The Twins will open the 2013 season at home. They will play a large percentage of their home games during April and September. They have only a few home games in July. And their regional rivalry with the Brewers has been shrunk to four games.
Heck, the Twins are playing home games the weekend of the fishing opener -- when they'd prefer to be long gone.
Major League Baseball on Wednesday released its 2013 schedule and, while the scheduling committee has myriad factors and 29 other teams to consider, it appears as if it did the Twins very few favors.
"Every schedule has its pluses and minuses," Twins President Dave St. Peter said, "and you have to take the good with the bad."
It's a historic schedule in that, for the first time, interleague play can take place every week of the season, a product of Houston jumping leagues to the AL West. The NL Central Cincinnati Reds, in fact, will play host to the AL West Los Angeles Angels on Opening Day.
Every team will play 20 interleague games in 2013, but series between main rivals have been reduced from two, three-game series to two, two-game series. And all games will be played May 27 through May 30, Monday through Thursday, with the venue switching Wednesday.
That's two fewer games between the Twins and Brewers, big draws for each clubs.
"The Twins and our fans have long been supportive of the traditional rivalry with the Brewers," St. Peter said. "To that end, we are disappointed with anything that minimizes that opportunity."
Twins pitcher Glen Perkins pointed out how many Twins fans show up on weekends in Milwaukee.
"That Saturday crowd in Milwaukee is my favorite of the year," he said.
Every team is in the same boat there. The Twins see other flaws with their schedule.
They open the season at home April 1 against Detroit, after opening the past three seasons on the road. Most teams in the northern cities would like to open as late in April as possible. Mother Nature is being poked with a stick, it seems.
"It could be 80 degrees," Twins General Manager Terry Ryan said. "And it could not be. We won't talk about what it could be."
The schedule has the Twins playing 15 home games in April and 16 in September -- 38.2 percent of their home games in months when temperatures could be cool and school is in session.
The summer months are when teams want to be home as much as possible, and the Twins have only nine home games scheduled in July.
St. Peter tried to look at the bright side, pointing out that the travel schedule is reasonable, the Red Sox visit on a weekend in May and the Yankees are in town on July 4th.
"On the down side, we are less than thrilled with the home dates in April and September while only having nine home dates in July," he said.
The Orioles will be in town May 10-12, the weekend of the fishing opener.
Twins manager Ron Gardenhire was worried his pitchers would have to take batting practice throughout the season, but the Twins are done with interleague play after a June 25-26 two-game series in Miami. But he did notice that the Twins have to play for 20 days in a row right before the All-Star break and over the final 20 games of the season.
"Those are stretches you don't like to see during the course of a year, 20 games in a row, and we have two of them," he said.
The Twins could gripe all day about the schedule, but Ryan said it's about what teams do with the schedule once they get it. If the Twins play well, fans will show up regardless of when they are playing which teams.
He remembered hearing how the Twins were supposed to open the season by beating up on lowly Baltimore.
"I don't worry too much about a schedule," Ryan said. "We ought to take care of our own business. We talked a lot about opening [the season] up with Baltimore. You saw what happened there. We got our ears pinned back."
