The Rake Magazine

Month: July 2006

  • Consider Me Entertained. Consider Me Astonished.

    There have been so many amazing and gratifying things about the performance of the Twins over the last month. Most of them have been plenty well documented, but it’s still pretty mindblowing (and mindboggling) all the same.

    The truth, of course, is that the Twins really should have five All Stars –Francisco Liriano, Justin Morneau, and Joe Nathan should all be joining Joe Mauer and Johan Santana in Pittsburgh. Nathan is the only guy whose snub isn’t a complete injustice.

    And great as Mauer has been, and as wondrous as he is to watch, the offensive MVP of the team at this point has to be Morneau. It’s hard to argue with twenty-two homeruns and seventy-one runs batted in. I’m too lazy to dig around for the stats myself, but I’d love to see the number of his homeruns and RBI that have given the Twins the lead or come with two outs.

    Mauer, frankly, is something of a mystery to me. Maybe it’s just a fluke, or maybe he needs to be moved to somewhere else in the batting order, but I can’t for the life of me understand how a guy with a .391 batting average, .458 on base percentage, and .546 slugging percentage –hitting in the three hole every night– is fourth on the team in RBI and tied for fourth (with Morneau) in runs scored.

  • What Makes A Man Start Fires?

    hammer-2.jpg

    As a child he had been hesitant, self-conscious, and frightened of everything, all products of a certain persuasive calamity of the blood, an inbred insecurity that even the constant certainty that he was loved could not entirely vanquish.

    His response to this crippling insecurity was to act up, and in time, as he grew into a late and awkward adolescence, this acting up became a sort of method acting, which in turn morphed into real fearlessness, an indifferent and heedless brand of fearlessness that was often truly wreckless and dangerous in its manifestations.

    What was initially a public persona designed to attract attention, eventually became a fierce and private quest for oblivion, almost a desire to transcend his old childhood terrors and insecurities by pushing himself time and again to the brink of senselessness and extinction.

    Whenever he stopped moving or pumping chemicals into his body he was bored out of his mind.

    Somehow he managed to settle down, and allowed himself to be almost tamed. He learned how to be almost normal, or at least how to conduct himself as an almost normal human being, at which point he recognized the old hesitation, fear, and self-consciousness creeping back into his bored and exhausted brain.

    And that, of course, was when he once again became truly dangerous.

    figurine-soldier.jpg