Ain't That A Damn Fine Idea?

A genius to me is somebody who does something wonderful I can’t begin to comprehend, and with his latest virtuous and ambitious enterprise John Bonnes (a.k.a. Twins Geek) fits the bill. If you’ve been reading John’s blog over the last few seasons you know that he’s among the more balanced and rational of the baseball obsessives holding court in cyberspace (and, believe me, that’s saying something). He offers up the macro, the micro, and pretty much everything in between, and you always have the sense of a real, rounded, breathing person behind his posts –an actual guy with a life who nonetheless needs to get a life, in other words, instead of just a guy who needs to get a life.

Twins Geek, like most of the other team-related sites, was clearly started as a labor of love, an act of faith conceived in isolation and tossed out into the void. To his credit, John has a good deal more savvy, technical wherewithal, and just plain doggedness than most of us –or at least certainly more than I’ll ever have– and he’s managed to build a fine franchise over there at the Geek. Now he’s taking the whole thing a big leap forward, turning his perfectly fine single-family home into a flophouse for all manner of Twins-obsessed riffraff.

I have absolutely no idea how John’s new thing works. I haven’t figured it out yet, and it may take me a while. What it appears to be, though, or aspires to be, is a baseball blog built along the community ownership model, and what could be better than that? Anyone who wants gets to claim a bit of real estate in Twins Territory, a soap box of their own to ramble and rant and reason to their heart’s content.

God knows, this could all end up being a terribly entertaining nightmare, a literal cyberspace version of Baseball Babel. It could also turn out to be a sort of ultimate Utopian democracy, an ideal straight out of Bart Giamatti’s Yale wet dreams. Whatever it’ll be, it’s for damn sure going to be fun to watch. Check it out, and let John know what you think.