I Am Once Again Asking the Twins to Win a Playoff Game

Picture by author, 2018

It has been 16 years since the Minnesota Twins last won a playoff game.

From the A’s, to the Yankees, to the A’s, to the Yankees, and the Yankees, and the Yankees, and the Yankees again, the back-to-back A.L. Central division champions haven’t won a single playoff game since 2004. Last year, I wrote a long-winded soliloquy talking about how I loved the Twins and how they helped inspire my passion for sports. It’s not worth repeating myself here, and it wouldn’t feel right anyway.

In a year ravaged by the most disastrous and deadly pandemic in living memory, where just under one-million people have died and yet people still won’t do things like wear a mask because they can’t grasp the magnitude of the issue or simply don’t want to and don’t care about the lives of others.

In a year where the city the Twins will play at least their first two playoff games burned after yet another Black man was killed for no reason at the hands of police officers, where the city council said all the right things about defunding police and allocating funds where they are desperately needed only to backpedal while the mayor hasn’t done anything except show up to a protest and refuse to dismantle the police department that has taken life after life, year after year.

In a year where the same story has played out in cities like Louisville and Kenosha and so many others that go unreported, under-reported, unseen or un-believed.

The country sits on a cracked foundation, a white house built atop the bones of Native Americans and Black slaves and countless others, content to add to that foundation with more and more bodies than even dream of fixing it.

Baseball, right now, doesn’t mean anything. In the scope of everything, it’s just a pass time that often perpetuates the same stereotypes and social ills of America at large.

It would still be nice to have the distraction of a playoff win, at least for a little bit.