Disclosure: Until Wednesday, I hadn’t watched a single pitch of the new Major League Baseball season.
In more than 30 years covering MLB in Boston, New York and the Twin Cities, I can’t remember missing a single Opening Day, let alone the first six days. Part of it, of course, had to do with the Twins beginning the season on the road. But the main reason – and I’m not embarrassed to admit this – was March Madness, the women’s tournament especially. Caitlin Clark, Paige Bueckers, Angel Reese and JuJu Watkins offered much more compelling television than any late March baseball game, one of 162 in a grind of a season that lasts well into fall.
The numbers show I wasn’t alone, either.
Earlier this week, MLB sent out a press release boasting about television viewership from the opening weekend. Highlights included the roughly 1.8 million who watched last Sunday night’s game on ESPN. That represented less than one-sixth of the 12.3 million who tuned in to see the Iowa-LSU women this past Monday night – the most-watched women’s game ever on ESPN, according to the network.
That audience included Twins manager Rocco Baldelli and his coaches.
On a rare night off on the road after the opening series in Kansas City, the Twins staff gathered for dinner at a hotel restaurant in downtown Milwaukee. Baldelli grew up a Big East Conference fan in Rhode Island, rooting for the Providence College men, not so much the women. Bench coach Jayce Tingler, on the other hand, follows women’s hoops closely because he grew up with it. Both his parents coached girls high school basketball in Missouri, and his mother Diana is a member of that state’s Sports Hall of Fame.
As Baldelli and the coaches settled into their seats at the Mason Street Grill, they noticed all the TVs tuned to the women’s game. Quickly they got into it, captivated by Clark and Reese and everyone else in the Hawkeyes’ 94-87 victory over the defending national champions. Now, Baldelli says he’s a fan of the women’s game as well.
“I think more people are watching women sports in general,” Baldelli said Thursday, before the Twins’ home opener at Target Field. “It feels like, especially with women’s basketball, a lot more people are interested in it, paying attention and absorbing it right now. For me, the players, the coaches, they’re so much fun to watch.”
Easy segue: Iowa-LSU turned out to be a lot more entertaining than the Twins were Thursday. Before a crowd announced as 35,595, about 3,000 short of a sellout, the punchless Twins struck out 15 times and went 0-for-12 with runners in scoring position in a dreary 4-2 loss to Cleveland.
The failure to sell out the home opener shouldn’t surprise anyone who follows the Twins closely. Fans reacted angrily on social media when lead executive Derek Falvey announced last fall that the club, following its first playoff series victory since 2002, planned to reduce payroll from last year’s record $156 million. With $54.8 million in television money from Diamond Sports Holdings, which filed for Chapter 1 bankruptcy protection, in jeopardy, the Twins felt the need to cut back. (Diamond Sports eventually reached a deal to emerge from bankruptcy that provided some, but not all, of its obligation to the Twins for 2024.)
Letting Sonny Gray and Kenta Maeda, two-fifths of the starting rotation, depart in free agency didn’t sit well, either. Then Anthony DeSclafani, acquired from Seattle in the Jorge Polanco trade to be the fifth starter, needed season-ending elbow surgery – at least the fourth pitcher acquired by the Twins the past few years to be quickly felled by elbow or shoulder issues. (Sam Dyson, Chris Paddack and Tyler Mahle are the others; only Paddack remains with the club.) The popular and oft-injured Royce Lewis getting hurt again on Opening Day didn’t help.
As of Monday, plenty of upper level grandstand and outfield seats remained for the home opener. Most ended up filled, helped by a $20 general admission special and favorable weather (sunny and 48 degrees at game time). On the plus side, the Twins began play Thursday with a healthy Byron Buxton in center field, two days after he barely avoided a collision with one of Milwaukee’s famous racing sausages.
Though the Twins threw out three runners trying to score in the first six innings – two in rundowns – they couldn’t get much going offensively to support All-Star right-hander Pablo Lopez. Buxton struck out three times, as did Edouard Julien (all looking), though Julien did homer with no one on in the fifth. The Twins fanned eight times with runners in scoring position – not surprising from a team that broke the MLB for strikeouts last season – and the 0-for-12 left them 9-for-61 (.148) in such situations through six games.
“Obviously, (strikeouts) do hurt you with runners in scoring position,” Baldelli said. “At least giving yourself a shot and putting the ball in play is probably a better scenario for us. We just have to have better at-bats, flat out. We had plenty of chances to do it today.”
Baldelli suggested the Twins take shorter swings with runners on, especially until the weather warms up. Carlos Correa, who had three of the seven Twins hits, thinks it may be worth a try.
“It’s a possibility,” he said. “When you look at the (Guardians), they’re not trying to hit home runs. They’re just trying to put the ball in play. It’s a beautiful game early in the year when it’s cold weather and it’s tough to string a lot of home runs together or square the ball up. It’s not a bad approach.
“Looking at the at-bats, I do think we can get better as a team, try to get those pitches in the zone and make better decisions on pitches to swing at. But it’s easier said than done. The season is still very young, but we don’t want it to be like last year where the first half was a mess for us. We want to make the adjustments a lot earlier.”
The series with Cleveland continues with day games Saturday and Sunday, and the Dodgers with Shonei Ohtani come in for three games beginning Monday.
Not sure if I’ll check it out. There’s still Madness to watch.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct Angel Reese’s name.
