For Twins fans, end of postseason drought would be 'wonderful, joyful thing'

MINNEAPOLIS -- Pablo López will deliver the first pitch of the 2023 American League Wild Card Series on Tuesday. Scattered around the stands of Target Field, Richard Adair, Leah Olson, Matt Pettersen and John Tantzen will be watching.

It will have been 6,937 days since the Minnesota Twins last won a playoff game. They have lost 18 consecutive postseason contests in that span since Oct. 5, 2004, marking the longest playoff losing streak in not only baseball history, but in the history of American “Big Four” sports.

Adair, Olson, Pettersen and Tantzen have been there for every one of those losses at home. (Except for the 2020 American League Wild Card Series, which fans were not allowed to attend due to the COVID-19 pandemic.)

October baseball should be cause for jubilation, for hope. It’s the reward for players and fans alike at the end of a grueling, 162-game war of attrition. Any team left standing can wipe out everything that came before, get hot and go on a long run.

Any team but the Twins, it’s seemed for a long time.

“Yeah, I have a feeling of dread,” said Pettersen, a teacher in Amery, Wis. “We’re going to get in, and it’s fun to watch them win in the regular season and stuff. … And even though the pitching is better than it has been, I just have this feeling that, you know, we’re not going to be able to win any games. I definitely have that there.”

“I always kind of feel like that Michael Scott [from ‘The Office’] meme of, ‘I’m ready to be hurt again,’” said Andy Johnson, a Twins fan and social studies teacher.

A tinge melodramatic? Perhaps. Fatalistic? Without question. But is there even a “proper” emotional and logical response to be expected with regard to a one-of-one occurrence like this?

Every time a Twins team makes the playoffs, the manager and players are inevitably peppered with questions about the streak, and every time, they don’t exactly seem sure what to say -- and why would they? The vast majority of them have absolutely nothing to do with a Yankees comeback off Juan Rincon, or with a fair ball being called foul by Phil Cuzzi, or with Torii Hunter’s futile dive that turned a sinking line drive into an inside-the-park homer.

The only things in common throughout the streak spanning losses in 2004, ‘06, ‘09, ‘10, ‘17, ‘19 and ‘20, really, have been the team name on the front of the uniform -- and the fans who watched, owning the entire narrative.

“We've had three managers now be a part of this streak, and how many dozens of players?” Johnson said. “Probably hundreds of players, and they're not necessarily the ones who, like, were the streak when they added on their couple of games to it. But it really is a streak of the fans who have been here for closing in on two full decades of it.”

The math behind the streak has long since left the realm of the absurd.

In the oversimplification in which each game is modeled by a coin flip, the odds of a team losing 18 straight games is 1 in 262,144. As computed by Twins fan Chris Hanel for a video retrospective about this Twins losing streak, factoring in the Twins’ maximum win probability in each game extends those odds up to a frankly unbelievable 1 in 65 billion.

If this is to be considered some sort of collective regional and generational struggle, it would, of course, figure that different fans would process those emotions in different ways.

Perspective is everything in that. For the younger generation of Twins fans, 19 years feels like an eternity, and it’s all they know.

“It doesn’t matter until they win a playoff game,” is a refrain often seen from the more cynical of them after anything remotely positive at any point in the regular season, year after year. Why get too invested if it’ll only end up as another data point in -- literally -- the most inglorious streak of all time?

But through all of this, some of those that have been there for the most postseason losing are actually the ones to maintain the most optimism, levelheadedness and relentlessness about seeing all this through -- because many of them have also seen what’s on the other side.

The Twins do remain the last Big Four sports team of the state to have won a championship -- that, having come all the way back in 1991, when Jack Morris’ immortal Game 7 performance against the Atlanta Braves gave Minnesotans their last taste of glory at the following what is still widely considered one of the greatest World Series ever contested. For younger fans, Game 163 in 2009 is the closest they’ve come.

“I remember just feeling so proud of them,” Pettersen said. “Like, we had never even been close to doing something like that before. … I have those memories of that happening and knowing what that was like, and just, you know, I wish I had those feelings again.”

“I got to see two world championships, and that was incredible,” Olson said. “That was absolutely incredible. And, you know, they’ll get back there. And this might be the year.

“Why would I ever want to miss that?”

Others, like Adair, an 80-year-old retired physician, remember when there wasn’t baseball in Minnesota at all, and what the sport meant to him in his childhood was the ability to go into the street and play with his friends. He and Tantzen, a software manager whose Twins fandom began in 1969, have the broadest perspective and the purest enjoyment of the game, to the point where that’s hardly sullied by even a streak such as this.

“Sure, it's disappointing, but if you enjoy baseball in winter, win or lose, you can still enjoy it, right?” Tantzen said.

There were the dark ages of the late ‘90s in which performance and fan interest dwindled to the point where the organization had to survive the threat of contraction by Major League Baseball. Since then, the Twins have been the most consistently successful regular-season team in the state.

The Twins are the ones to have punctuated the long months of the summer with fan favorites and exciting divisional chases -- but underlying all that joy is the fear and resignation that it would all inevitably come crashing down with another nationally televised pantsing, likely at the hands of the New York Yankees (responsible for 13 of the 18 losses).

“I love all of the Minnesota sports teams,” Johnson said. “But the Twins are certainly at the top. I think it is because they were the first team when I was just a kid that was really consistently successful. … I think that's what latched me to them in the first place. And for better or worse, I feel like I'm stuck to them. I think it's because of that success that they did have.”

This year does feel different, these fans say. It’s the pitching depth, the fundamentally solid baseball, the X-factor of Royce Lewis that they variously say could fuel a deeper run into the postseason for a team that has been among the best-performing in the Majors in the second half.

For a team with championship hopes, one win is not meaningful; it’s a step on the path to their ultimate goal. And yes, some Twins fans still dare to look ahead, but for many outside the clubhouse, defeatist as it may sound on the bigger stage, even one singular win really would be a big deal, given all the last 19 years have entailed.

“I think it would feel way bigger than it actually is,” Johnson said.

“There are many places in which we don't get to celebrate in today's world, where people are nervous and worried about this, that and the other,” Adair said. “It would be just a wonderful, joyful thing. So beautiful.”

And if, once again, this isn’t the year?

“Then we come back next year,” Olson said, immediately.

Every fanbase has its hardships, each with its unique flavors. The Twins make the playoffs, for one. Try finding sympathy from, for instance, fans of the Seattle Mariners, who waited 21 years for their team to taste the postseason at all last October and have never seen their team in a World Series, or those who support the Cleveland Guardians, who last won the World Series during the Truman Administration.

The longer the journey, the stronger the rush of absolution when it all comes to an end. Just ask Boston fans in 2004 or Cubs fans in ‘16.

At some point, the streak will end. It just has to. For the Twins fans that have made the pilgrimage to the Metrodome and Target Field, time after time again in October, they’ve already come this far on that journey; far from feeling trapped or beaten down by it, of course they’re going to see it through.

“I hate to use that word over and over again, but it’s an anomaly that the Twins have had that happen to them 18 times in a row,” Johnson said. “But we've all been here for the 18-game streak. And if they should add two more games to it, and it's up to 20, we'll be back next year believing that, ‘This is the year that the streak is going to end.’”