If the Minnesota Twins are good at one thing – and, if the last two games are any indication, they have more than one thing going for them – it’s a remarkable exploitation of every single flaw in the current model White Sox.

Rest assured no one’s jumping out the windows of the 35th Street office, but in all honesty who among Sox starters was going to win a game? Who, in that entire rotation, would you have pointed to and said “This is the guy to right the ship. This is the guy the Sox can win behind when they need to.” And tonight he actually did alright, save for one non-special inning turning into the one biggest inning of them all. One in the first, two in the second, game over.

Going into this series, you could feel a certain confidence in the air among the White Sox faithful. Now, we thought, they were going to get serious. All that fundamentally sound, well-balanced business the current Sox regime has been preaching is going to win this against the soundest squad of them all. It’s over, we thought. Start printing those playoff tickets. The Twins were going to lose at their own game.

And now here we sit, four Dewayne Wise-stranded runners later wondering just how this is all going to shake out. The kid pitches tomorrow; after that, the two most ruined teams in the division stand to revel in a gleeful crushing of South Side dreams while those damned Twins head south to massacre another Royals squad that got lost on its way to the middle of the pack. Either this ends poorly, or this ends tomorrow.

The Twins have now shown – repeatedly – that the way to beat the Sox is to simply play. Take the extra base. Hit the cutoff man. Swing for something besides the fences. Run on weak arms. Pitch to contact and let the defense do their job. You could say the ump’s blown call made the difference but let’s be serious: that game didn’t come down to one call. That game, this series, the whole entire season, came down to a clash of softball and smallball, of bark and of bite, of domes and of disasters.

Is the season over? No, not quite. But it’s funny how quickly Tuesday evening’s all-knowing smirk can become Thursday morning’s shredded fingernails.