I am not a superstitious person. I don’t run my life through actuarial tables or anything, but I don’t believe in magic or spirits or karma or fate. I don’t think there’s a natural order to things, or that there’s a hidden puppet master, whether physical or metaphysical. I don’t think that past events have any relation on different independent events happening today. When I have gut feelings about, say, a baseball game, I ignore them because they’re irrelevant; teams win when I think they’ll lose and lose when I think they’ll win, and it’s impossible to tell what will happen next.
Except when it comes to the goddamn Yankees.
As soon as the Yankees scored their fifth run against Shane Bieber on Tuesday — they’d add a couple more the next inning — they were going to sweep their short series against Cleveland. This is simply how the world works: as soon as the Yankees gain momentum in a postseason series, they’re going to win it. It takes an act of God — like the Red Sox scoring off of Mariano Rivera in 2004 — to stop them. It’s not that they’re too good. It’s that they’re too Yankees.
It turns out, I have totally bought into the Yankees mythos, hook, line, and sinker. I wouldn’t know who they were if it was possible for them to lose a series after having a nice lead heading into the fifth inning of Game 1. I got a little hyperbolic with it on Twitter — WHAT NO NOT THAT — but the general idea behind it is solid:
Some teams just have an identity. This is the Yankees’ identity, for better or worse or occasional inaccuracy. The Rays, who also moved on to the next round yesterday, have an identity too: they’re perpetually young and cheap and on the cutting edge, though it’s more the cutting edge of Not Paying Players Very Much.
And then we come to the Twins. Alas, the Twins.
The Twins, as you have presumably heard, lost both games of their series to the Astros this week, with their first loss being their 17th consecutive playoff game loss, a record in major North American sports. It has to be “major” North American sports because who’s to say if the Washington Generals ever made the playoffs? If they did, oh boy do I not have confidence in their results. Triangle offense, guys! Get with the times!
So the Twins, whose streak has reached 18 consecutive postseason losses, have an identity too. They’re losers. Or chokers, maybe. They get to the big stage and turn into a bunch of hapless idiots, chickens with their heads cut off who can still find enough of the strike zone to give up a 3-run homer.
And yet, to me, that’s not set in stone like the Yankees are. All the Twins have to do is win one game and the story vanishes. Whenever that happens, I’ll probably be happy for the team, since they’re composed of a bunch of seemingly likable guys who just haven’t been able to win in October (or late September this year!) with the Minnesota uniform on. Sure, it seems like they’ll never win another postseason game ever again, but that’s more pattern recognition than a statement about the world.
The Yankees, though, are still the Yankees. They are the anti-Twins, a team utterly able to beat anyone without a second thought (They are also the anti-Twins because they have been uniquely brutal on the Twins during this streak, beating them in 13 of those 18 losses). And that will never change. The Yankees are goliaths in the baseball world, so they get treated differently. People think about them differently than about any other team, even though it’s just as possible that they’ll lose their next 18 postseason games as it was for the Twins back in 2004.
Still, the Yankees have a mystique. It is an annoying mystique that Yankees fans expect everyone to genuflect in front of, but it is undeniably there. The Twins have the opposite of that. Call it superstition if you want. Call it pattern recognition. Either way, the Twins are the anti-Yankees. For most of the season, that makes them a fun, likable team that it’s easy to root for. But in October? Oh boy is that not what it means.