Twins' win streak provided spark needed to right the ship

MINNEAPOLIS -- It seems the rally-sparking summer sausage has reached its expiration date.

“It might be in the trash by now, honestly, where it belongs,” said manager Rocco Baldelli, who had raised questions regarding its potential adverse health effects on humans all along.

The Twins’ winning streak is over, cut off at 12 games following a 9-2 loss to the Red Sox at Target Field on Sunday, the Twins’ first defeat since an April 21 loss to the Tigers two weeks ago. These 2024 Twins will remain in a tie with the 1980 club for the second-longest streak in team history, and the record 15-game streak set by the ‘91 squad will live to see another day.

But, as catcher Ryan Jeffers put things when sausage-mania was at its peak and the Twins were in the midst of that streak, it was always more about the “idea of the sausage” and the “meaning behind the sausage” anyway.

Whatever that might mean to those within the clubhouse walls (frankly, many of them probably won’t spare it another thought), the point is more that the entire silly saga will remain representative of how these Twins found their needed spark to right the ship -- and started having fun playing loose baseball again.

“That feeling we have in the clubhouse right now is allowing us to play loose, play without feeling weight on our shoulders and then just don’t even think about it,” ace Pablo López had said after his Saturday start.

They needed that in a bad way 13 days ago, when all this started.

“It was special,” Carlos Correa said. “Gives us a lot of confidence moving forward. It's going to be a long season. We knew it wasn't going to last forever.”

Here’s the difference that two weeks made:

The standings
Following the games of April 21, the Twins were at 7-13, in fourth place and a full eight games behind the American League Central-leading Guardians at 16-6.

The Twins now sit in second place at 19-14, only 2 1/2 games back of the Guardians. This 12-game streak didn’t take them all the way to the top, but it certainly made them competitive again with Cleveland, Kansas City and Detroit, which had all jumped out to surprisingly strong starts.

Following a series loss at home to the Tigers, the Twins needed to take advantage of a stretch against the White Sox, Angels and White Sox again -- and they won all of those games.

“I really wasn’t looking at any of those games,” Baldelli said. “I was just looking at us needing to figure ourselves out, more so than anything else.”

The offense
On April 21, the Twins were hitting .195/.281/.329 as a team, ranking them 29th in batting average, 27th in on-base percentage and 29th in slugging percentage among MLB teams.

Following Sunday’s games, they’d bumped that up to .239/.318/.401, pushing them firmly into the middle of the pack in average and on-base, and actually pushing them into the top 10 in slugging, where they ranked ninth.

It’s a similar kind of turnaround to the one the 2023 Twins saw -- but this one came sooner.

The Twins’ offense scuffled deep into the summer last season before the arrivals of several key rookies -- Edouard Julien, Matt Wallner and Royce Lewis foremost among them -- and improvements from several existing lineup members turned them into one of the Majors’ most productive offenses, in aggregate.

They’re hoping this stretch served as a similar sign of a turnaround for the bats.

“That happened last year in the second half,” Baldelli said. “I like the fact that it happened in April, and the guys -- the cocoons have kind of opened up a little earlier this year. And that’s a good sign, because it took us a while last year to get it going.”

Playoff odds
It’s way too early to be thinking about things in terms of playoff odds, but it does a give-picture sense of the season that the Twins had a 67.1% chance of making the playoffs on Opening Day, per FanGraphs, which dipped to 34.1% by April 21 -- but has since rebounded all the way up to 69.6%, higher than when the season began.

And perhaps they’ve learned something about themselves through that adversity.

“The way we’ve come back from the start, which wasn’t a great start, the way we came back from that shows character,” Baldelli said. “That’s something you’re really looking for in your group.”