12 October 2023
When he stood up to address his teammates after the Twins were eliminated from the playoffs on Wednesday night, Carlos Correa had multiple messages he wanted to get across to the assembled group.
Remember this feeling, he told his teammates, because you don’t want to feel this again. And also show up to spring training ready — they’ll be seeing more of the Houston Astros, and they need to be prepared to beat them.
“We’re going to compete against those guys again,” Correa said. “If you want to get to a World Series, you’ve got to beat that team. We’re going to prepare for that.”
With the 3-2 win over the Twins on Wednesday night at Target Field, the Astros advanced to the American League Championship Series for the seventh straight season. They’ve been to the World Series in four of those seasons and have won two rings. Simply put: The road to the World Series in the American League runs through Houston, as it has for the better part of a decade.
“We’re not that far from playing in the World Series,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “We’re playing against the best teams in baseball right now, doing a helluva job going out there, competing against them.”
While they didn’t win the series, it’s not that hard for the Twins to envision how the series could have turned out differently.
They had plenty of opportunities with runners in scoring position in Games 1 and 3 that they weren’t able to capitalize on. And the Twins were right in Game 4 until the end. A few timely hits could have easily flipped the outcome in the series.
“The gap isn’t too crazy,” Correa said, before noting he believed the Astros’ experience played a big role. “Now that some of our guys got their feet wet in postseason baseball, next year I feel like we’ll be a lot better, and I know the front office will put the right pieces together for us to go out there next year and go further, all the way.”
Correa has frequently compared this team to the 2015 Astros. That was the year he debuted and things started to come together for them, getting to the playoffs and then winning the Wild Card Game before falling in the ALDS.
This year, the Twins saw the emergence of rookies Royce Lewis, Edouard Julien and Matt Wallner. Other young players, like Ryan Jeffers, Alex Kirilloff and Bailey Ober took steps forward. Paired with veterans, like Correa, Pablo López and Byron Buxton, all of whom the Twins locked in long-term, and a bullpen that will mostly be back intact, there’s plenty for the Twins to like moving forward.
“It sucks, it hurts, but we know the core we’ve got in this locker room of us young guys that have done a lot this year and have improved and grown this year,” Jeffers said. “I think we’re upset, we’re frustrated but we’re excited to turn our sights to what we have in store for us.”
This was the team that vanquished postseason demons of years passed, that brought some October joy to a fanbase desperate to see the Twins find postseason succe.
Now, in order to move forward, they have another hurdle: an Astros team that has knocked them out of the playoffs in consecutive appearances (2023 and 2020).
“They’re going to be there year in and year out. They’ve shown that,” Jeffers said. “We’ve gotten over a lot of humps this year, this season that we needed to go over. Now we have a new hunger for October baseball. We’ll look internally and see how we can improve, what we can do to be better. But now we know what it is like to be here now.”
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