How to Be a Minnesota Twins Fan and Keep Your Sanity

Being a Minnesota Twins fan can be hard on a person’s mental health. The key to maintaining your sanity is to manage your expectations. If you don’t allow your expectations to surge to unrealistically high levels, they won’t be dashed by the team’s maddeningly conservative, small-potatoes approach.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

1. Learn to embrace the finer points of pitching and defense. Your team will never score a lot of runs or belt a lot of homers, but their ability to pitch and catch the ball will keep them in most games.
2. Accept the reality that the Twins play in a small market with limited media revenue, and are owned by a shrewd, penny-pinching banking magnate. Unlike most owners of professional sports franchises, he sees the Twins as a money-making venture, not a hobby. As a result, the Twins will never be extravagant spenders—not as long as he or his family are running things.
3. Approach the off-season with realistic expectations. Because of the ownership’s tight purse strings and the front office’s “build from within” philosophy, the Twins will almost never bring in a big-name free agent from another team. Don’t torture yourself by believing all the idle speculation floating around the Internet. The Twins simply don’t operate that way.
4. Approach the season with realistic expectations. The staff of competent coaches, scouts, and front-office mavens will nearly always keep the Twins competitive on a yearly basis. But because of the limited budget, the team will rarely be a legitimate World Series contender. Be happy with just making the playoffs—the Pittsburgh Pirates haven’t been there in fifteen years!
5. Approach the July 31 trading deadline with realistic expectations. The front office doesn’t like to mortgage long-term competitiveness in favor of short-term gambles, so the chances of them trading their top prospects to bring in a star player are extremely remote.
6. With these appropriately lowered expectations, sit back and enjoy the season. Baseball is a beautiful game, and the Twins are a well-run organization who does things the “right way.”