No Mas

Okay, honest to God, that’s just about enough of this nonsense. I believe we’ve reached the point where the bump in the road has officially turned into a rut, and it’s damn hard to explain what’s happening to this team right now.

This is one of those times where you could point your finger in just about any direction in the Minnesota clubhouse and you’d be looking at somebody deserving of a share of the blame for this stretch of sustained wretchedness. It’s especially painful to be reminded of what a miserable game and utter waste of time baseball can be.

Under the happiest of circumstances baseball requires a ridiculous time commitment from the serious fan –a game like tonight’s, for instance: let’s say you got down to the Dome at five o’clock for the virtuous Admission Possible picnic; then you sat through nine excruciating innings in which the Twins managed just five hits and two runs against Detroit’s Jeremy Bonderman, and Kyle Lohse got the snot knocked out of him by the Tigers.

It was an ugly game all around, a well-rounded exercise in futility, yet dispatched in a mercifully brief two hours and thirty-eight minutes. Still, that’s almost five hours carved out of your life right there. By the time you got to your car, negotiated your way out of downtown, and got home it was probably 10:30. Presumably you worked today as well, and it was a weeknight.

If you’re a serious fan, though, you likely tuned into Baseball Tonight or checked out the internet when you got home to see how the White Sox did (they won again, of course, behind another splendid performance from Jon Garland, stretching their lead in the Central to a truly dispiriting nine games).

So: You just buried seven or eight hours of your day in a hole in the ground; you’ll never get a single minute of any of those hours back, and, with the exception of the pleasant and inspiring prelude of the Admission Possible event, you don’t have a single fond memory to show for your evening.

You can’t even begin to imagine how exhausting this sort of thing must be for the players, who got to the ballpark hours before you did and had to drive home through deserted streets long after you departed. You’d think, though, that it must be very exhausting.

And you certainly hope they’re as tired of it as you are.