Bring on the Yankees

Prevailing wisdom in baseball suggests there is some intangible quality that allows some players (and certain teams) to have success in big games. Lack of said clutchiness, they tell us, is what makes teams like the Twins struggle in October. I don’t buy it. Never have. No doubt it sounds bad that the Twins haven’t won a postseason series in eight years. In fact, they haven’t even won a single game in six. That represents a losing streak of… nine games. In six of the nine games (games 2-4 in 2004 and the entire series last season against the Yankees) – the Twins came into the series as a clear underdog. The only time one can make the argument that the Twins should have won was in 2006. That is all to day that the Twins have only performed slightly worse than they should have been expected to in postseason play over the last decade or so. Yet the prevailing narrative of the 2000′s is that the Twins aren’t capable of competing in October. Whil...