John Shipley: Yes, Rocco Baldelli gets it. Twins need to be better in postseason.

There isn’t much one can say about the Twins’ recent inability to win a playoff game anymore, so perhaps the best thing to do is stand back and gape. And let’s be honest, “recent” isn’t a great modifier here. The Twins have lost a major league-record 18 straight playoff games, but that skid started 16 years ago.

Those losses are connected because they’re uninterrupted, but there are high school sophomores who weren’t born when Minnesota won Game 1 of the 2004 American League Division Series at Yankee Stadium. Since then it’s been 0-18, capped this time by a 3-1 loss to the Houston Astros at Target Field on Wednesday.

It’s astonishing and for the most part inexplicable.

“Every year, every team is very different (yet) our organization, we haven’t been successful in the playoffs lately, at all,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “And that is a reality for all of the fans and for everyone who follows the organization and cares about the Twins. I’m aware of it now.

“The day I showed up here in the Minnesota Twins organization, I had no idea that was even a thing. I didn’t know it existed.”

Most bad baseball teams win at least 60 games in a season, sometimes by accident, sometimes by misadventure, yet seven actually good Minnesota Twins teams have played 18 straight playoff games without even running into one.

The Twins entered the expanded 2020 postseason having won their second straight AL Central Division title, yet that team, by and large, is 0-5 in the playoffs. Last year’s team hit a major league-record 307 home runs before bowing out weakly to the New York Yankees in a three-game sweep; this one was bounced before most of the National League playoff teams had started Game 1, partly a vagary of eight first-round series in this expanded playoff format.

“It’s kind of weird we’re already out and some teams have yet to play a game,” reliever Tyler Duffey said. “It’s just a strange.”

The Twins managed to score two combined runs in two games against an Astros team that entered the playoffs with a 29-31 record. Having used his best pitchers in Tuesday’s 4-1 victory, Houston manager Dusty Baker threw rookie right-hander Jose Urquidy on Wednesday — and it didn’t matter.

Whether or not Urquidy becomes an all-star — and he looked like one while handcuffing the Twins for 4.2 innings Wednesday — he is now the answer to a trivia question one tipsy friend asks another at closing time. Right-hander Christian Javier earned the win with three hitless innings — in his major league debut.

There are probably a hundred small baseball plays that have added up to 18 playoff losses and no real overarching reason to explain it beyond the fact that the Twins, no matter who their players are, have not played well in the postseason. It’s not written in the stars, it’s written between the lines.

It’s not as if the Twins can’t win big games; you don’t win eight division titles in 17 years without winning big games. Their Game 163 victory over the Detroit Tigers to win the 2009 division title was a classic. Unfortunately, it’s also the ne plus ultra of Twins postseason baseball for a generation of Twins fans, probably because it technically wasn’t really a postseason game.

“That sting of today carries over into next year, and this time next year, hopefully we’re sitting in a different spot,” Duffey said.

It was a weird season, 60 games long because of the novel coronavirus pandemic. Teams played regional intrasquad schedules and there was a universal designated hitter for the first, although probably not last, time. Yet for Twins fans, it ended in familiar, if not entirely predictable, fashion.

Even those most hardened Twins fan believed this team was poised to end its postseason problems and perhaps even play in the World Series for the first time since 1991.

“At least we got to play baseball,” DH slugger Nelson Cruz said.

There is that.

This season and last, Baldelli was careful not to feed the beast on the postseason skid narrative, but after Wednesday he acknowledged it. He seemed surprised by the way the Twins bowed out this season.

“I hear about it from people who care about this team. And you know what? We want to do better,” he said. “We want to do better for ourselves, we want to do better for the organization, and want to do better for all the fans, too. I think all parties deserve that.”