Yankees Lose Season Series to Twins For First Time in 22 Years
The New York Yankees’ current slump resulted in the end of a dominant run against a single opponent.
After a 6-2 loss on Tuesday in Minneapolis, the Yankees have officially lost the season series to the Minnesota Twins. This may not seem like a noteworthy moment, as a season series varies wildly depending on the opponent’s division or league.
That is, until fans look at the Yankees-Twins series since 2002 and the ridiculous stats that come with it, almost all of them in New York’s favor.
The last time the Twins won the season series against the Yankees was 2001. In the following 21 seasons, the Yankees won or split the season series (the only two splits were in 2005 and 2006). Back in 2001, the Yankees played on the MSG channel (YES Network was created the next year), beloved Yankee Paul O’Neill was in the outfield instead of the YES broadcast booth (O’Neill retired after the season and has been with YES since its inception), iconic Red Sox slugger David Ortiz was on the Twins (Ortiz signed with Boston in 2003), and the Yankees were the three-time defending World Series champions (they’d win their fourth straight AL pennant that year). That was a long time ago, and so much has happened in the baseball world since then.
The stats and fun facts get even crazier from there.
Since the start of the 2002 season, the Yankees are 100-42 against the Twins. That’s a .704 winning percentage, which is the same as the legendary 1998 Yankees, a team that went 114-48 and won the World Series.
And that’s just the regular season. Since 2003, the two teams met in the ALDS five times (2003, 2004, 2009, 2010, and 2019) and in the 2017 AL Wild Card Game. The Yankees not only won all of these meetings, but have a combined record of 16-2. Both the 2003 and 2004 ALDS saw Minnesota win the opener, only for New York to win three straight. 2009, 2010, and 2019 were all three-game sweeps. The Twins have lost 18 consecutive playoff games (a streak that is still active as of 2023); 13 of those losses were at the hands of the Bronx Bombers.
If the regular season and playoff results are combined, then the Yankees have a 116-44 record against the Twins since 2002. That’s a .725 winning percentage in 160 games, just two games short of a full season. If you stack that record up against the greatest regular seasons in MLB history, that would be the third-best single-season winning percentage since 1900, trailing only the 1906 Chicago Cubs (116-36, .763 winning percentage) and the 1902 Pittsburgh Pirates (103-36, .741 winning percentage). The 116 wins themselves would be tied with the 1906 Cubs and the 2001 Seattle Mariners for the most in a single season. Needless to say, that’s unreal domination.
With the Twins officially winning the 2023 season series, that 21-season (and 22-year) period of dominance for the Yankees has ended. But the fact that the two teams were able to play a single-season’s worth of games before Minnesota finally won another season series is a true anomaly in baseball history.
After finally beating their figurative grim reaper, perhaps the Twins can start to dominate the season series against the Bronx Bombers. However, the dominance the Yankees had in the season series will likely never be replicated.
To conclude this article, it would make sense to include the exact moment the Yankees’ dominance over the Twins began. If it ended with Byron Buxton’s decisive two-run home run on Tuesday, then it began with former Yankee first baseman Jason Giambi’s ultimate grand slam on May 17, 2002.
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