Minnesota Twins: Team preview and prediction for 2020 season
By Sean Basile
The single-season record-holders in team home runs march into 2020 with a reloaded roster of star vets as the Minnesota Twins try to hunt down a world title
The Minnesota Twins are coming off a huge 2019 where they set the MLB team home run record at 307 and won over 100 games for the first time since 1965 in Rocco Baldelli‘s rookie season as manager. Are the Twinkies up for a repeat as AL Central champs, or will they revert back to their old ways and under-perform after one of their best seasons as a franchise?
One thing I’ve noticed from this era of Twins baseball is a lack of consistency. They’ve won two of the past three Manager of the Year awards (Baldelli and Paul Molitor), but have yet to have back-to-back winning seasons since 2009 and 2010- nearly a decade. Where we see them explode one year, they quickly regress the next and under-perform.
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So, will we see that similar failure in 2020 now that they have expectations?
I don’t know, which is why I think they and the Indians are a lot closer than people think in this division. Plus, we now have the White Sox much improved and hungry to take a crack at the Central. So, 2020 will be a battle for the Twinkies to repeat as division champs.
But I think they can pull it off. Top-to-bottom, they have one of the best rosters in baseball and clearly the best roster in their division, and they only got better over the offseason. They added Josh Donaldson, the Bringer of Rain himself, and retained Nelson Cruz to their lineup, as well as two of the Dodgers’ main starting pitchers from a year ago in Kenta Maeda and Rich Hill.
As far as the makeup of this team is concerned, the Twins once again have a loaded group of position players in their lineup that can very well break their own home run record this very year if all goes according to plan.