Uncle Jumbo's Playground

—illustration: James Dankert

All day I was looking forward to hustling home from my job as a lobby gnome at an office building downtown so I could settle into the couch to watch the Twins and Indians. Friday nights –like most other nights– are usually a clear, blank radar screen at Jumbo’s posh hovel, but that generally changes during the baseball season. I even stopped on my way home for some Taco Bell, a bag of red licorice, and a six-pack of Grain Belt.

But I’ll be good and damned if the TV bastards didn’t take the night off. Where’s Victory Sports when you need ’em? And where the hell does that leave me? I’ll tell you where it leaves me: pissed off and desperately in need of another six-pack (and another bag of licorice) by the end of the third inning.

I had to dust off the old man’s trusty Philco transistor radio; the tubes take a while to get warmed up, but once the thing gets crackling it’s like listening to a ballgame that’s being broadcast from a doomed spacecraft. Or, in this particular case, a ballgame being broadcast from a doomed spacecraft piloted by two raving idiots.

After hibernating all winter, joining the yahoo convergence at the Dome for the home opener was a difficult, if necessary, excursion. Thank God for Xanax, 3.2 beer, and the obsessive diversion of a scorecard. It takes me longer every year to get used to the sort of forced and wholly artificial camaraderie that exists at the ballpark. As far as I’m concerned 12,000 is a nice, comfortable attendance number; I like to be able to stake out a piece of private territory in left field, and the big crowds wear me out.

When the team’s going pretty good it’s hard to find things to bitch about. Actually, of course, it’s never really hard to find things to bitch about, but so far the Twins haven’t done a whole lot to chap my ass. All those first inning runs made me rant and rave like Charlie Callas, but if an opposing team’s going to score I’d rather have it happen in the early innings when the Twins still have a chance to recover. The runs in the eighth and ninth inning are the ones that kill you; those are the ones you carry home and take to bed with you, the ones that linger right into the next day like a hangover.

The damage baseball does over a long season is cumulative. When it comes in dribs and drabs like it has so far this year I can generally forget all about it. Granted, beer is mighty helpful in this regard. But as I’ve gotten older every victory is a salve that allows me to flush the defeats out of my system more quickly. I guess it’s that one-game-at-a-time business. I can’t hold grudges like I used to, at least during the season. I can, however, nurse a grudge –even a series of festering grudges– through the entire off-season.

I guess what I’m saying is: so far, so good, and those words don’t come easily to a guy like me. This early in the season, though, the damage hasn’t yet had a chance to do its steady, corrosive work. I’m still getting a feel for this team, and trying to be optimistic about how good they can be. We’re still in the honeymoon period. I’m just grateful to have that chunk of time accounted for every day. Even a night like this, a night that began in disappointment, is better than any single Friday night in mid-winter.

I’m fully aware, believe me, that there’s still a very good chance this team will have my ‘nads in a vise before the year is out, but it’s too early to start fretting about the perhaps inevitable pain that’s waiting for all of us down the road. For now, at least, even I can cling to something that feels almost like hope, if not outright optimism.

As I’ve been listening to the game –and it’s been a decent game so far– I’ve been intermittently standing before the mirror in my living room, fine-tuning my Whiffleball swing. I’m nothing to look at, I know that, particularly in my boxer shorts and Hudson Hawk tee-shirt, but I’m not looking at myself. I’m looking at my swing, analyzing it closely and with the utmost wonder and disembodied appreciation; I’m nursing a modest buzz, but even so, I’ll be damned if that swing isn’t still a pretty picture, a very pretty picture indeed.