None of Minnesota’s teams were in action on Monday evening, which gave me an extra day to catch up a little on the things that I missed - though it’s also true that, after last week’s action, it was a bit difficult to get excited to talk about Minnesota sports.

Just to recap: the Twins lost four in a row, including three in a row to the hapless Detroit Tigers, two of which saw them get shut out. Minnesota United went into Nashville for a Leagues Cup quarterfinal, and came out with the club’s first-ever 5-0 loss, a game that’s probably top five or top ten for their worst losses ever. The Lynx, starting a run of must-win games with an away game at bottom-of-the-league Indiana, lost by an astonishing 18 points in a game that wasn’t really even that close.

The Saints did win five in a row last week, so there’s that. And the Twins recovered the weekend by rebounding to win two out of three against Philadelphia. Over the past two and a half weeks, Minnesota is 1-6 against the AL Central and 7-2 against everybody else, which might be the best possible illustration of why fans are tearing their hair out this year.

Let’s start with the Lynx, whose frailties were on full display in a 91-73 loss to Indiana. Giving up 91 points to Indiana ought to be nearly impossible, but Kelsey Mitchell scored 24 for the Fever, Indiana grabbed 13 offensive rebounds - including five on one single possession in the second half, which will live long in the memory - and the home team outscored Minnesota 34-18 in the paint.

On the offensive side, Napheesa Collier and Diamond Miller combined for exactly two points in the first half. Collier got in foul trouble, couldn’t hit anything, and didn’t manage to score a point until halfway through the third. Miller had a bit of a third-quarter burst, but ended the game with only 11, and Kayla McBride - the third scorer on this squad - couldn’t pick up the slack, going 4-for-10 and scoring ten points.

When Collier, Miller, and McBride combine to shoot 11-for-34 from the floor, it’s pretty much always going to be a bad night for Minnesota. Rachel Banham made five threes off the bench, but it wasn’t nearly enough to bring the Lynx back into the game.

Minnesota had eight days off following the game - they don’t play again until Friday - which in no way means they’re sliding down the standings. The WNBA is pretty ridiculous this year. The two super-teams, Las Vegas and New York, are a combined 51-9 this year. Meanwhile, eight of the other ten teams are below .500.

I feel fairly comfortable in saying that if the Lynx can be the fourth or fifth seed in the playoffs, they have the potential of winning a playoff series. If they finish lower than that, and have to play Las Vegas, New York, or Connecticut, it’s unlikely that they’ll manage to win a single playoff game.

Speaking of games where everything goes wrong, it’s hard to find a game where more went wrong for MNUFC than in their 5-0 loss to Nashville.

DJ Taylor was sent off in the first half - a very soft foul, but once the referee called the foul, he was also duty-bound to send Taylor off, since the fullback was the last defender for the Loons - and from there, everything collapsed. Nashville scored twice before halftime, then three times in nine minutes in the second half, as the Minnesota defense - especially young fullback Ethan Bristow - adopted a “stand completely still, and maybe they’ll get confused” strategy that was not enough to fool the Nashville attack.

Minnesota famously lost 6-1 in their first MLS home game ever, and they have a few 5-1 and 4-0 losses on the books too, but this was their first 5-0 loss.

It can be tempting to write off the loss - it’s just the Leagues Cup, who cares - but there was plenty at stake in this one. Not only was there a berth in the semifinals, but the Loons would have had another home game, against Mexican powerhouse Monterrey. Not only that, but getting into the final four would have left Minnesota with an excellent chance of claiming one of the top three spots, which would have given them a berth in the CONCACAF Champions Cup.

They’ve never managed to get into a CONCACAF competition before. They lost the 2019 US Open Cup final, which (as it turned out) would have given them two years in the Champions League; they also lost in the MLS is Back semifinals in 2020, one game short of a chance to play for a Champions League berth.

Minnesota’s proud of their MLS playoff streak; they’re the only team in the Western Conference that’s made it into the postseason, four years in a row. Their stated goal is to make that five years in a row, something that should be fairly easy given that nine of the 14 teams in the West will make it this season. That said, it does feel that shooting for the Champions Cup - not just making the playoffs - should be more in line with this franchise’s goals.

The setup of the Triple-A International League is a little strange. There are divisions, but they don’t matter; the playoffs are between the first-half champions and the second-half champions, across the entire league. And so in a 20-team league, it can be hard to make up much ground in the standings, even when you win five games in a row like St. Paul did last week.

Anyway, the Saints are one of six teams that are within two games of the second-half league leaders, so they’re going to need to keep taking five of six and that sort of thing if they want to get into the playoffs this year.

It’s been good to see prospect Austin Martin starting to get hot at Triple-A. He’s played mostly second base this year, but also some left and center field, and after some struggles with the bat he’s picked things up in August. This month, he’s batting .393, and he’s walked ten times in 38 plate appearances for an astonishing .550 OBP. Throw in six stolen bases in seven attempts, and Martin is showing off what he can do.

Also raking this month is catcher Jair Camargo, who has four homers in eight games. Camargo fits right in with the rest of the Twins - he’s struck out 99 times in 258 at-bats this year, but has also hit 18 home runs and slugged .523. 18 homers ties a career high for him with more than a month to go, he’s only 24, he hits right-handed, and he’s reputed to be the best defensive catcher in the organization (he’s thrown out 31% of base-stealers this year). If he was in another organization, the Twins would happily trade Christian Vázquez for him, is all I’m saying.

On the pitching side, the debate has begun about whether Louie Varland should be replacing Dallas Keuchel’s moon balls in the Twins’ rotation. I lost track of Varland a little bit, partially because when he went back to St. Paul in June, he started by giving up five runs and six runs and not completing five innings in either start.

Since then, he’s been pretty good - a 3.64 ERA in July, with 32 strikeouts in 29.2 innings, and now two consecutive starts in August in which he’s given up zero earned runs.

Of course, Keuchel was even better at Triple-A - an 0.96 ERA in six starts, plus 24 strikeouts - and in two starts for the Twins, he’s struck out nobody and given up seven earned runs in 6.2 innings. So using Triple-A numbers in this discussion may not be particularly illustrative.

Finally, we come to the Twins, who are so weird that it can be hard to care on a daily basis. They either score eight runs or two runs in every game, and their pitching staff either allows three runs or ten runs, and so their results on any given day can be almost anything. They got outscored 14-13 in the Philadelphia series, and won two out of three because 13 of Philly’s runs were scored on Friday.

In some ways, that’s just baseball, I guess.

Baseball Reference has a stat called Wins Above Average, which is telling. Minnesota’s pitching staff has been 6.2 wins above average this year, tops in the majors by a considerable distance; second-place Boston is a full win behind. Meanwhile, the Twins’ position players have been 0.5 wins above average, good for 15th in the league.

As you might expect, the team’s payroll is inversely correlated to the player’s value. Carlos Correa? -0.3. Byron Buxton? -0.4. Ryan Jeffers? Leads the team at +1.6. Christian Vazquez? Last on the team at -1.1.

What a strange team. They need to win 20 of their final 42 games to finish above .500.

TODAY’S SLATE

TWINS vs Detroit, 6:40pm
SAINTS vs Indianapolis, 7:07pm

ON DECK

LYNX at Seattle, Friday
VIKINGS vs Tennessee, preseason, Saturday
LOONS at NYCFC, Sunday