melodramatic? Perhaps. Fatalistic? Without question. But is there even a \u201cproper\u201d emotional and logical response to be expected with regard to a one-of-one occurrence like this?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every time a Twins team makes the playoffs, the manager and players are inevitably peppered with questions about the streak, and every time, they don\u2019t exactly seem sure what to say — and why would they? The vast majority of them have absolutely nothing to do with a Yankees comeback off Juan Rincon, or with a fair ball being called foul by Phil Cuzzi, or with Torii Hunter\u2019s futile dive that turned a sinking line drive into an inside-the-park homer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The only things in common throughout the streak spanning losses in 2004, \u201806, \u201809, \u201810, \u201817, \u201819 and \u201820, really, have been the team name on the front of the uniform — and the fans who watched, owning the entire narrative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe’ve had three managers now be a part of this streak, and how many dozens of players?\u201d Johnson said. \u201cProbably hundreds of players, and they’re not necessarily the ones who, like, were the streak when they added on their couple of games to it. But it really is a streak of the fans who have been here for closing in on two full decades of it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The math behind the streak has long since left the realm of the absurd.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the oversimplification in which each game is modeled by a coin flip, the odds of a team losing 18 straight games is 1 in 262,144. As computed by Twins fan Chris Hanel for a video retrospective<\/a> about this Twins losing streak, factoring in the Twins\u2019 maximum win probability in each game extends those odds up to a frankly unbelievable 1 in 65 billion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If this is to be considered some sort of collective regional and generational struggle, it would, of course, figure that different fans would process those emotions in different ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perspective is everything in that. For the younger generation of Twins fans, 19 years feels like an eternity, and it\u2019s all they know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter until they win a playoff game,\u201d is a refrain often seen from the more cynical of them after anything remotely positive at any point in the regular season, year after year. Why get too invested if it\u2019ll only end up as another data point in — literally — the most inglorious streak of all time?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But through all of this, some of those that have been there for the most postseason losing are actually the ones to maintain the most optimism, levelheadedness and relentlessness about seeing all this through — because many of them have also seen what\u2019s on the other side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Twins do remain the last Big Four sports team of the state to have won a championship — that, having come all the way back in 1991, when Jack Morris\u2019 immortal Game 7 performance against the Atlanta Braves gave Minnesotans their last taste of glory at the following what is still widely considered one of the greatest World Series ever contested. For younger fans, Game 163 in 2009 is the closest they\u2019ve come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Minneapolis — Pablo L\u00f3pez will deliver the first pitch of the 2023 American League Wild Card Series on Tuesday. Scattered around the stands of Target Field, Richard Adair, Leah Olson, Matt Pettersen and John Tantzen will be watching. It will have been 6,937 days since the Minnesota Twins last won a playoff game. They […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":276236,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-276235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=276235"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":276251,"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276235\/revisions\/276251"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/276236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=276235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=276235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=276235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}