A Confounding, Improbable Team Once Again Achieves The Confounding And The Improbable

That logo’s just fine if you’re talking about Johan Santana. You’ll need to insert your own mental s, however, if you’re referring to the Twins’ offense.

Down at the Dome this weekend they celebrated the 20th anniversary of the 1987 World Series championship season. Somehow, despite scoring three runs over three games, the Twins managed to win two-of-three from the Rangers. A weird sort of tribute, really, but by now I guess we just have to accept that this team is what it is: the reincarnation of a 1968 also-ran.

It’s been an astonishing season, and Santana’s brilliant –that word, of course, sounds trite in this instance, but it’s late and my brain is paste– performance managed to be both thrilling as well as perhaps the saddest example yet of the sort of pressure Minnesota’s starting pitchers have been laboring under the last couple months. The guy –like the guys who have been following him in the rotation all year– has absolutely no margin for error. The fact that he shattered the team’s strikeout record and allowed just two hits while pitching with a one-run lead the whole way just shows what a wonder Santana is, and how devastating it would be for the Twins to lose him.

The team the Twins were celebrating this weekend provided a marked –hell, an extreme– contrast to this current bunch. The ’87 Twins hit 196 home runs; three guys (Hrbek, Gaetti, and Brunansky) hit over 30, and Puckett finished with 28. They scored 786 runs, despite which they were outscored by opponents 806-786. The World Champions had just two pitchers (Viola and Blyeven) with double-digit wins, and of the three guys who tied for third with eight victories, two (Juan Berenguer and Jeff Reardon) were relievers. The staff gave up more hits than innings pitched and walked 564 batters. The team ERA was 4.63.

This year’s club has hit 92 homers, and scored just 547 runs. They’d have to average more than six runs a game and average almost three homers over their final 38 contests to equal the totals of the ’87 club.

On the surface, and even when you really look at the numbers, the pitching on the ’07 team is vastly superior to the ’87 squad’s. It isn’t going to show up in the won-loss columns, however. At present only Santana and Silva are on track for double-digit victories, even though the team’s overall numbers are more than solid enough to have won, at minimum, a dozen more games. They’ve got almost a 3-1 strikeout-to-walk ratio, and at this point have walked 241 fewer batters than their counterparts on the championship team. Their earned run average is more than half a run better.

The bottom line is that this team will likely –or, actually, if they’re lucky– finish with a won-loss record very similar to that of the ’87 team: 85-77.

And in 2007 that record –assuming the Twins can approach it– isn’t going to be enough to even get the team into the post-season.

Here’s a sort of unrelated (but wholly relevant) question: has Joe Mauer, even dating back to little league, ever had a stretch where he’s looked this clueless at the plate? Maybe whatever’s wrong with the Twins’ offense really is contagious.