October baseball never ends, but Twins exited by reverting to their early-season selves

There was a reference to "heartbreak" for Twins fans in large type in Thursday morning's paper. We were really getting ahead of ourselves if losing in four games in a Division Series gave that emotion to even a small share of Minnesota's sporting public.

Now heartbreak … that would've been available to those turned fanatical about October baseball way back in 1991, if Atlanta's Lonnie Smith had not been duped into stopping at second base and the Twins and Jack Morris had lost 1-0 in Game 7 inside the madness of the Metrodome.

That's not the way it turned out, which many will recall, and others have been informed by their elders.

Actually, there was an urge to call Morris from the Target Field press box on Wednesday night to get his opinion on Twins starter Joe Ryan being removed after one run and two innings.

Common sense prevailed, since we were so far removed from this being a dramatic twist in October baseball that it wasn't worth bothering Black Jack.

You do realize this, right:

The Twins needed eight postseason victories to win it all in 1987 and 1991 — four in the ALCS and four in the Series.

And when they returned home for two games this week, the Twins had won three — two vs. Toronto, one in Houston — and still required another 10 victories to claim a third World Series title a generation and a half after the second.

Baseball joined the rest of the major sports leagues to add playoff teams with a third round of playoffs in 1995, and has now added a fourth.

That puts MLB up to 12 of 30 (40%) teams in the playoffs, compared to 14 of 32 (43.7%) for the NFL, 16 of 32 (50%) for the NHL and 20 of 30 (67%) for the NBA, if you include the spellbinding 7-through-10 play-ins.

Thus, if you were the division winner with the lowest winning percentage, as were the Twins as champs of the AL Central, you wound up needing 13 wins for a championship.

The Twins did return from Houston with considerable hope, after Pablo López's masterful pitching evened the series at 1-1 in Game 2.

What happened, of course, is the team that set an all-time record for striking out with 1,654 (first MLB squad to break the 1,600 barrier!) came back home and swung the bats like all season-long observers feared they might.

Facing a pair of Houston starters who had been struggling, Cristian Javier and José Urquidy, and with assistance from their all righthanded, hard-throwing bullpen, the Twins' totals for two games were three runs, six hits and 28 strikeouts.

The sellout crowds did put in a noble effort, with a large share waving the latest version of Homer Hankies. These were red, a change for the better, as they were much less blinding than those white ones that first filled the Metrodome in 1987.

Charley Walters, the famed "Shooter" still writing a couple of outstanding notes columns per month in the Pioneer Press, and I had a chance to reminisce in the pressbox on Wednesday about the Star Tribune's first version of those annoying Hankies in 1987.

I also was working for the Pioneer Press then. There was a skyway connected to the staircase of the Pioneer Press lobby. That circled past the notorious Victory Ramp and across the street. The Star Tribune had a small office over there, from which they were selling those tissue-thin Hankies for a buck apiece.

By the time the World Series was getting ready to start, you people — or your parents or grandparents — were backed up all the way to our staircase, the length of a football field, waiting in line to buy Hankies.

And as Frankie Viola was throwing his warmup pitches before Game 1, we looked out at these two decks of waving white rags, and I nudged Walters and said:

"Do we see many Homer Hankies, Shooter? I don't see that many. I don't think that promotion is going to work."

Yah, ancient times, when you could win one series and then feel as though a world championship was within reach.

That wasn't the case Wednesday.

What Pablo and the feisty whiffers did accomplish was ending the Minnesota shame of a Western Hemisphere record of 18 straight postseason losses, which was right on par with the shame with being 0-4 in Super Bowls, and now in the 47th season of not qualifying for a fifth.

Some of us said before this started last week, "Just win one," get the gorilla of October failure off your backs — as well as all civilians with a rooting interest in the home team.

Rocco Baldelli's Twins did that. They won three. Which meant there were still 10 to go.

Heartbreak? Come on.

You know what a real kick in the shins would've been? Reaching the World Series, getting the middle games on Oct. 30-31/Nov. 1 and celebrating with an anniversary repeat of the 30-inch Halloween blizzard in 1991.

The Twins would've had to move our home games to Milwaukee. Oh, the horror.