Twins No Longer in Fight to Survive

Trite as it may be, first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz concedes, the story of the Minnesota Twins’ season as the defending American League Central champions approach the crunch of September is the familiar scenario of good news, bad news.

“I guess the bad news is that we still haven’t played to our potential, and the good news is that we’re still right in the mix,” he said. “We’re still hoping to get on some kind of roll because we haven’t really been on one all year.”

What’s with the Midwest?

The AL Central is the same three-team dogfight that the National League Central is except that the AL combatants don’t get as much respect.

The Twins, who outlasted contraction and overcame a modest payroll to win the division by 13 1/2 games last year, trail the Chicago White Sox by 2 1/2 games and the Kansas City Royals by 1 1/2 games after Wednesday’s 5-4 loss to the Angels at Edison Field.

If the Angels are more like the Salt Lake Stingers than the swaggering team that eliminated the Twins in the AL championship series before defeating the San Francisco Giants in the World Series less than a year ago, the Twins also have been trying to reclaim their identity and momentum while comforted by the fact that neither the White Sox, who played so poorly in the first half that Manager Jerry Manuel was on the verge of being fired, nor the upstart Royals, who have managed to keep their pitching staff together by shopping the bargain racks, have run away with the race.

Still, Twin General Manager Terry Ryan said at Edison Field, “We’ve had to battle for every win, had a tough time getting the pitching and hitting on the same page. We just really haven’t clicked, and there’s been no excuse.”

There have been greater expectations, of course. The Twins are no longer fighting for franchise survival, the little team that could.

Coming off last year’s division title, beleaguered owner Carl Pohlad agreed to kick up the $41-million payroll by $15 million, the largest percentage increase in baseball.

This helped Ryan sign Kenny Rogers as a replacement for injured starter Eric Milton and give multiyear contracts to outfielders Torii Hunter and Jacque Jones.

Of course, that left closer Eddie Guardado, setup man LaTroy Hawkins and catcher A.J. Pierzynski wondering aloud in spring training why they were left out of the multiyear mix, which didn’t help the focus going into the season.

Ryan, however, said he saw no problem with the focus and intensity.

“Last year,” he said, “it was us against the world, us against the industry, us against contraction. It would have been difficult to come back and play with the same emotional intensity over 162 games, but I haven’t seen a problem with the focus, and I thought everything was in good shape coming out of the spring.”

Although the Twins have been pretty much the same statistical team as last year on an overall basis, their streaky performance led St. Paul Pioneer Press columnist Bob Sansevere to compare them to the class tease Tuesday.

At the All-Star break, for instance, they had lost 12 of their last 13 games, were 44-49 overall, had fallen eight games behind the division-leading Royals and were so frustrated, infielder Denny Hocking said in reflection, “That we were just trying to get to the break so we wouldn’t have to look at each other for a few days.”

Now, the Twins might be coming together at the right time.

Since the break, when Ryan traded Bobby Kielty to the Toronto Blue Jays for outfielder and leadoff man Shannon Stewart, the Twins are 24-15, have knocked off most of their division deficit, and now probably have the best of the remaining schedule.

The Twins do not play the Royals again and meet only teams with losing records, other than playing the White Sox seven times. The Royals have six games left with the White Sox in a similar slate, but the White Sox, in addition to playing the Royals and Twins, have 23 games left against teams with winning records, including four with the New York Yankees and five with the Boston Red Sox.

“The one thing we didn’t do last year,” Mientkiewicz said, “is get ahead of ourselves. Even when we took a 15-game lead after the All-Star break you never saw any of us check the paper to see how far ahead we were. We just kept plugging along, taking it one game at a time. This year, I think, we got ahead of ourselves. We kept saying, ‘Tomorrow will be better, tomorrow will be better.’ I think we’re finally back to a point now where we’re focused on the now.”

The Twins, he hopes, also are back to a point where they’re only focused on their clubhouse. They have to live with the fact that former DH David Ortiz is now smashing home runs for the Red Sox, and they are trying, at least, to ignore Chicago’s summer additions of Roberto Alomar, Carl Everett and Cincinnati reliever Scott Sullivan along with the barrage of moves the Royals have made, including this week’s acquisitions of Rondell White and Brian Anderson.

“The reason we made the turnaround a couple years ago is that we stopped worrying about what we didn’t have and started to make the most of what we did,” Mientkiewicz said. “I mean, our song and dance for four years now has been that we need a right-handed slugger, but we know that if we play to our potential we’re good enough to win the division again.”

Are the Twins finally playing to that potential? The clock is ticking in the AL Central.