Minneapolis – Following their six-game homestand against the Cleveland Guardians and Kansas City Royals, the Minnesota Twins have embarked on their longest and strangest road trip of the season.
They left Minneapolis early Sunday evening to start a three-game series against the Tampa Bay Rays at George Steinbrenner Field. The series was initially scheduled to play out in early July. However, after Hurricane Milton destroyed Tropicana Field’s roof in October, the Rays had to move to the New York Yankees’ spring training complex and play out most of their home games before hurricane season.
Following their three-game series in Tampa, the Twins will take the second-longest continental flight in MLB from Central Florida to Seattle. They will finish the road trip with four games at a minor-league ballpark in Sacramento against the former Oakland Athletics.
“It’s going to be as interesting a trip as we’re going to have all year long, and the guys, I doubt most of them have even thought about it for one second,” Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said ahead of the trip. “We know it as a staff, but we’re looking forward to it, we think it’ll be a nice challenge.”
One of the biggest challenges will be adjusting to the minor-league ballpark factors in the series that bookend the trip. Twins starter Chris Paddack will be, for lack of a better term, the guinea pig for the rotation when he takes the mound Monday evening against the Rays.
“For me personally, nothing changes,” Paddack said. “It’s still a big league lineup that you have to prepare for and get ready for. You know, you hear the rumors of, wind blows out, ballpark might not hold some baseballs like a big league park would. For me, that’s all negative stuff that we can’t put in our heads as pitchers.”
Paddack will be going up against a Rays lineup that’s on a hot streak. The Rays are on a five-game winning streak and have won eight of their last 12 games. Over that time, they’ve hit .248/.305/.418 as a team with 17 home runs and 61 RBI. They have a league-leading 24 stolen bases in part thanks to speedster rookie Chandler Simpson, who has a 29.9 ft per sec sprint speed.
Paddack didn’t make any of the bus trips to pitch against the Yankees at their spring training complex before the season began. Still, he faced many of Tampa’s hitters in camp at Fort Myers and Charlotte County, Fla.
“So [I’m] definitely going to try and use that to my advantage of seeing how I pitched them in spring,” said Paddack. “Seeing some good results, bad results, and then obviously simulating that into what I do well this year, and put together a good game plan for tomorrow.”
It will be a change that will be somewhat shocking for Baldelli. He spent seven of his eight years in the majors with Tropicana Field as his home ballpark. Between his retirement in 2011 and the Twins hiring him in 2019, he spent eight years working as a Rays team official and first base coach.
“It was unsightly, it wasn’t something anyone wanted to wake up to and see,” said Baldelli. “We had a lot of great talks in that building, I won’t forget that. No matter what happens, I won’t forget that. They’ll figure it out, they’ll always figure it out.”
There’s a lot of outside noise about where the Twins will play and how long they’ll be flying. However, the clubhouse is tuning more of that out and focusing on trying to make this a winning road trip more than anything else.
The Twins will start a long stretch of games, with only one matchup against a divisional foe between now and August 1. How they play these next two months could help them gain ground on other teams in the division.
“I just want to keep playing the same type of baseball that we’ve been playing,” said Baldelli.
“It’s been good on both sides of the ball. We’ve been playing well defensively. The at-bats have been good up and down the lineup from the first inning to the ninth inning. There’s a lot of different ways, but I just want to keep playing that type of baseball. If we keep doing that, we’re going to continue to pick up wins and play well like that.”
“At the end of the day, we’re on that rubber, it’s still the same island, it’s still 60 feet six inches away,” said Paddack. “You just have to prepare and get the mind ready, and treat it just like you would if you were at Yankee Stadium. … I think, if we can come out on top as far as win more games than we can lose on this road trip. It’s going to be one that we talk about in September.”
And as for how the team will kill the time on a flight from Tampa to Seattle, that could take up to six hours. Baldelli will just have more time to play chess against random people around the world, while the players will do what they usually do.
“They play cards, talk crap, and sleep,” he said. “That’s literally it, and they love it.”