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Chris Hanel has only been to a handful of Major League Baseball games in person and wasn't able to watch his favorite team on TV for many years because he didn't live in Minnesota.
But you can tell he is a Twins fan because who else but a Twins would do this: Make a nearly two-hour documentary about the franchise's record-setting 18-game postseason losing streak, complete with some truly mind-boggling mathematical probabilities, and yet assert that in the end the story is truly one of optimism and hope?
Hanel, using win probability data from all 18 games, a streak the Twins of course carry into Tuesday's Wild Card opener against Toronto, found that if we take the peak of their chances to win every game — which was sometimes 90% or higher even in games they eventually lost — the odds that they would instead lose every single one of them is this: 69 billion to 1.
And yet he's telling you there's a chance they win?
Indeed he is, not only in the documentary but in a recent conversation for Monday's Special Daily Delivery Twins playoff preview podcast.
"It's not so much a kicking them while they're down," Hanel said from his home in Oregon. "It's about an exploration of how much I'm a fan of this team and how much I celebrate them despite everything that's happened in the postseason."
So even as Hanel painstakingly laid out in the documentary all the heartbreak over the years, compiling video and statistical evidence starting with Game 2 against the Yankees in the 2004 ALDS all the way through the sweep at the hands of the Astros in 2020, there was an attempt to uplift.
His earliest Twins memory put him on the right path: the 1987 World Series. Hanel grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, with Twins fans in his family and he was hooked. In the documentary there are tributes to Johan Santana and Joe Mauer. And more than that, there is a fresh way of looking at the streak: It's nearly impossible to fathom that it exists, and therefore it is destined to end.
"The stats and all of the graphs and everything is basically an excuse for me to dive into my emotional connection with this team, which is very strong and very optimistic and that especially in the conclusions and whatnot," Hanel said of a video that has already been watched 38,000 times since its release on YouTube last week. "It's a hopeful tale and to see people come away from that feeling like this is the year, that I can tell this story of heartbreak over two hours and then people come out of it being excited for the postseason, I have done my job."
