I apologize for my unexcused absence, my silence, my disappearing act.
It’s been a long, weird summer, and the weirdness of my neurological life has been disturbingly mirrored by what’s happened to the Minnesota Twins. I can’t begin to explain any of the weirdness, can barely even be bothered to try anymore.
I think it’s probably best to chalk it up to an empirical blackout and leave it at that.
Good lord, though, if ever there was a stretch when I could have used a pick-me-up from the local baseball club it was the stretch I have recently been living through. And the truly discouraging thing about this season, and this summer, is that for as long as I can remember baseball has provided that pick-me-up, or at the very least a consistent and satisfying diversion through all manner of black patches and disoriented slumps.
That’s what the baseball season, in a nutshell, has always represented for me: a blessed time of orientation and order and routine. A period when I could provide a strict accounting for some portion of my days, and a clear, focused outlet for my obsessions.
I stumbled off the path at some point back in early July, at almost exactly the same time that the Twins stumbled off the path and strayed so far that it was clear –despite resolute denial on my part, and on the part of so many other fans– that they would never manage to find their way back.
Here’s the thing about baseball, which I continue to adore: a baseball team can be loveable and entertaining in so many different ways that it’s truly difficult to put a dog off its food (as Uncle Jumbo has described his recent reaction to this season). A genuinely lousy team can be supremely entertaining and worth rooting for almost precisely because of its futility. There have been many, many teams in Twins history that have been compelling to me almost solely because they have been so comically, hopelessly inept. It’s a classic dysfunctional, even abusive relationship.
Through the bleak years of the early 1980s I routinely went to thirty to fifty games a season at the Dome, this at a time when the average attendance often seemed to rival that of a Sunday service at a suburban mega-church, or even, on some afternoons, a meta-church. The atmosphere was, of course, far less reverent, befitting a congregation that believed in almost nothing except beer, a cheap refuge, and the inevitability of futility and disappointment. Those versions of the Twins offered a crash course in all manner of entry-level philosophy (stoicism and existentialism, most notably), and exposed glaring holes in the average die-hard fan’s hard-wired child psychology.
Still, I had a tremendous time at the ball park back then. Some of my all-time favorite Twins characters were a part of those teams, starting with manager Billy “Slick” Gardner. Those were also the years when we had our first look at the wave of players that would turn the long moribund franchise around and win the state’s first world championship in 1987: Kirby Puckett, Kent Hrbek, Frank Viola, Gary Gaetti, Tom Brunansky, Randy Bush, and Tim Laudner.
A game then felt almost like purely private theater, and there was no attempt on the part of Twins management –none whatsoever– to entertain or occupy the fans that did show up. There were no bobblehead giveaways, no kiss cam. Every once in awhile they might give away a shoe horn or a ruler.
Loving and intensely following a lousy team is perhaps the ultimate manifestation of true fan psychology. Nobody’s climbing on the bandwagon. There is no bandwagon.
A very good team, a team that delivers on promise and expectations, is also a wonderful, sustaining pleasure. Of course. As is a team that utterly confounds expectations by playing well above its expected level. We’ve seen all sorts of teams that fit that description, including the 2002 version of the Twins.
In truth, the only type of team that can utterly crush you as a fan is the team which enters the season with the highest expectations and proceeds to time and again confound those expectations in myriad and maddening ways. I can’t think of another team in Twins history that has ever carried such high expectations into a season, or dashed them so thoroughly, and so often, as has this team.
I feel almost as if the Twins have stolen hope from me crumb by crumb, every so often turning around and, in an effort to make nice, allowing me to lick one of my own offered crumbs from their sweaty palms, only to promptly grab me by the throat and force me to regurgitate every single one of those measley crumbs.
The hard thing to swallow about this season –besides all those crumbs of stale Dome Dog buns– is that this has not been a classically bad team. The pitching has been far too splendid to classify this as a team of abject futility. No, what this has been is a team of heart breakers and betrayers. It’s been a marriage in which one partner has been constant, and has worked hard to make the marriage work, while the other partner has dicked around and broken every promise it ever made.
That’s a very hard team to root for, and I have never had such a hard time rooting for a team, never felt such genuine frustration and anger in the wake of so many games.
There have been a lot of miserable games that left a lingering sour taste in my mouth this year, but yesterday was almost certainly the capper. It may have been the most shameful game in team history, as I believe a number of players openly acknowledged in its aftermath.
Everything the offense of this team has done wrong this season –and they have done so many, many things wrong– they managed to do wrong yesterday. Looking at the boxscore of the game is the closest you’re ever likely to come to staring at a mathematical impossibility made horrifyingly, irrationally real. You cannot make sense of a mathematical impossibility.
Runners in scoring position in eight of the nine innings. Sixteen base runners, thirteen hits, zero-for-ten with runners in scoring position; botched sacrifice bunts and stolen base attempts; double plays; runners at second and third with less than two outs left stranded.
Zero runs. Against the Kansas City Royals (43-88).
The fourth 1-0 game in the last three weeks.
And, in perhaps the ultimate indignity of the entire season, Denny Fucking Hocking scoring the winning run in the bottom of the ninth, with Terry “Moses” Mulholland on the mound.
Really, it’s almost more than a guy can bear.
I’m back, though. I’ve made my own way out of the woods, and I expect to be here the rest of the way, gargling bile and doing my damnest to extract a bit of ivory from a dog’s mouth.
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