Chris Hanel has only been to a few Major League Baseball games in person and hasn’t been able to watch his favorite team on TV in years because he doesn’t live in Minnesota.
But you can tell he’s a Twins fan because who else but a Twins would do it: Make a nearly two-hour documentary about the franchise’s record-setting 18-game postseason losing streak, complete with some truly mind-boggling mathematical possibilities, 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 carried into Tuesday’s Wild Card opener against Toronto, found that if we peak their chances of winning in every game — which is sometimes 90% or higher even in the games they end up losing — the odds of them losing each of them instead are this: 69 billion to 1.
And yet he told you they had a chance to win?
He actually was, 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 kicking them while they’re at it,” 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 has painstakingly documented all the grief over the years, gathering video and statistical evidence from Game 2 against the Yankees in the 2004 ALDS to the sweep at the hands of the Astros in 2020 , there is an attempt to lift.
His earliest memory with the Twins set him on the right track: 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 on top of that, there’s a new way of looking at the streak: It’s almost impossible to understand that it exists, and therefore it’s destined to end.
“The statistics and all 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 especially in the conclusions and what yet,” Hanel said of a video that has already been viewed 38,000 times since it was released on YouTube last week. “It’s a hopeful story and seeing people go away from that feeling like this is the year, that I can tell this story of heartbreak for two hours and then people walk out from this excited for the postseason, I got my job done.”