Dog Days

It’s been a mighty strange season, and I’m frankly exhausted. It obviously doesn’t take a whole lot of psychic energy to follow a genuinely good team. That’s probably not true, though, at least strictly speaking; to really follow any baseball team, day in and day out, takes a tremendous amount of psychic energy. It’s a huge investment of time, attention, and emotion.

I guess what I’m trying to say, however, is that a good team more consistently rewards you for that time and attention, and the emotional reserves get replenished on a regular basis, allowing you to hang tough through the inevitable disappointments and occasional small heartbreaks.

I’ve also always felt that a truly lousy team can be oddly satisfying in its own way. Expectations are diminished, futility is almost masochistically entertaining when it’s sustained, and you can sort of sit back, absorb the regular blows, and focus on the peripheral pleasures of baseball: the atmosphere, the development of young players, the incredible athleticism of even marginal stars, and the inning-by-inning, pitch-by-pitch dramas and decisions that make up every game. I’ve always contended that the teams with the most knowledgeable and loyal fans are the teams that have endured stretches of true futility.

A team like this year’s version of the Twins, though? A decent team with a core group of excellent players, a promising batch of young pitchers, and absolutely no depth? A team that is distinguished by nothing so much as it’s maddeningly consistent inconsistency? This is the sort of team that kills you.

I mean, you can bitch until you’re blue in the face about a shitty team and the sorts of complete organizational overhaul that would be necessary to make it competitive again, but real hope is so unrealistic and the malaise tends to be so general in such cases that it’s pointless to even have discussions of the sort we’ve been having all spring and summer this year. Back in the mid-90s nobody would have wasted any breath pining for the acquisition of somebody like Ty Wigginton, or crossing their fingers that the return of Rondell White could make any sort of a difference.

I suppose you could argue that those discussions and hopes were just as pointless this year, but that’s part of the frustration of a team like the 2007 Twins; all we can do is strap ourselves into the slow-motion roller coaster and bitch and suffer as we lurch up and down and yet somehow still manage to go nowhere. It’s a rare and queasy experience that can make you feel like you’re riding a roller coaster and treading water at the same time.

Since the All Star break the Twins have been one solid, sustained stretch away from surging right back into contention in the Central, but they haven’t had one solid, consistent surge in them. And as the Tigers and Indians have done everything in their power to make the division a three-team race, the Twins have been utterly unable to hold up their end of the deal.

And that’s been nothing but frustrating.