The San Francisco Giants and Minnesota Twins open their final series of the season on Monday at Oracle Park, a three-game set that lands in the last week of the year with little at stake beyond pride, evaluation and the record books. The Giants are 64-92. The Twins are 73-83.
For readers searching Twins Vs Giants now, the draw is the schedule itself: Monday and Tuesday at 6:45pm PT, then Wednesday at 12:45pm PT, all at Oracle Park in San Francisco, California, with no national broadcasts listed. Blade Tidwell is set to start Monday for the Giants against Zebby Matthews for the Twins, Anthony Molina is lined up Tuesday against Taj Bradley, and Cesar Perdomo is listed for Wednesday against a TBD Twins starter.
Tom Pohlad looms over the series because the season has been such a hard turn from expectation to aftermath. In the offseason, he called season ticketholders and asked them to stick around, a plea that sounds different now that the Twins have fallen to 73-83 after being 56-55 and only 3 games out of the AL Central lead by the end of July. They have lost 7 of 9, Byron Buxton has been lost to injury once again, and the club that still had a path in midsummer has spent the closing stretch looking like one that ran out of answers.
The numbers explain why the matchup feels like a clean ending and not just another set of games. The Twins have been poor on the road at 33-45, while the Giants are 36-39 away from home, and both clubs have had defenses that hurt them all season. The Giants are 23rd in MLB at minus-34.5 Defensive Runs Above Average, and the Twins are 25th at minus-38.4. Jung Hoo Lee has 31 doubles this year after 31 last year, while Kody Clemens has 26 home runs, 14 of them on the road, but those isolated performances have not changed the larger story of two teams that have spent much of September trying to get to the finish line.
That is what gives the final week its edge. The Twins are supposed to be the cautionary tale, because a team that was in the race in late July has ended up in this kind of shape, while the Giants are closing a season that never found the consistency to match the hope that followed their earlier contention window. The schedule says Tuesday and Wednesday are next, but the more revealing answer is already here: these are not clubs meeting for a statement series, only for the last few innings of a long disappointment.
