Brian Murphy: Time for Twins fans to vote with their wallets after embarrassing season

"Time to drain the rivers of revenue flowing at 1 Twins Way and stop carrying water for a team that treats them like saps."

Sep 25, 2024; Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA; Minnesota Twins manager Rocco Baldelli looks on from the dugout agains the Miami Marlins in the first inning at Target Field. Mandatory Credit: Jesse Johnson-Imagn Images / Jesse Johnson-Imagn Images

The wake was Friday night at Target Field, and you could practically here "Danny Boy" verse for verse above those silent Minnesota hitters and wheezing pitchers, writes Brian Murphy.

As faceplants go, this was 2:15 a.m. outside the Irish pub after the beer and whiskey run dry and the mourners stumble to an afterparty. Pour one out for the choking 2024 Twins, who meekly bowed out of contention with a characteristic 7-2 loss to the playoff-bound Baltimore Orioles.

A meltdown for the ages that portends a winter of discontent and self-reflection, if they can stomach it.

"That was clearly beyond a disappointing way to end what was, and appeared to be, a promising season," said somber manager Rocco Baldelli. "This will bother me forever."

Yeah, get in line.

It only took the Twins two hours to complete an historic collapse after the Detroit Tigers put them on the clock around 8 p.m. with their wild-card clinching victory at home over the hapless White Sox. But never forget their grave was dug last winter when ownership gutted a modest payroll and stripped to the studs all that goodwill they had earned in October.

"Just trying to right-size our business," a tone-deaf Joe Pohlad casually explained during spring training about slashing $30 million from a postseason roster and sifting through the free-agent bargain bin like an old maid. Willful contempt for your audience is no way to run a business, but, hey, I’m not the one with diversified holdings and billions in the bank.

The Pohlads betrayed their fiduciary duties as franchise caretakers by letting their product fossilize and assuming their customers wouldn’t notice. They conveniently scapegoated bankrupt Bally’s Sports and the legal catfight this summer that depressed revenues and blacked out broadcasts for a wide swath of loyal and perpetually gouged patrons.

Worse, they failed to read the room and reward a forlorn fan base that had fallen back in love with the Twins and restored the roar at Target Field last fall when the team won its first playoff game in 20 years and finally advanced after losing nine straight series. Cynical stewardship for all to see. What a waste.

All that energy and momentum turned to ash when the Twins started the season 6- 12. They aroused from their slumber and stacked enough wins through Aug. 17 to peak at 70-53 and eventually build a 10 ½-game lead over Detroit in the wild-card race. Not quite the 1951 Giants and Bobby Thompson snuffing a 13 ½-game deficit and vanquishing the Brooklyn Dodgers. Or the Red Sox choking away a 14-game advantage on the Yankees in ’78. But the meek Twins’ six-week collapse was thorough enough to declare this season one of the most encompassing and embarrassing in franchise history.

"There’s an expression that everything happens for a reason; I don’t like it,” said Pablo Lopez, who was tagged with his 10th and final loss of an underwhelming and inconsistent season for the ace. “People use it when what happens is what you didn’t want to happen."

Nothing can whitewash how the Twins simply bled out, and the boos that cascaded from the seats on a balmy early autumn night might be the least of the club’s worries. It’s still $14 beer night every night at the ballpark, but fans are finally waking up from the sugar-coated spell they’ve been under since Target Field opened its gilded doors in 2010.

Attendance plunged during this week’s Miami series to barely 17,000 Thursday night, when the Twins choked in the 13 th inning and ended up on life support. The autopsy should not spare anybody from the ownership suite and front office to the manager’s office, clubhouse and perpetually packed training room. Accountability ain’t just a news conference cliché. By padlocking the vault, the Pohlads left executive vice president and chief baseball officer Derek Falvey and senior VP/general manager Thad Levine no margin for error when trying to deepen the pitching staff and supplement this gassed lineup.

Still, they whiffed on every acquisition to backfill a staff thinned by the offseason departure of Sonny Gray and the August loss of Joe Ryan, or fortify a tattered bullpen that has been hemorrhaging runs and bodies for weeks.

Enigmatic reliever Trevor Richards was brought in from Toronto at the trade deadline in late July but proved so useless he was released in less than a month. Falvey would have been better off standing pat than overreaching for another failure. Lopez’s late-season resurgence was hardly enough to spackle together a suitable starting rotation devoid of battle-tested veterans.

Three rookies -- Simeon Woods Richardson, David Festa and Zebby Matthews – were desperately thrust into pennant-race roles for which they were wholly unprepared and unfairly supported by an offense that flamed out as summer wore on.

Minnesota’s inability to go deep or drive in runners in scoring position in September was an accelerant. Manager Rocco Baldelli’s stubborn refusal to check his gut before the charts robbed proven starters like Bailey Ober chances to continue shutting down opposing lineups over the addictive lure of data-driven late-inning matchups.

Superstars Royce Lewis, Carlos Correa and Byron Buxton were together in the lineup for about two weeks’ worth of games as the Twins’ confounding injury woes only deepened. Bally’s this week celebrated Buxton playing his 100th game for the first time in seven years as if he survived the Bataan Death March.

The postmortems reveal the hard truth that the Twins are a middling team forever scrapping for premier talent and postseason breadcrumbs because the Pohlads prefer tidy bottom lines to playing hardball with competitors more driven by the championship chase. This is not a right-sizing, it’s a reckoning. The status quo is untenable. Everyone knows it. Will anything change?

The Pohlads have revealed their motives. Time for fans to start voting with their pocketbooks, drain the rivers of revenue flowing at 1 Twins Way and stop carrying water for a team that treats them like saps.