We had a four-person group to split four season tickets when Target Field opened in 2010. It became a three-person group for the next two seasons. There were two of us for this season, only because my partner agreed to take two-thirds of the games.
A month ago, we decided to proceed with the same arrangement for 2014. I think we're going to have to talk again.
I was in attendance for the first-ever Twins game in 1961. I can hold my own with anyone in Minnesota on Twins' history ... not trivia, but remembrances of players who have come and gone. And baseball has remained my No. 1 sport to follow, even as NFL madness has overtaken the nation.
But what the Twins have offered up this season is a disgusting collection of garbage matched only by the final two seasons at Met Stadium in 1980 and 1981. Calvin Griffith saw what he had early in 1982, the first season in the Metrodome, and turned the roster over to rookies through call-ups and trades.
That youthful bunch started 16-54 and was such a source of ridicule that the third baseman, Gary Gaetti, noted that the newspapers in the towns they visited carried the same sentence: "The hapless Twins start a three-game series tonight at Comiskey Park (or wherever.)."
Gaetti suggested the team should consider changing its name to the "Hapless Twins."
That remains the only Twins team to lose 100 (102 games), yet it went 44-48 over the final 3-plus months and did offer hope with Hrbek and Brunnansky and Gaetti and several more of the 15 rookies.
There were also the lost years of the '90s, when the Twins went from winning a World Series in 1991 to eight consecutive losing seasons from 1993 through 2000. What should be remembered about that ineptitude is the Twins were still trying to put a product on the field through 1996, and were being done in by lousy starting pitching.