Twins came back from the dead; Wolves need to show pulse

Major league baseball was shut down by a players' strike in August 1994. Andy MacPhail, the Twins' general manager for the World Series victories in 1987 and 1991, left for the Chicago Cubs. The job went to Terry Ryan, MacPhail's assistant.

Kent Hrbek retired at the end of the shortened season. The baseball owners went through the charade of using replacement players in the spring of 1995. The season started nearly a month late with the real players.

The Twins were 17-42 at the end of June. Attendance was horrible. On July 6, the Twins sent closer Rick Aguilera to Boston. The next day, they sent starter Scott Erickson to Baltimore. On July 31, they sent starter Kevin Tapani and reliever Mark Guthrie to the L.A. Dodgers.

The Twins finished 56-88 and 44 games behind Cleveland in the AL Central in a 144-game schedule. The announced attendance was 1,057,667 for 72 games in the Metrodome.

It would take another half-dozen seasons for the Twins to get back above .500 (85-77) and for the fans to show a renewed interest in buying tickets (1,782,929). Even then, there was a contraction scare to be avoided before the Twins could start winning division titles and providing the momentum for the construction of Target Field.

The new ballpark and an expectation for success have made the Twins' label mightier than at any time in 50 seasons.

Outside Target Field's main gate, 150 yards across a plaza, sits the back entrance to Target Center, where the main occupants are the NBA Timberwolves.

The Twins were in a third consecutive season of serious losing when Ryan made those trades.

The Timberwolves went from 58 victories and reaching the Western Conference finals in 2004 to ever-decreasing win totals during the next three seasons (44, 33 and 32). On July 31, 2007, they sent the franchise's one great player, Kevin Garnett, to Boston for Al Jefferson and several suspects.

Starting with the pitching purge of July 1995, it took the Twins five more desultory seasons before the 57-33 start to the 2001 season drew the interest of the sporting public.

Starting the Garnett trade in July 2007, the Timberwolves have gone through three disastrous seasons.

The Twins had the fifth-best record in the American League in 2001. Offer that deal -- two more seasons of misery, followed by the fifth-best record in the Western Conference in 2012-13 -- and Woofies owner Glen Taylor would do more somersaults inside the arena than the Fargo-Moorhead Acro team.

• Everything being equal, there's a stronger base of baseball fans than NBA fans in Minnesota and in most of the country.

• When the Twins were at rock bottom, there were two other major league teams in the market -- the Vikings and the Wolves. Now, the Twins and the Vikings have an interest level here that might be unprecedented, and the Wild is still popular at the gate after a decade in St. Paul.

It has to be depressing for any Wolves employee to be walking the skyway to Minneapolis' Ramp B, and to gaze into Target Field and see what the Twins now have to sell, and to be reminded the winter competition, the Wild, has a still-sparkling arena to attract customers.

Taylor's loyalty to McHale ended in the spring of 2009 and he brought in David Kahn as the basketball boss. The best guess is Kahn used "bifurcate" in a sentence, and Taylor, a guy from Comfrey, Minn., couldn't help but be impressed.

Tonight, Kahn conducts his second Wolves draft. Again, he has multiple choices. He screwed up the first, not so much because Ricky Rubio remains in Europe, but rather because Stephen Curry -- a guard who can shoot, pass and find space -- was available and Kahn went for the speedy bricklayer, Jonny Flynn, at No. 6.