MINNEAPOLIS -- Ryan Jeffers was ahead in the count when he got the sinker he was looking for down the middle of the plate, took his best swing after having felt great with it all night and lofted a lazy fly ball to center field. He gazed at it and slammed down his bat in frustration.

So it goes.

That just about sums it up for the state of Minnesota's offense, as not even the last-place Marlins brought the Twins any answers for the questions that have buried them in the past month as part of this disheartening collapse out of the playoff picture. Instead, the frustration might have hit a critical point as part of a 4-1 loss to Miami at Target Field on Tuesday.

The loss very well could have been a critical point for the season, too. It dropped them two games behind the Royals for the AL’s third and final Wild Card spot with only five more to play. The defeat was the Twins’ eighth in their past 11 games and their 23rd in their past 34 games.

Urgency is a given at this point, yet might not be enough with time running dangerously low. And what had long been a unified message of forgetting about today and focusing on tomorrow was different after the game when Carlos Correa was asked if he felt urgency around him.

“Some guys, yeah,” Correa said. “Some of us hit extra today and tried to figure something out. We didn't get the win, but we've got to do more of that and eventually find something right away so we can go out there and put up more runs.”

When asked to clarify his cryptic reference to “some guys,” and whether that meant Correa wanted to see more from others, he didn’t elaborate and noted that “we’re all trying our best, and everybody wants to be in the playoffs.” But he perhaps offered a clue at the end of a later answer about the team taking its frustration as fuel.

"Some guys take it as poison and some guys take it as fuel,” Correa said. “The guys who take it as fuel are the ones that always come out on top and have a beautiful career and stay in the game for a long time. We have a lot of young guys and a lot of people try to help them, but at the end of the day, everybody has to figure it out on their own.”

This Twins' offense is as close to full strength as it will ever be following the returns of Correa and Byron Buxton from injury, with both immediately hitting well. On paper, they should not be struggling this hard to score runs, having surpassed four runs only once in 11 games since a 6-4 win over the Angels on Sept. 11, and only once in another 12-game stretch just before that.

The parts just haven’t added up. And when the Twins fell behind after a four-run Miami second inning, the offense again couldn’t find a way, stranding 10 runners.

“It’s not a lack of opportunities,” Jeffers said. “We’re just unable to capitalize on any opportunities that have presented.”

Manager Rocco Baldelli posited that the Twins got too swing-happy for much of their 11-23 skid since Aug. 18, and spoke about the need for the hitters to focus on a specific part of the strike zone and go to the plate with more of a plan.

“We’ve been in swing mode where we’re just swinging at a lot, things we shouldn’t be swinging at, and not as concise of a plan and approach as we need to have,” Baldelli said. “We need to tighten it up as much as possible in these last five games.”

But that has been the refrain for much of this skid, without an uptick to show for it. And while it’s true that young players like Royce Lewis and Jose Miranda have been prominent in the struggles, it’s also true that Trevor Larnach and Matt Wallner -- the latter lost to oblique tightness in the sixth inning -- have been the team’s only above-average regulars in that time.

So now, with their backs against the wall, perhaps frustration just turns to hope that something will change.

“We put ourselves in a situation where we’re no longer in the driver’s seat,” Jeffers said. “You hope, in those situations, that we’re going out there and we play winning baseball, we scratch together some wins.”