In baseball, success isn't an accident

Baseball is the only sport where you never win by accident. It is contested on a daily basis for 26 weeks, and all of a team's flaws will be revealed in that time.

An NFL team can recover a couple of opportune fumbles, get a hot game from a so-so quarterback, get off to a 5-1 start and stumble from there to the playoffs, no matter its inadequacies.

The NHL and the NBA allow 53 percent of their 30 teams to reach the playoffs, meaning that mediocrity will be rewarded by definition.

There's no gray area in baseball. The standings use W's and L's. There are no OL or SL columns on the right -- no place to try to sell the public the idea that a loss was anything other than that.

Fast starts are preferable to slow starts. They help to sell tickets, but they are meaningless. You can be 10 games over .500 on Memorial Day, hit a little swoon in June and, presto, you're chasing three teams in the division.

Back in 1987, the impression was that the Twins slid into that World Series championship under the cover of darkness. Now, you look at it from the distance of two decades, and the Twins' victory over Detroit in the ALCS wasn't shocking, and they probably should have taken care of St. Louis in fewer than seven games in the World Series.

Bert Blyleven, Frank Viola, Jeff Reardon and Juan Berenguer worked 36 2/3 of the 44 innings that the Twins pitched against Detroit. Manager Tom Kelly's "first-division players" (as he called them) -- Kirby Puckett, Kent Hrbek, Gary Gaetti, Tom Brunansky, Greg Gagne and Dan Gladden -- made 68 percent of the plate appearances for the Twins in that ALCS.

We had another mystery involving the home team only two years ago. The '06 Twins were 25-33 in early June, then went 71-33 to overtake Detroit for the AL Central Division title on the last day of the regular season.

The local sportswriters spent a lot of time trying to explain how this could have happened -- to readers as well as to themselves. Most of us came to the same conclusion: It was the baseball version of a miracle.

The reason for that is we spent a lot of time focused on the fact that the Twins had changed the left side of the infield at roughly the same time they started winning. They dropped veterans Tony Batista and Juan Castro for Nick Punto and Jason Bartlett.

Jason Tyner arrived a couple of weeks later and started playing left field. Ozzie Guillen, the White Sox manager, watched Punto, Bartlett and Tyner moving around swiftly and referred to these smaller members of the Twins' lineup as "The Piranhas."

Look back now, and their contributions can be appreciated, but it was neither a miracle nor the Piranhas that caused those Twins to be a cut above the competition for the final four months of the schedule.

Joe Mauer was the game's best catcher, and a hitting machine at a league-leading .347. He produced an exceptional 157 runs (scored and driven in). And second baseman Luis Castillo, more a former All-Star than a Piranha, was a tremendous player for those four months.

Johan Santana was unbeatable after early June and was the league's best starter by a landslide. Joe Nathan was the unhittable final weapon in a bullpen that nearly guaranteed victory if the Twins were leading after six innings.

Minnesotans couldn't believe that the '87 Twins could win a World Series after winning the West with 85 victories, and we couldn't believe the endless drive to a division title in '06, but looking back, both achievements can be explained.

This is baseball. There are no accidents.