Trevor Plouffe is a relentless optimist, and he professed no doubts about his team before Monday's home opener or after the 4-1 loss.

The Twins' 0-7 start to the season, he said, is a blip compared to the 162-game grind, and can be overcome — will be overcome, he insists — once the Twins muddle through their hitting slump.

"It gets a lot of attention because it's the first [seven] games of the season," Plouffe pointed out. "Teams go through hot and cold streaks all the time, but it gets magnified because it's at the start, instead of in the middle of June."

He's got a point — sort of. Losing seven in a row to start the season certainly leaves plenty of time to turn things around. But history shows that such long losing streaks aren't necessarily random. In many cases, they're simply reflective of the overall record to come.

The Twins are the 25th MLB team to start a season 0-7 since 1901, and none of the previous 24 recovered to earn a postseason spot. In fact, only two — the 1980 Braves, who went 81-80, and the 1983 Astros, who went 85-77 and finished third in the NL West — even managed to post a winning record.

And what if a long losing streak occurs in June, rather than the season's first week? Well, the Twins have some experience at that, and those numbers are also alarming.

The Twins are in the midst of the franchise's 39th losing streak of at least seven games, and first since 2013. And while the Twins' overall history is roughly break-even — the team has finished with a winning record 26 times, a losing record 27 times, and exactly .500 twice — the losing streaks come overwhelmingly in the sub-.500 years. That makes sense from a chicken-or-the-egg sense, of course, but it's actually quite rare for a winning team to go through such a rough stretch.

Only five times has a Twins team gone through a streak of 0-7 or longer, at any point in the season, and still finished with a winning record, and it hasn't happened in a long time: 2003, to be exact. Only three times has a Twins team made the playoffs after slumping so badly.

On the other hand, 31 long losing streaks, or 81.6 percent, have come in years when the Twins finished below .500.

Then again, the Twins have a model for their goal of a turnaround, as Plouffe well knows. Dan Gladden and Jack Morris told him all about it during spring training.

"Gladden and Morris, they said the 1991 team started 2-9," Plouffe said, and that world championship season did indeed include an 0-7 losing streak. Not to mention the 1970 AL West champions, the second-best (98-64) team in franchise history, which suffered through an 0-9 slump in August.

"There's plenty of time to turn it around, and I'm confident we will," Plouffe said. "You can't let a small sample size define your season."