Major League Baseball

Twins' postseason baggage gets heavier with another loss to the Yankees

Published Oct. 10, 2010 10:11 p.m. ET

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NEW YORK -- Target Field wasn't enough, a $184 million catcher wasn't enough and a payroll pushing $100 million wasn't enough.

After so much enchantment and promise and supposed progress, the Twins ended the 2010 season the same way they finished 2009, swept out of the postseason by the New York Yankees after a 6-1 Game 3 loss Saturday night at Yankee Stadium.

This season, the Twins were supposed to contend with the best teams in baseball and be more than the American League Central's little engine that could. They were supposed to leave their troubled postseason past at the Metrodome and use their shiny new home field as an advantage. But this AL Division Series against the Yankees was more troubling than the previous ones.

"We keep saying next year we'll get these guys," right fielder Jason Kubel said. "Well, it's happened a couple times, and it hasn't worked out."

The Twins went 2 for 18 with runners in scoring position, batted .216 as a team, scored only seven runs in three games and couldn't figure out how to quiet, let alone silence, Joe Girardi's lineup for nine full innings.

Saturday, Brian Duensing couldn't do it for even two.

The left-hander made it through just 3 1/3 innings, the first time this season he didn't make it through at least five innings in a start. He showed flashes of hope early, getting ahead 0-2 in the count to three of his four first-inning batters, but efficiency quickly gave way to hits and runs and a 5-0 New York lead by the time Matt Guerrier took over in the fourth.

Saturday's season-ending loss, though, was about much more than Duensing. It was about more than missing Justin Morneau for the past two postseasons, being without Joe Nathan for all of 2010 or simply falling victim to a great team.

This year, the Twins were supposed to be great, too.

And for so long, they were. They went 94-68 and ran away with the Central, but that offers little solace after another postseason disaster. The Twins have lost 12 straight postseason games, including nine straight to the Yankees. They have been swept out of the playoffs in their past three trips and have advanced beyond the divisional series just once with Ron Gardenhire, who has a 6-21 postseason managerial record, as their leader.

"It's more frustrating this year just because I felt like our team is so good," said Duensing, who didn't induce a swing and miss on even one of his 58 pitches. "When you win 94 games during the year, you feel like you can beat anybody. To be honest, the first couple games of the series, we all felt like we had them. One big hit or one big pitch here or there, we could have been coming to New York 2-0 instead of 0-2, but that wasn't the case."

When these two teams come together, it rarely is.

Minnesota is 18-57 against the Yankees in the regular season and postseason since Gardenhire took over in 2002, and within the damning big picture are troubling individual trends. Jason Kubel, moved into the cleanup spot for Game 3, went 0 for 8 in this series, dropping his postseason batting average to a miniscule .069 (2 for 29). On Saturday, Kubel came up with one out and the bases loaded in the eighth inning and popped to third base on the first pitch he saw. Joe Mauer still has just one career postseason RBI, and Jim Thome, who smashed 25 home runs in the regular season, had one hit, a single, in 10 ALDS at-bats.

Last October, the Twins arrived in the postseason exhausted by clawing back from three games down with four to play. This year they sprayed champagne all over their brand new clubhouse with two weeks left in the 162-game schedule. They rested their regulars and lined up their rotation, but despite all the time to prepare, the results didn't change.

"We liked the way it set up, we thought we had some good opportunities, we just didn't get it done," Gardenhire said. "The last game you play should be a win and then you win the World Series. That's our goal, it continues being our goal, it will never end being our goal."

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