But right now that doesn’t make the way the season ended any less painful.

Watching the Twins get shut down by a pitcher they’d dominated and watching Nick Blackburn pay so dearly for one mistake — one mistake — feels like the wrong way to end this 163-game joy (and pain) ride we’ve taken. Right now, the big picture hasn’t yet settled in, not compared to knowing that the Twins pretty much gave it away with those Friday and Saturday losses to Kansas City while the White Sox were losing to Cleveland. (Yes, there were giveaways scattered throughout the rest of the season, but the same holds true for the White Sox, and the Twins knew what needed to be done in those final games against a losing outfit.)

Really, it was a good year, and in time I’ll be appreciative of all the gifts that Twins baseball brought this season. But it’s hard to look all the way back from the last day of September to the last day of March, when we trudged through the snow to the Dome and told jokes about outdoor baseball as we celebrated that opening night victory against the Angels.

Some people are more resilient. The commenter DCTwinsFan offered this in response to the previous post: “It was a heck of game. It was a heck of a season. The Twins were not an amazing team, but they played some amazing baseball.”

And there’s Mike, who said: “This team gave us everything that they had. I remember sitting in the middle of a snowstorm waiting to get into the game on opening day…wondering what was in store. This team gave me one hell of a ride. No one gave Nick Blackburn a chance tonight, but he pitched his tail off. I love my Twins right now after the loss more than I would have loved them had they won.”

In these hours after, it’s still pretty painful.

It’s painful to know that Justin Morneau pretty much gave away the MVP award because his bat disappeared in the final weeks of the season. I have to take that position because, all along, I’ve said that the closeness of the division races meant that end-of-the-season performance was going to decide things.

And to know that he was one at-bat away; one lousy at-bat on Saturday. What if he had lined a double with the bases loaded and one out instead of grounding into a double play? That would have been another one of those game-changing hits that we bragged on (and properly so) about him for most of the season. That would have been game changing and season changing. It was clear that Morneau was worn down and hurting by September, which I hope serves as a lesson for those people who have been on Joe Mauer whenever he’s been taken out of the lineup.

Morneau had an excellent season. So did a bunch of other guys who aren’t the MVP, either.

The Twins were shut out eight times. Five of those were 1-0 games, including Blackburn’s first and last starts of the season. In that first one, against the Angels, his mistake was bouncing a breaking pitch off the plate for a wild pitch with a runner on third. (Scott Baker was the starter in the other three 1-0s — at Cleveland, Boston and Texas.) In the last one, it was the down-the-middle change-up to Jim Thome. I guess if you’re gonna beat, it’s a little easier to take when you get beat by a future Hall of Famer who treats the game the way you like to see it treated. I mean, if the peroxide brat Pierzynski had hit that home run …

John Danks pitched his a$$ off. He was Mark Buehrle with better stuff, and he may be the poster child for not being afraid to bring back a pitcher on three days rest, especially after a short outing. His stuff and whatever jumpiness the Twins brought to the park contributed to some helpless at-bats. It was especially sad to see Mauer reduced to bunting his final time up after striking out the first two times. If the batting champ feels that helpless, it doesn’t bode well for anyone else, right?

This wasn’t an easy team to manage, and I really think that Gardy did the third best job in the American League behind Joe Maddon of the Rays and Mike Scioscia of the Angels.  If the Rays are a rock ‘n’ roll fantasy and the Angels are heavy metal, then the Twins were a pick-up band: parts that were pieced together out of necessity and eventually worked together well enough to almost win the talent contest.

I remember thinking, “Oh, great,” when Denard Span misplayed one of the first balls hit to him after Cuddyer got hurt and wondering how desperate the the Twins were to call up Alexi Casilla, who was hitting .217 at Rochester when he got promoted. (And you were too, probably.) And it would have been the easy way out to argue for Carlos Gomez’ demotion, as many people did, instead of trying to harness and re-harness (and re-re-harness) his energy for the team’s good.

But Gardy combined the numbers from his laptop with the knowledge he had from working the clubhouse. There were setbacks and misfires along the way (relying on Guerrier for too long and not finding a way to get Morneau days off, are two examples), but I’ll argue with anyone that the good moves outweighed the bad with a team that could have been managed to a 78-win season. (I’d buy the coffee if Gardy would explain to me why he sent Guerrier back out to pitch the seventh against the Royals on Saturday.)

The challenge for the Twins right now is to know they have to get better. This was a fluky year for the two teams that were supposed to dominate the division (Detroit and Cleveland, remember?) and it would be folly to think that this season’s 8788 victories will automatically translate to 98 simply through experience and individual improvement. There are changes that need to be made.

But that discussion can wait a bit.

For now, it’s best to end with a text I received after the final out from the philosopher Young220: “Fun year!”

Yeah, it hurts. But the kid’s right.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 at 12:56 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.