Everybody seems to have a blog these days. Your angry libertarian neighbor probably has one, not to mention the cat hoarder across the street, and the tortured teenage poet up the block. In the public mind, unfortunately, the excitable political bloggers tend to be regarded as representative—or perhaps symptomatic—of the whole phenomenon, and they certainly hog the media attention and the traffic. That’s a shame, because there are all sorts of other blog niches—literature and music, for instance—where the spirit of the enterprise takes on the quality of a lively and civilized dinner party conversation, rather than the cacophony of Babel.
In Minnesota, there has been an unusual proliferation of baseball blogs devoted to everything from the history of the game to hardcore statistical analysis to general Twins love.
In the Twin Cities, there are dozens of good baseball blogs and a number of excellent ones. A fascinating give-and-take has developed between the creators and readers of many of these sites, to the point where there now seems to exist a genuine symbiosis in which the various blogs feed off each other for traffic and fodder.
In a couple of notable cases, a real sense of community has been achieved. John Bonnes’s already successful Twins Geek site (www.twinsterritory.com), for instance, has evolved this season into a group blog in which readers are welcome to become members and create their own regular posts, or simply join in the fray through the comment threads.
Anne Ursu’s Batgirl (www.anneursu.com/batgirl) has in the last year become a true phenomenon that is generating the kind of traffic and reader enthusiasm that would be the envy of most political bloggers. Ursu is a Twin Cities writer (she has published two novels, Spilling Clarence and The Disapparation of James) and a lifelong Twins fan. With the help of her husband and her brother, Ursu launched Batgirl early last season. The site’s colorful logo, lively voice, and truth-in-advertising slogan, “Less Stats, More Sass,” quickly distinguished it from the prevailing boy’s-club vibe among local baseball blogs. Its unabashed enthusiasm for the Twins, along with an entertaining mix of imaginative prose, playful graphics (including Lego re-creations in lieu of a highlight reel), and interactive game threads have also garnered Batgirl a huge and fiercely loyal audience that is too large to be dismissed as a mere cult.
That audience includes Twins manager Ron Gardenhire and, apparently, the majority of the players in the clubhouse. The crowning achievement for the Batlings thus far has been the creation, earlier this season, of a short animated DVD starring Gardenhire and a handful of Twins, entitled “Oh Five, The Musical!” Gardenhire got his hands on a copy, allegedly called the team together, and showed the clip in the clubhouse to uproarious laughter, creating in the process the most high-profile legion of Batgirl fans to date.
On a recent Friday night, I talked Ursu into accompanying me to the Dome to see the Twins play the Angels. An acute observer of detail, she immediately took note of the World Series trophies on display in the Twins office, something I hadn’t noticed in nearly a half dozen years of trekking through there en route to the field and clubhouse. I am, of course, a Batgirl fan, and well aware of her loyal following, but I wasn’t prepared for the reception she received at the Dome that night. It was humbling, to say the least.
As we made our way through the bowels of the Metrodome to the field for batting practice, Ursu was greeted like a celebrity singer of the national anthem by virtually everybody I paused to introduce her to, from clubhouse legend Wayne Hattaway to the beat writers who cover the team for the papers and wires, and even the batboys.
As a rule, women are still seriously underrepresented in the press box at a baseball game, but Ursu settled in and held her own—it surely helped that the place was packed with Batgirl fans. Although she seemed to be sincerely thrilled to meet Andy Price, the Twins’ game-day ringmaster and the genius who invented Twingo (the fan participation game based on Bingo), she managed with considerable and obvious effort to avoid breaking the press-box interdiction against cheering.
After the game, which the Twins won 7-4 behind a gutsy performance from starter Carlos Silva, we ventured into the inner sanctum of the clubhouse. When Ursu was introduced to Gardenhire in his office, the Twins manager reacted with almost terrifying enthusiasm, and gave her a spontaneous bear hug. He followed us into the clubhouse, announced Batgirl’s presence to Joe Mays, Johan Santana, Terry Mulholland, and bench coach Steve Liddle, and even taunted Mulholland by singing the veteran lefthander’s single line from “Oh Five!”: “My life is over.” Mulholland looked at Ursu with a bemused expression and deadpanned, “What’s that all about?”
From that point on, everything else was pretty much a blur. I got bored as Ursu and Lew Ford yakked about video games for what seemed like fifteen minutes, and walked over to talk with Torii Hunter, who was nursing a giant ice pack on his knee. When I told Hunter that Batgirl was in the clubhouse, he went … well, batshit. He hobbled across the room and waited patiently as Ursu and Ford continued their conversation. When I finally got Ursu’s attention and she turned around to find Hunter standing there, her impressive composure wobbled noticeably for the first time. Hunter expressed his admiration, requested copies of the DVD, and gave her a hug.
“I’m sorry,” Ursu apologized to Hunter. “I swore I wasn’t going to be a gomer.”
“Oh, man, that’s all right,” Hunter laughed. “We’re all fans in this clubhouse.”—Brad Zellar
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