CLEVELAND -- Every season comes with its ups and downs -- but boy, have the ups of this season been very, very up and the downs been very, very down.

Hardly two months into the regular season, the Twins are already on their second five-game losing streak of the campaign -- somehow sandwiching a 12-game winning streak amid a stretch in which they won 17 of 20 overall.

And firmly in the middle of that inconsistency is the Minnesota offense, which has gone from famine to feast back to famine, with the Twins narrowly avoiding their third shutout loss in four games with Saturday’s 11-4 blowout defeat at Progressive Field -- with this one coming at the hands of left-hander Logan Allen, who entered the game with a 5.56 ERA for the season.

“You can go out there and you’re on fire for two, three weeks straight and you feel like you can do no wrong, and the game will turn it around very quickly on you,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “We’re having trouble stringing together at-bats and finding ways to push runs home. The offense, we’re sputtering a little bit. There is no way around that.”

As the Guardians jumped out to an early lead against the consistent Bailey Ober and just kept adding, the Twins’ offense again went totally silent. Until they tacked on four inconsequential runs in the ninth, they were on track to only have plated three runs in five games, which would have been their fewest runs in any five-game stretch in club history.

Either way, they’ve been outscored 28-7 amid this five-game losing streak, for an average of 1.4 runs per game -- a stark turnaround from their recent stretch of torrid play that saw them score 128 runs in 20 games, an average of 6.4 runs per game, to surge back into contention toward the top of the surprisingly strong American League Central.

Keeping some level of encouragement and stability might be particularly tough considering the extremes this season has already seen -- but that’s been the unique challenge of a unique 2024 season for this group.

“You can’t bury yourself, because we’re in May right now,” Kyle Farmer said. “I couldn’t imagine what it would be like in September if we were like this, but we’re not going to be like this. I promise you.”

What gives him that confidence?

Casting aside the fact that 117 games remain on the schedule, the veterans in that clubhouse have seen that switch flip at various stops along their career, and even the youngsters in there remember last year, when a mostly punchless offense suddenly flipped that switch in the second half and turned into one of the best-hitting groups in baseball.

And they don’t even need to look any further back than a month ago. Even Baldelli had been pretty frank about the fact that he hadn’t seen it coming at all when the Twins suddenly flipped a switch on April 22 and went from scoring four or fewer runs in 14 of 15 games to winning their next 12 in a row, including a handful of blowouts and offensive eruptions.

It’s not that they were beating up on mostly bad teams, either; they took three of four in that stretch from the Mariners, a first-place team with an elite pitching staff, and two of three from the Red Sox, the fourth-best slugging team in the AL.

“The only thing you can do when that's going on is to just show up and have energy,” Ober said. “Hopefully, one of these games, all the stuff's going to roll our way and land our way and we're going to be able to do exactly what that team did to us today.”

It’s not that the signs have all been bleak, either -- though the sustained hits came late, the Twins had baserunners in every inning but the third and eighth on Saturday, when they also had 10 of the 12 hardest-hit balls in the game. And on Friday, they’d mostly outdone the Guardians in their quality of batted ball contact.

And maybe they’re just missing certain intangibles, too.

“We might need to find a new sausage. The sausage isn’t here, so I think we might need to find a new one,” Farmer said. “I don’t know where it is. I think someone forgot it. Not pointing any fingers. Might bring a banana to the dugout tomorrow.”