Like they’ve done for the past six months, the Twins showed up to the ballpark on Saturday and prepared to play a baseball game. Only this one, for the first time since March, simply didn’t matter.

Their postseason fate was sealed a day earlier when they were eliminated from the wild card race. Saturday’s 9-2 loss at Target Field to the Baltimore Orioles only added a small insult to a much larger injury.

Zebby Matthews, a rookie who began the season at Class-A Advanced Cedar Rapids and was thrust into service due to an injury to Joe Ryan, could not contain the playoff-bound Orioles, giving up six runs in three innings.

It was part of a night in which the Orioles (90-71) scored in six of nine innings and the Twins (82-79), whose demise has in part come as their offense has tailed off, was silenced by Baltimore up until the ninth inning with two outs when Ryan Jeffers hit a two-run home run.

The loss was yet another in a string of them for a Twins team that reached a season-high 17 games above .500 on August 17 and has followed that by going 12-26.

In the aftermath of their elimination, as they grapple with the fact that they will be watching from home next week when the playoffs begin, the Twins are still trying to digest what went wrong.

“We’re in this spot where we have to spend the whole offseason thinking about this and looking for ways to make sure moving forward this doesn’t happen again,” shortstop Carlos Correa said.

The Twins searched for those answers during the season. They tried being patient in their approach to problem solving, manager Rocco Baldelli said. They tried more aggressive directions.

It didn’t matter.

“We tried several methods and that’s the part where, yeah, that will irk me,” Baldelli said. “That will continue to irk me and bother me because you always believe that there is an answer. You always believe that there is a path that could work. And in six weeks … the several paths that we went down, they all ended in the same place.”

There’s plenty of blame to go around, from ownership, which slashed payroll in the offseason, to the front office, to coaches and players.

Correa, the team’s highest-paid player and a leader in the clubhouse, tried to shoulder much of it himself after the shortstop missed much of the second half dealing with plantar fasciitis.

“If you have anybody to blame, blame me for going down for two months and not being part of the team,” Correa said. “I think that’s one of the main reasons.”

Injuries — not just to Correa — played a part. So did bullpen blowups. So did a rotation that put extra strain on the bullpen. So did the offense’s dramatic drop off. Royce Lewis, one of those who tailed off in the second half, said he “ran out of gas.”

A collapse like the Twins’ has so many different root causes, so many paths for leadership to investigate, dissect and try to understand what went wrong and how to best move forward.

Now that the season is almost over, that’s their next challenge.

“Whenever we (go) through the whole self-reflection, it’s not only on the field but off the field,” starter Pablo López said. “There’s going to be a lot of talk on what we could have done better.”