Winless record sends message: Don't buy into Twins

The Twins sold 3,223,640 tickets with a 94-win team in their first season in Target Field in 2010. The masses returned and the Twins sold 3,168,107 tickets with a 63-win team in 2011.

There is nothing more off-putting in major professional sports than a bad baseball team. If you're a sports consumer, the futility is in your face for 6.23 games per week for 26 weeks.

Even in new ballparks, honeymoons don't last for bad baseball teams, particularly in a market with such spotty support for its ballclub as this one.

The Twins won 66 games in 2012 and the tickets sold fell to 2,776,354. They won 66 again in 2013 and fell to 2,447,644. They won 70 in 2014 and fell to 2,250,606.

Season tickets were dropping by 3,000 to 4,000 per year and had fallen into the 13,000s for 2015. Forecasts were for another 90-loss season and another precipitous drop in attendance.

And then the Twins rallied from a poor start with a 20-7 record in May and stayed in the wild-card race until the last weekend. There was also excitement created with the arrival of Miguel Sano, the ballyhooed power hitter.

This time, with an 83-79 record in Paul Molitor's first season as manager, the attendance drop leveled off at 2,220,054. When you consider there was a drop of 300,000 individual tickets attached to season sales, many more people bought tickets to the Twins last summer than in the prior year.

There was enough optimism over the winter to end the annual fall in season tickets. There was also enough skepticism that positive reports from spring training (some authored here) were not greeted with universal approval by the team's followers.

Conclusion:

This was one of those years when the sports consumers were hopeful, but they also were going to wait to detect a trend before deciding whether to buy in on the Twins.

Seven games in, the trend has been horrendous, and odds are, we'll find out for the remainder of the opening homestand that the buy-in was as soft as the North Dakota oil boom.

A year ago, the Twins wanted to make sure of a sellout for the home opener, so they came up with an impressive giveaway: 30,000 blue sweatshirts.

The feedback was positive and the Twins did it again with 30,000 red sweatshirts for Monday's opener. This turned Target Field into a sea of red, as the patrons used the freebies as an outer cover against a game-time temperature of 42 degrees with the wind blowing at more than 20 miles per hour.

The Twins were 1-5 when they arrived at Target Field for the 2015 opener. Those were the good old days for Molitor. This time, the Twins were 0-6 after being swept in Baltimore and Kansas City.

And this was the trend that appeared to be developing: The Twins had the misfortune of playing teams better than them.

Baltimore was better, with Darren O'Day and Zack Britton to settle the issue in late innings. The World Series champs from Kansas City were better in only three areas: pitching, hitting and fielding.

The home opener would be the test. The White Sox were the opponents, and they did much to make Molitor's first season a winning one — going 6-13 against the Twins.

Both teams were dealing with lost clubhouse leaders: Torii Hunter for the Twins and Drake LaRoche for the White Sox.

The Twins have three players new to the organization on the roster: Byung Ho Park, the DH from South Korea; catcher John Ryan Murphy, and reliever Fernando Abad. The White Sox remodeled with a new infield of Todd Frazier, Jimmy Rollins and Brett Lawrie, catchers Dioner Navarro and Alex Avila and starter Mat Latos.

Sad to report, the first hint was strong that the White Sox could be another opponent that offers the Twins that small problem of playing against a better club.

The White Sox improved to 5-2 and pushed the Twins to 0-7 with a 4-1 victory. The way the Twins are swinging the bats, those four runs seemed as out of reach as a 10-spot.

The Twins had a season-low seven strikeouts. Unfortunately, they had six hits, and only Trevor Plouffe's double for extra bases. The Twins have had a higher strikeout total than base-hit total in all seven games.

Park's debut in Target Field proved so futile (two strikeouts and a pop foul) that Molitor sent up Eduardo Nunez as a pinch hitter against closer David Robertson in the ninth.

Admittedly, it was cold, the Twins and their new slugger were again futile at the plate, and the home team has fallen a full game behind its torrid 1-6 pace of last season.

It wasn't all bad as openers go, though. The new drinking areas in straightaway center field seemed very popular with thirsty customers in their red freebies, so there was that.

Patrick Reusse can be heard 3-6 p.m. weekdays on AM-1500.