The Finish Line: The Black Bus With The Tinted Windows Is Waiting

Trust me, even when I go away, I’ve got nowhere else to go. I’m always around, a lurker in my own life.

The end of the baseball season is always a painful thing for an obsessive/compulsive man who is a complete slave to routine yet has very few habits –with the exception of bad habits– that would qualify as routines.

Baseball was invented for people like me, and when the carnival shuts down for the winter and the boxscores disappear from the morning newspaper, I’m left with…I’m left with…um…I’m honestly not sure. Extreme malnutrition, dodgy hygiene, darkness, and increasingly long stretches of paralysis. I likely won’t turn on the television again until April.

Was it a good season? I guess I’m not sure. It certainly wasn’t a particularly great year to be a Twins fan. In the next couple months, I suppose, some highlights and happy memories will surface through the murk, but mostly what I remember now is that sense of frustration and futility that seemed to get cranked tighter and tighter as the season dragged along to what in hindsight seems like its inevitable conclusion.

I began the season in a state of extreme denial. I always begin the season in a state of extreme denial. I was as grouchy as the next guy when the Twins hauled Sidney Ponson and Ramon Ortiz north in April, but I honestly believed a team with Johan Santana, Joe Mauer, Justin Morneau, Joe Nathan, and Torii Hunter would be able to play with anybody in the AL Central.

I was wrong, of course. I had a pretty good idea that Ponson and Ortiz would suck, and I had a pretty good idea that Nick Punto was probably not a perfect-world everyday second baseman. But I had no idea Joe Mauer was going to spend most of the year either injured or doing a sort of Brian Harper impersonation. I had no idea Justin Morneau’s power numbers would disappear in the second half. And I had no idea the contract status of Hunter and Santana would become such a lingering and maddening sideshow.

The truth, though, is that you never have a really good idea about much of anything. Baseball proves that virtually every year.

The postseason was both frustrating and oddly satisfying, starting right ouf of the blocks with the one-game Rockies/Padres playoff. I liked every one of the match-ups, but it was a shame to see so many quick series. The World Series pitted two very different teams that were both fun to watch and, more importantly, seened to genuinely enjoy playing the game.

The Red Sox were just scary, scary on so many levels, and every indication is that this is an organization –and a team– that is determined and capable of being scary good for years to come.

Now what?

No idea, really. The whole Hot Stove League thing has become little more than commentary and speculation surrounding the incredulous –and often horrifying– free agent cash scramble.

I think I’ll probably try to write about baseball books, or baseball and comic books, or baseball movies, or great names in baseball history –or just strange historical arcana related to the game.

I’ll try to write about something, even while I lurch along aboard the Black Bus, and squint hopefully through the tinted windshield for the first sign of spring sunlight on the horizon.

And I’ll remind myself of the words I speak aloud every year when the last out of the World Series is recorded: God help us all. May I still be sitting here come April.