MINNEAPOLIS — Eight days ago, the Minnesota Twins were baseball’s hottest team and winners of 17 of 20 games.
After Monday night’s 12-3 loss at the Washington Nationals, the same club was mired in a seven-game slide so miserable that it sparked a players-only meeting.
“It’s easy to be a fun guy to be around when things are going good and when everything you’re hitting is falling and you’re just winning games,” Twins shortstop and two-time All-Star Carlos Correa said. “But when the tough times come, that’s when you know who people are. And it's helpful to talk.”
Correa hit a two-run homer, the bright spot in another sluggish outing for an offense that has been the primary culprit, scoring only 12 runs during Minnesota’s free fall to within a game of the .500 mark.
Against soft-tossing Nats starter Mitchell Parker, manager Rocco Baldelli said the Twins (24-23) simply weren't reacting.
“The guy just stood out there and threw off-speed pitches for four innings, and we didn’t do anything about it,” Baldelli said. “We continued to kind of wave at them and look for fastballs. Which today, they weren’t coming. Especially for the first five, six innings. And in this stretch of games where we’ve been struggling, that’s been a common theme.”
Baldelli said he's held two or three postgame talks already during a year that also included an earlier five-game slide, and is hesitant to conduct more because “it starts to get drowned out.” He approved of the players’ decision.
“I don’t know what was said. I have no idea,” Baldelli said. “I think it was the right thing to do at the right time. And hopefully we get something out of it.”
In his sixth season in charge, he’s a little in awe of how quickly things have turned. Again.
“You start to forget some of the things that you’ve experienced when you flip it. I mean we’ve flipped the season completely around multiple times already,” Baldelli said. “I’ve seen a lot of streaky baseball, we all have. This is next-level stuff.”
Pablo López, Monday’s losing starter, expressed disappointment he couldn’t be the stopper but hoped the meeting would make a difference.
“Externalizing gives you the sense of relief,” López said. “When you say things out loud, when you hear things being said out loud, it puts things in perspective. So I think we said things that maybe we were thinking but weren’t saying out loud.”
Watch more coverage of Minnesota sports:
Watch the latest reports from the KARE 11 sports team in our YouTube playlist:
WATCH MORE ON KARE 11+
Download the free KARE 11+ app for Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV and other smart TV platforms to watch more from KARE 11 anytime! The KARE 11+ app includes live streams of all of KARE 11's newscasts. You'll also find on-demand replays of newscasts; the latest from KARE 11 Investigates, Breaking the News and the Land of 10,000 Stories; exclusive programs like Verify and HeartThreads; and Minnesota sports talk from our partners at Locked On Minnesota.
- Add KARE 11+ on Roku here or by searching for KARE 11 in the Roku Channel Store.
- Add KARE 11+ on Fire TV here or by searching for KARE 11 in the Amazon App Store.
- Learn more about the KARE 11+ app for Apple TV in the Apple App Store.
- Learn more about KARE 11+ here.