{"id":13503,"date":"2012-05-15T14:11:17","date_gmt":"2012-05-15T13:11:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=13503"},"modified":"2012-05-15T14:11:17","modified_gmt":"2012-05-15T13:11:17","slug":"tough-times-for-twins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=13503","title":{"rendered":"Tough times for Twins"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just over two years ago, baseball fans in Minnesota were eyeing their glorious new ballpark, Target Field, and dreaming of a new era of Twins baseball.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

After years of measly payrolls and wrangling by the Twins’ ownership to get a new ballpark, including the threat of contraction, Target Field was meant to usher in a period of stability off the field and success on it as additional revenue streamed in.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

The ballpark may still achieve those aims in time, but the initial returns have not been so promising and that was made starkly clear to me when I looked at the standings on ESPN.com<\/a> prior to Tuesday’s games.<\/p>\n

After their first 35 games, the Twins are 10-25 (the worst record in baseball) and their ESPN playoff odds calculation sits at 0.8%. Think about that for a second. With just under 80% of their games still remaining to be played, Minnesota’s odds of reaching the playoffs are less than 1%.<\/p>\n

Now, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s still early in the season and there is plenty of time for the Twins to launch a\u00c2\u00a0winning run to boost their odds, but that’s a sobering statistic to ponder, particularly when there are no obvious signs that this is a team that is suddenly going to spring into life.<\/p>\n

ESPN’s standings make for much better reading if you are a Texas Rangers fan. Their MLB-leading run differential of +78 is one clear piece of evidence to back up the general consensus that they are the best team in the Majors right now, even though the Dodgers have a slightly better record.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just over two years ago, baseball fans in Minnesota were eyeing their glorious new ballpark, Target Field, and dreaming of a new era of Twins baseball<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[110,553],"class_list":["post-13503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mlb-2","tag-minnesota-twins","tag-mlb-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13503"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13503\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13507,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13503\/revisions\/13507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}