Two years have passed since the Minnesota Twins’ ugly collapse in Texas, and the memory still hangs over the club like a warning sign. On Tuesday, the Twins hosted the Atlanta Braves, marking the anniversary of the day a season that looked built for October began to come apart.
Back then, the Twins were rolling through a steamy mid-August stretch with 90 wins in sight. They weren’t in first place in the AL Central, but they were sitting comfortably in the top wild card spot and pointing toward a second straight playoff berth. What followed, though, was the start of a breakdown that seemed small at first and then swallowed everything.
The team’s season ended at 12-27, and the postseason never came. That collapse set up major changes the next year, but in the moment, the reaction inside the clubhouse was far more measured.
“It’s a tough way to end this series, but we took three out of four against the defending World Series champs,” Pablo López said in the clubhouse after the game. “So, we have to be pretty proud of the way we played the series.”
At the time, that sounded like the kind of steady response a good team gives after one bad night. The problem was that the bad night turned out to be the first crack in the dam.
One of the biggest blows came from Jorge Alcala, who had been a major part of a strong bullpen group and had been dominating for months before that five-run implosion. He carried a 1.80 ERA from the time he was recalled on May 24 of that year, and he had been a key arm in the months leading into that outing.
“I think some of his pitches were probably just more hittable versions of his pitches location-wise,” former manager Rocco Baldelli said. “I talked to [pitching coach Pete Maki] about it.
Pete said it wouldn’t really change that much. That’s how he throws the ball in most of his outings.
Most of the time the other team is not hitting the ball on the barrel.”
Two years later, Alcala is no longer in organized baseball. The Toronto Blue Jays released him last week, and he has not signed anywhere else. His post-Twins line tells the rest of the story: a 6.42 ERA over 67 innings, along with 18 home runs allowed.
That day in Texas didn’t look like the end of anything. It looked like a bump in the road, something a team with control of its own fate could smooth out quickly.
Instead, the Twins never really got the plane back on course. The season nosedived, and the year after that ended with the abort button getting hit mid-flight.
Now the question is what this year’s team will do with the lessons left behind. The Twins are still airborne, but the margin for error feels thin. The offense has to do the heavy lifting down the stretch, and the pitching staff has to keep everything steady if the club is going to stay upright.
For now, the flight is still going. But the warning lights are on, the air is getting rough, and the next stretch could get interesting.
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