Miserable in Minnesota

Despite Gardenhire's prodding, Twins still floundering

Ron Gardenhire has tried everything. And then some.

The man is a cut-up at heart, so he's tried to keep things loose with his team. When that hasn't worked -- and it hasn't yet this season -- he's jumped in his players' faces.

He's done the motivational talks, and the no-talking-at-all thing. He's benched players. He's demoted and promoted.

But here are his Minnesota Twins, bobbing along at .500, in third place in baseball's weakest division. Try as they might, they simply can't seem to do much better.

Last year's low-revenue darlings, the survivors of contraction threats and the American League Central's defending champs, the Twins have turned into one of this year's biggest disappointments. Nobody, of course, is more disappointed than Gardenhire.

Hailed as the perfect successor to the hard-fisted Tom Kelly, Gardenhire is a little less buoyant this season, a little less prone to pull off his now-legendary practical jokes.

Losing will do that.

"You don’t sleep at night. You go home every night trying to figure out what are we doing, what are we doing differently," Gardenhire said recently. "The only way you know how to fix it, as a manager, is to keep working, and work hard. That's what we do. We go out and work our tail off every day. And every day we walk out on the field, we think we're going to win.

"Then you go out and something different happens. You lose a ball, you miss one play and they score three runs … those are the things. And how do you stop them? That's what we're trying to figure out. How can we get away from this?"

It's been a struggle all season for the Twins, predicted by many to win the AL Central again. They were all streaky at the beginning of the season, winning their first three, losing their next six, winning six in a row after that, then losing six straight.

They finally started to get things headed in the right direction in May, but they struggled through June and, just before the All-Star break, lost eight straight games.

That left them five games under .500 at the break (44-49), 7 ½ games behind the surprising Kansas City Royals and scrambling for anything to snap them out of their funk.

"You name it," Gardenhire said. "We've had no batting practice. We sat and watched highlights of last year's championship video. We said, 'This is the feeling. Let's just watch this. Watch this. Get this feeling back. This is what we're looking for. Look at the fun you're having. Look at some of the things you can do.' We've done things like that.

"You try just about everything. The bottom line is, it still has to come out on the field."

The bottom line is, it hasn't. Not yet. The Twins won five straight after the break to climb back to .500, but since then they've floundered more. And now they face the latest in a make-or-break stretch of games. With the Royals coming back to the pack -- their seven-game lead over the Chicago White Sox at the break is now down to a half-game -- the Twins still have plenty of time to win the division.

Starting Friday in Detroit, they play a string of 16 straight games against the AL Central. Seven of those games are against the Royals. Minnesota is 19-21 against the Central, 4-8 against the Royals.

The Twins also have seven games left against the Sox in September.

"Believe me, there's an attitude in the clubhouse, that we're going to win," insists Gardenhire. "But once the game starts, and something bad happens … when you're going through a stretch, that's when you see guys go, 'Oh, no. Here we go again.' That's what we have to get out. The only way to do that is to get a couple of big hits, come back on somebody, make something happen."

The problems with the Twins aren't so much about attitude -- though some bad blood has surfaced over the course of this frustrating season -- as they are about talent. The team's once-proud starting rotation has a 5.11 ERA, 11th in the league and better only than Tampa Bay, Detroit and Texas.

And though the Twins have a generally good-hitting team (.276, fourth in the AL), Minnesota is hitting only .255 with runners in scoring position.

All of it has weighed on Gardenhire, who last year was exposed as one of the game's best practitioners of the practical joke. He's hidden a joy buzzer in his hand and sprung it on unsuspecting guests, he keeps a shock pen handy at his desk and, in one memorable prank, he tossed a live lobster into closer Eddie Guardado's lap.

There just hasn't been much lobster-tossing this season.

"Gardy's staying the same. He's keeping his head up," Guardado said recently. "Granted, there's times when everybody's not feeling up to par. You have those days. But Gardy's the one guy that everybody looks up to. He stays strong."

Gardenhire has been criticized this year for being too soft. But he has benched shortstop Cristian Guzman, he stuck former starter Joe Mays in the bullpen and he's railed about his team's play to the press more than once.

Many in Minnesota expect that the Twins, soon, will finally snap out of it and start to play well. Occasionally, they even show signs that they might.

Since being acquired from Toronto on July 16, outfielder and leadoff man Shannon Stewart has tried to drag the team out of its doldrums, hitting .402 with eight doubles, four homers and 12 RBIs.

But Stewart has not managed to resuscitate the Twins. And neither has Gardenhire, for all his prodding, his threatening and his joking.

"Last year, we all stuck together, all year. This year, a couple of our wheels are not rolling right," Guardado said. "It's not Gardy's fault. He's in good spirits. We come in in the morning for a day game, he's out there talking. He's trying to lighten things up."

There's a lot to lighten up right now. And if the Twins don't start to win soon, it's going to be one dark September in Minnesota.

John Donovan is a senior writer for SI.com.

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