Some Pennant Races After All

After yesterday’s pasting by the Dodgers and the Rockies drubbing of the Diamondbacks, the Giants are 3.5 games back with 14 games to play.  The Gints have their work cut out for them, but they still do have a shot.  The Marlins and Braves are both four back in the loss column behind the Rox, a game behind the Giants, so they also still have a slim shot at the wildcard if either gets hot and the Rockies can’t play .500 baseball the rest of the way.

The team that has suddenly got hot and now have a chance that didn’t appear to exist a week ago is the Twins.  They’ve won six in a row, including the last two games against the Tigers, and they’re now only two games back of the Tigers with today’s game yet to be completed.  As I write this, Twins are leading the Tigers 1-0 in the second inning.

I had given the Twins up for dead, particularly once they lost Justin Morneau to a lower back fracture, but they’ve proved me wrong.  The late-season trades the Twins made for Orlando Cabrera, Carl Pavano and Jon Rauch finally seem to be paying off, and the Tigers have picked the right time (for the Twins at least) to go into the tank, losing seven of their last ten.

If nothing else, this weekend’s box office will probably cover the additional salary the Twins took on to make a run.  The Twins drew just over 76,000 for the first two games of this weekend series, and there’s a good chance that today’s attendance will be over 40,000, like Saturday’s was.

A big part of the reason for the Twins to trade young talent for veterans around and after the July 31 trade deadline was to show the Twins star players, particularly Joe Mauer, and the Twins fan base that that management was serious about winning.  They’ve done so, and it looks like management will be rewarded by higher attendance.  The Twins are currently 15th in MLB in average daily attendance, which is pretty good when you consider the market they play in and their home stadium (still the god-awful Metrodome in its last season as a baseball park — the new Target Field opens in 2010.)

As with the Giants in 1999, it is important for the Twins to play well this year, to add to the hype of moving into a new, better, smaller (and certainly more expensive in terms of ticket prices) ballpark.  Target Field will only seat 40,000, 15,000 less than the Metrodome, but at this point in the development of the modern new ballparks, it should be virtually certain that Target Field will be as much nicer than the Metrodome, as AT&T Park is nicer than Candlestick.

The Twins will likely sell out every game at the new park in 2010, especially if they stay in this year’s race until at least the final week of the season.  It would be a wise move for the Twins to spend much more money this off-season than they usually do, to try to fill their holes in their pitching staff and in the middle infield.  Nothing generates revenue in major league baseball like on-field success, and if the Twins can be legitimate play-off contenders coming into their first season in a great new park, they may be able to put a string of successful seasons together the way the Giants and the Indians did when they moved into their new ballparks.  The Twins should certainly have much higher revenues the next few years with which to put winning teams on the field.