The Minnesota Twins Are Defying Everything, And It Rules

There is a point in every baseball season, usually coming sometime around right now, when the early-season oddities have been mostly but not entirely smoothed over. Nobody is hitting .400 anymore, relievers' 0.00 ERAs have been contaminated, and the well-financed teams—anyway, the competent ones—have started to assert their power over the undermanned, overthought preseason darlings. It is late enough that rate statistics, however gaudy, take on a hue of legitimacy; maybe Zack Greinke really will post an ERA under two this year. It is also early enough, though, that the most resilient of April's hot streaks are still at least warm. A few teams and players keep doing things they have no business doing, and there is nothing to do but admire and pity them, knowing that even the healthiest helpings of conviction likely won't get them through the desert of sheer baseball truth that awaits in July and August.

For example: the Minnesota Twins, widely forecasted to bring up the rear in the AL Central, sit at 49-40. They have spent more time this season at the heels of the division-leading Royals than have the five-time division incumbent Detroit Tigers, and their record puts them in the company of the fawned-over young Cubs and such presumed contenders as the Angels, Orioles, and Blue Jays.

The Twins are doing this in spite of a franchise player who is becoming a more convincing parable of Midwestern suffering and endurance by the day; an offseason agenda that seemed aimed less at actually improving the baseball team than at organizing a kind of yearlong family reunion that would run until the team's prospects were ready; a pitching staff that would look just as convincing in USPS polos as big league uniforms; and, for that matter, uniforms that look a little bit like USPS polos. Right when this organization's hyper-fraternal commitment to rehashing the dizzy era of division series losses to the Yankees ought to be curdling, it is somehow paying dividends.

This run of success, humble as it is, has the look of an anomaly. Feed the Twins' relevant statistics—team batting with runners in scoring position, strand rate, record in one-run games, and so on—into your trusty Regression-o-Meter, and watch it light up like the Fourth of July. Most everybody, even the most doting optimists, knows how this will end. The Twins will lose by five runs sometime this summer, then lose the following six or so games in fashions dramatic and not, by small and large margins, and those foreboding numbers will come home to roost, first little by little and then all at once. The team will then spend the rest of the year mounting tame charges towards the top of the division, up a progressively steeper slope.

Let's not rush into anything, though. The season is long, and there will be plenty of time for reason to have its say. Right now, the Twins have a few minutes left before the alarm rings, and their collective dream is sweet stuff. If they are nothing more than this year's last doomed reality-holdout, they're a fun one.

Much of this fun is a result of anachronism. The Twins' old-timey air is owed not only to roster construction—although with sepia-tinted and tragic Joe Mauer batting second or third and prodigal Torii Hunter back in the outfield and the legendary Paul Molitor square-jawing it as manager, there is that. But Minnesota also plays the type of baseball that makes you believe in those dusty old verities, if only for an afternoon at a time. Brian Dozier, a very fine second baseman whose hitting and fielding aesthetic nevertheless has the heavily huffy, aspirational quality of the only slightly more Napoleon-complex'ed Dustin Pedroia, becomes in this context the type of hitter who can power an offense, or at least one who can make you believe it. Mike Pelfrey's career mid-four ERA seems a sign of accumulated wisdom, not longstanding mediocrity, as you watch him steer through six innings with little more than a sinker and some nerve. Molitor's preferred tetrameter of manager-speak—"Ninety feet is ninety feet"—starts to sound like a particularly profound koan.

On a representative and totally insignificant Thursday afternoon in mid-June, the Twins hosted the St. Louis Cardinals. The game went along at a quick pace for six innings, Pelfrey swapping scoreless frames with St. Louis starter Jaime Garcia. Until the seventh, the noisiest interruptions to the game's smooth line were a first-inning double from Matt Carpenter and the Target Field fans' booing Joe Mauer after a groundout. In the seventh, some distracted baseball deity decided to check in on that day's goings-on, noticed what Pelfrey was doing to baseball's best team, and prescribed a quick corrective. Jason Heyward shot a solo homer into the seats in right.

The joy that comes from watching a team like the Twins is of a hectic variety. Every bit of trouble feels like actuality has arrived and the dream is done. Consequently, every escape feels like magic. In the eighth inning, with nobody on, Mauer put a wide swing on an outside fastball. Even now, as his numbers take on coats of rust, Mauer's swing looks much like the one that won him an MVP in 2007, the bat starting high off the shoulder and ending in a two-handed follow-through, sweeping through the zone in a big arc. It is not quite as exact as some of baseball's best; it is obviously honed, but not clinical. It seems, somehow, to have more to do with the tactile sense than most swings, as if Mauer is at every moment feeling for the knock of contact as if for a light switch in a dark room.

Anyway, the fastball flew over the left field wall. The cheers were much louder than the boos had been. An inning later, Kennys Vargas hit another solo homer, this one a walk-off. Vargas is in the minors, now, and Mauer has a hopeful .953 OPS in July. The Twins are still hanging around.

The story of the Twins' year will likely be one of wins like that one—or like the one a couple weeks later, when Dozier and Hunter and third baseman Trevor Plouffe shot doubles all over Target Field and knocked Chris Sale around to the tune of six runs, or the one last weekend, when the team scored six in the bottom of the ninth in a win against the Tigers—becoming losses. The current season will almost certainly devolve into what everyone expected in the winter: a 162-game diversion while rookies Byron Buxton and Miguel Sano begin figuring things out in the bigs. The fans will grumble about Mauer again, Pelfrey will get shellacked, Dozier's doubles will go for naught.

It hasn't happened yet, though. What we're left with, until it does, is a team out of time, in regards to both personnel and philosophy. A manager's entrant into cliché canon becomes a viable ethos; a misty-eyed hanging-on to last decade's glory days somehow pays off. Hunter, however slowed, is back in the outfield, and Mauer, however fallen off, hangs around the top of the order. It is a design fated to fail, but most designs are. In the meantime, let's enjoy this last survivor of the small-time spring, before deep summer and its sensible winners take over. It's already getting late.