A season of ugliness for the Twins was looking particularly brutal just after 9 p.m. Tuesday. The team was already two hours into a rain delay — precipitation that was more than just a little sprinkle, as evidenced by the downpour and destruction of last night's storm — when the Twins said via Twitter that they anticipated a 9:50 p.m. start to the game.
Outrage from fans soon followed, from many different corners. Some of the best came from Tina Milone, the wife of Tommy Milone — Tuesday's starting pitcher — who is 38 weeks pregnant and was at the game. The prevailing theme from most fans can be summed up in this tweet:
But then a very strange thing happened: the night turned into a win for the Twins — both on the field and in the area of public relations. First, the rain did relent. The game did start at 9:50. And even though there were very few fans in the stands when the first pitch was thrown, the Twins announced right around the start of the game that anyone with tickets Tuesday night could exchange them for a future game, even though the game was being played.
Twitter replies immediately shifted to include words like "classy" and "awesome." And while for many fans the delay and bad weather meant they couldn't go to the game, others took advantage of the late start by taking in some impromptu baseball.
Tina Milone made the best of a bad situation and got to see Tommy pitch brilliantly. And anyone else who stayed up at the field or watched on TV saw one of the Twins' best games of the season — with massive contributions from young players Byron Buxton, Max Kepler, Miguel Sano and Kennys Vargas in an 11-4 victory.
Over in St. Paul, the Saints did much the same — offering refunds for fans and announcing people could just walk into the game for free after similarly starting late. If you went to the Adele concert, that would have been a pretty nice doubleheader — and a reminder that sometimes going off-script works out just fine.
