DETROIT — Completely soaked by the spraying champagne and flowing beer, Mitch Garver was nevertheless reflective as the Twins celebrated Thursday night. He had witnessed one of these scrums before. He felt part of this one.
"I tasted this in 2017," when the Twins won a one-game wild-card berth, "but I was just a very very small part of that," Garver said. "This is a completely different feeling. I'm a big leaguer and I'm on the best team in the Central. It's unbelievable."
Actually, it's not, Marwin Gonzalez said. He signed with the Twins two weeks after spring training opened, and he said he realized before the calendar turned to March that he had made a smart decision. "When I saw how much talent this team has, I knew it was a team that would win," he said. "We've got players who can win in a lot of different ways, so it's not a surprise that we're here. It would be a surprise if we weren't."
Maybe to him, but Kyle Gibson said he detected plenty of doubters along the way to the Twins' first AL Central championship in nine seasons.
"All along the way, people have said, 'Just wait until they stumble.' Back in spring training, we heard that it's the Indians' division. And when we got a half-game down [in the standings], they said 'that's going to be the end,' " Gibson said. "Right now, those people are busy finding a way to say that the Yankees are going to beat us, that the Astros are going to beat us, whoever it is. But you know what? We're not going to worry about that. We're going to play the way we play. We're going to play Twins baseball and we'll see what happens."
He's right, there will be a lot more skeptics along the way, and not just because the Twins will finish the season with a half-dozen or so fewer wins than their opponent, which is almost certain to be New York, naturally. The Twins' last three playoff appearances were against the Yankees, and the Twins went 0-7 in them. They've lost 10 straight playoff games to New York.
But Gonzalez, who owns a World Series ring he won with the Astros in 2017, had a rebuttal. "Every team that goes to the postseason has a chance to win it," he said. "Every team in it is a great team, and we are, too."
Rocco Baldelli, the manager who orchestrated this run, knows first-hand that's true. He played for one of the most improbable World Series teams in history, the out-of-nowhere 2008 Rays, and even hit a home run in the series.
