Twins wrap regular season, focus now on Blue Jays in Wild Card matchup

DENVER -- This is where the fun part begins.

At least publicly, the Twins maintained that they’d been paying no mind to the chaos in the AL West and AL Wild Card races, because they’d take their present group against anyone in the playoff field. With the dust settled, that opponent will be the Blue Jays -- and the Twins are up for that challenge.

This Twins team has the AL’s best record in September, and the second-best since the All-Star break. The Twins have scored 20 percent more runs than anyone else in the Junior Circuit in the season’s final month, which they capped with a 3-2, walk-off loss in 11 innings to the Rockies on Sunday, just their fifth loss in their last 16 games to finish out the regular season.

It’s settled, then: The next time the Twins take the field, it will be at Target Field at 4:30 ET/3:30 CT on Tuesday as the AL’s No. 3 seed, for a best-of-three Wild Card Series against Toronto, the No. 6 seed.

“I think this whole time we stayed pretty, who we play is who we play and there’s nothing we can do to control that,” Ryan Jeffers said. “Every team has their strengths. Every team has their weaknesses. I think we’re a pretty dangerous team, so we’re fine to play whoever we play.”

In many different ways, it’s been an unbelievably deep group effort on both sides of the ball to get the Twins peaking at this point -- and case in point: There likely isn’t room on the Wild Card Series roster for Bailey Ober, the pitcher who finished the season with a 3.43 ERA in 26 starts and dialed in for a gem at Coors Field.

“You can tell a story about every single guy on our roster, because they've all been productive, good Major League players for us this year,” Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said. “Everyone stepped out of line for a few weeks this year and took over games and won several games, almost in a row, for us. And everyone kind of took their turn doing that once or twice.

“It's not normal. It's been a very abnormal season, but in a good way.”

Here are a few more stats that illustrate how deep this lineup has been:

• The Twins had 12 players hit 10 or more homers this year, a new club record.
• The Twins had 12 players with 40 or more RBIs, tied for the most by any team in the expansion era (since 1961).
• The Twins had 15 players record 100 or more total bases, by far the most by any team in the expansion era (the previous record had been 13).

They’ve had seven different players account for their 10 walk-off wins this season. They’ve done all this while overcoming seasons by both Carlos Correa and Byron Buxton that ranked among the worst of their careers. On any given day, they don’t just feel good about where their lineup stands, one through nine; they can feel good about the guys on the bench, too.

“Really, one through nine, we’ve got so many guys that have come up in different spots, in big spots for us throughout the year,” Jeffers said. “So if you want to say one thing that’s really helped us is that depth of, if one guy’s not doing it today, another guy will pick him up.”

“It just screams, ‘good team,’ is what it screams,” Baldelli said.

And, for once, the Twins don’t have the pitching questions that have been pervasive throughout this 18-game playoff losing streak that has defined the recent era of Minnesota postseason baseball. They have a clear-cut No. 1 and No. 2 starter to line up in the first two games of the playoffs and had their pick of three well-performing pitchers for a possible Game 3.

This isn’t the same team that struggled to a 45-46 record in a bad division at the All-Star break; the personnel, depth and situational hitting have all gelled down the stretch, and they feel they can go toe-to-toe with anyone -- Toronto included.

“We definitely had our struggles at the beginning of the year,” Jeffers said. “It definitely didn’t come together how we wanted it to come together in the beginning. … But we really put it together down the stretch and we just stayed true to what we knew we had as a lineup, and we really started clicking.”