The Rake Magazine

Author: Brad Zellar

  • Monday

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    Saturday afternoon I was approached outside my house by a down-on-his-luck character who told me he was trying to buy a used car over on Pillsbury Avenue and had found himself fifty bucks short. He’d taken the bus from St. Paul to look at this car, he explained. He’d just gotten a job in Maplewood and was starting on Monday. He was clearly desperate, and seemed almost frantic. If he didn’t get this car, he said, he would have no way to “drive backwards and forewords to work.”

    Backwards and forewords    . That, I thought, felt like the way I usually come and go from work every day.

    I’ll admit, though, that I was a bit skeptical, so I offered to walk over with him to check out the car, figuring this character would balk and that would be the end of that. He didn’t balk, however; if anything he responded with almost alarming enthusiasm to this offer, and we walked the several blocks to Pillsbury without much in the way of conversation passing between us.

    And sure enough, there it was, some kind of white, four-door family car in the garage of a townhouse.

    I found myself trying to negotiate with the car’s owner. Couldn’t he, I asked, do any better than $800? The man was emphatic. He had already agreed to shave the price down from $1000 to $800. He’d just listed the car on Wednesday, he said, and he was confident he would eventually find someone willing to pay his original asking price.

    The potential buyer and I walked down to the end of the driveway and talked things over. Did I think it was a good deal? he asked.

    I told him that he was unfortunately asking the wrong guy. It looked like a decent car, I said. He pulled a wad of rumpled cash from his pocket and counted it out. He was, in fact, $48 short.

    I gave the guy his fifty dollars so that he would have a car to drive backwards and forewords to work. “Long may she run,” I told him as I handed over the cash.

    I left the two guys to complete the transaction, but as I walked away down the sidewalk the buyer scurried after me and asked for my name and address. I wrote this information for him on an index card and handed it over.

    Easter afternoon I came home to find an envelope in my mailbox. The envelope contained two twenties, and twelve ones.

  • Yowza!

    I’m suddenly all in favor of giving Johan Santana all the extra time he needs between starts.

    Do you ever just pause for a moment and, out of sheer gratitude that this guy is pitching for the Minnesota Twins, show your teeth to whatever sort of god you might (or might not) believe in?

    You should.

    Both of Justin Morneau’s home runs this season, including today’s three-run shot off Sox rookie John Danks, have come against lefties. That’s not an aberration; last year Morneau hit .315 and launched 13 of his 34 home runs against left handers (.325 w/21 HRs vs right handers).

    Compare his righty-lefty splits with Cleveland’s Grady Sizemore (who hit just .214 with ten homers vs lefties in 2006 –compared with .329 and eighteen HRs vs right handers) or Chicago’s Jim Thome (.236 with six HRs vs southpaws, .321 w/36 HRs vs righties).

    Hell, Tom Kelly would platoon both those guys.

  • Ugly All Day

    Sure, a pat on the back to Carlos Silva. That was a decent outing all around, particularly given the conditions (even though I’d think such conditions could possibly be beneficial to a sinkerball pitcher like Silva, presuming that Silva still is a sinkerball pitcher). It would have been nice if he could have been a bit more efficient with his pitches and hung around longer than five innings, but given the hullabaloo about the guy even getting a spot in the rotation I think everybody has to be pretty happy about the Jackal’s 2007 debut.

    The Cuddyer base running gaff in the second (the Twins had the bases loaded with one out and Cuddyer started to trot home after Jason Tyner’s pop-out to short and was doubled off third) was an inexcusable brain cramp, but did anyone else wonder what Scott Ullger was doing on that play? I mean, shit, the third base coach is standing there maybe five or ten feet away; doesn’t he say something? Doesn’t he shout something? Shouldn’t he be talking to Cuddyer both before and after the pitch? It sure seems to me that he should have been. Otherwise what the hell is he out there for?

    Poor Ullger is off to a tough start, and he’s already making many fans nostalgic for the days of Al “Send ‘Em All Home” Newman.

    Who knows if the play ultimately had any effect on the game’s outcome; the Twins couldn’t do anything offensively against Javier Vazquez.

    Point of pride: At least none of the Twins were wearing those ridiculous hooded wet suits that were favored by a number of the White Sox.

    Finally, I’m starting to get a little nervous about Minnesota’s handling of Johan Santana this early in the season. Why all the concern about getting him extra rest?

  • What The Hell?

    You gotta be kidding me? They postponed the game in Chicago because the forecast was for “cold and blustery” weather? They made this decision in the late morning or early afternoon?

    I just checked three different reports and not one of them said anything about rain.

    Come on. It’s April. It’s the freaking Windy City. Bundle up and play ball.

    Pussies.

    Now how the hell am I supposed to piss away a Friday night? I guess I’ll just stumble around my apartment listening to T.Rex and gobbling microwave burritos and Swedish Fish.

  • Make That 'The Meal Deal'

    God almighty, did you see poor J.D. Durbin’s pitching line for the Diamondbacks last night? It was mind boggling: two-thirds of an inning pitched, seven hits, seven earned runs, and a walk (2007 ERA: 94.50).

    This wasn’t a mop-up performance, by the way; Arizona brought Durbin into the game in the eighth, trailing 4-2.

    It’s pretty sad, actually. This was a kid, after all, who gave himself the nickname “The Real Deal,” and he was the rare case of a professional athlete whose cockiness was so dorky it was charming.

    The Diamondbacks designated Durbin for assignment this morning, which means they have ten days to trade him, release him, or put him on waivers.

  • In Other Words

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    The giving of thanks: lip service is easy, but really feeling it, truly giving it away, expressing it from your heart, that’s more difficult.

    Where do you even start?

    Any fool with a roof over his head, a car to drive, a job that pays the bills, food in his cupboard and refrigerator, a sense of responsibility, a feeling of belonging, of having a family or a community or a tribe that depends on him and perhaps even loves him; who has a leg to stand on, shoes on his feet, a warm bed, clean underwear, hot water, a toilet that flushes, books to read, music to listen to, a chair to sit on, hands and feet and arms and legs and eyes and ears that still work, a cracked and compassionate heart, a brain that is still capable of manufacturing sense (even if only occasionally) and cooperates, however gracelessly, with his tongue and dispatches words to his fingers; any fool whose fingers can still grip a pen, who still has access to blank sheets or scraps of paper and who continues to feel compelled to say something; anybody, in other words, who has lived a good, long while on the planet and feels things ever stirring in his head and heart, any such person should spend at least half of whatever time he has left in the world saying nothing but thank you.

  • A Laugher, A Mess, A Pleasant Surprise

    Ugly game for Baltimore: six walks, eleven hits, three errors (should have been four); a horrendous start for Jared Wright, and an even more horrendous start for the Orioles, who started a season 0-3 for the first time since 1995. This team looked bad enough in this series to challenge the 1988 O’s, who lost their first 21 games and finished at 54-107.

    Ramon Ortiz was pretty damn good, but I don’t think anybody should get too excited until he faces a better lineup. Still, seven innings pitched, five hits, four strikeouts, and a walk isn’t too shabby, even if his ratio of ground balls (6) to fly balls (11) wasn’t exactly what you’d like to see from him. There were a bunch of pop-ups in there, though, so it wasn’t like Baltimore was hitting rockets all over the Dome.

    A nice series for the Minnesota bullpen: eight innings, four hits, seven strikeouts, three walks, no runs allowed, and a new baby (Joe Nathan’s wife, Lisa, gave birth to a baby girl named Riley Grace at 8:34 pm tonight at Fairview Southdale).

    I listened to this one on the radio, and hearing the Twins on KSTP just doesn’t seem right. Also, the reception over here in South Minneapolis is lousy. This is the first game I’ve heard since the Twins bolted from WCCO, and the whole package seemed sort of cheesy. It reminded me of growing up listening to Twins games on Austin’s KAUS. I don’t know; maybe that’s not such a bad thing after all.

  • Game Two

    I’m using some new-fangled technology to write this swill live from the Dome. I’m pretending to be a real writer, in other words.

    Some sort of big white creature –it appeared to be a dog, with a Target logo on its chest– threw out the first pitch. I guess I wasn’t aware that Target had a mascot, but I’m officially on record as being opposed to the idea of any sort of anthropomorphized creature, no matter how cuddly (or padded with corporate cash), throwing a baseball.

    Boof rolled through the first inning in impressive fashion, striking out two and throwing just eleven pitches, but he started to struggle with his control in the second, and gave up a couple runs in the third on a Melvin Mora home run, and an RBI single by Aubrey Huff. He had 81 pitches through four, despite which the Baltimore hitters inexplicably came out hacking in the fifth, and were retired on six pitches. They didn’t fare much better in the sixth, going down 1-2-3.

    That was it for Boof: six innings pitched, three hits, two runs, three walks, six strikouts, a home run, and a 2-2 game to turn over to the bullpen. I think the Twins would take that from any one of their starters every night of the week.

    [This from the scoreboard between innings: “Johnson Brothers: Proud Sponsors of the Foul Pole.”

    Okey dokey.]

    Baltimore starter Daniel Cabrera was 2-0 with a 2.13 in two starts against the Twins last year, and entering tonight’s game was 5-1 with a 3.25 ERA in seven career starts against Minnesota. This is a guy who is 31-31 (4.75) overall. He was pretty damn effective again tonight, but the Twins kept chipping away and finally went up 3-2 on Jason Bartlett’s 7th-inning RBI single, scoring pinch runner Jason Tyner (in the final innings of the game Minnesota’s seven, eight, and nine hitters were all Jasons), who had just nabbed second –one of five Minnesota stolen bases on the night.

    At which point I said to myself: Game over, I’d say.

    Game over. Neshek gets the win, Nathan notches his second save in as many games.

    See you tomorrow night.

  • Imagine That

    This just seems so wrong on so many different levels.

    I mean, seriously, what the hell?

  • One Down

    Well, other than a nine-pitch first inning Johan’s performance wasn’t exactly pretty, but it was more or less in keeping with the way he usually starts the season. Kind of a strange pitch selection in the early innings –Santana just kept pounding away with the fastball, and didn’t go to the change-up until the Orioles started teeing off on the heater. I suspect he recognized in the bullpen that he didn’t have good command of the change, and when he finally started mixing it in he was missing with it much of the time.

    Still, he was just good enough to keep his Dome streak alive: dating back to 8/1/05 Santana hasn’t lost at home, and in the 24 starts since his last home loss he is 17-0, 2.08 (169.0 ip, 39 er) with 182 strikeouts

    The key inning, of course, was the fifth; after the Twins scratched back to tie the game on a Jeff Cirillo single punched through the right side of the infield, Johan came out and worked only his second 1-2-3 inning of the game (thanks in large part to Rondell White’s splendid diving catch of Melvin Mora’s hooking drive down the left field line). The Twins then came back and scored three runs in the bottom half of the inning to put it away.

    Morneau had a very good, and very curious, game: an opposite field home run and two singles against a hard-throwing lefty; both times he had to run rather than trot, he was gunned down on the base paths –at home (in a play that included a collision with catcher Paul Bako) and at second– by Baltimore right fielder Nick Markakis, who trivia junkies should note was a member of the Greek national team at the 2004 Olympics.

    Check out Morneau’s career numbers against Oriole starter Erik Bedard: 8-14 (.871 BA) with two homers and eight RBIs. Fourteen of his last 35 home runs have come against lefties.

    The bullpen was, as usual, splendid: Three scoreless innings (Reyes, Crain, Rincon, and Nathan) with one hit and a couple walks.

    After Michael Cuddyer’s at bat in the fourth (a single), Bedard had thrown 46 pitches, and 17 of them had been to Cuddyer.

    Morneau and Hunter’s back-to-back shots in the second represented the first time in club history the Twins have had back-to-back home runs on opening day.

    Ceremonial first pitch: Brad Radke

    National Anthem: Paris Bennett, some American Idol finalist with Minnesota ties. Better, I say, than another (to me) anonymous warbler in a cowboy hat and tight jeans.

    They always seem to trot out the bald eagle and the giant flag for opening night, and Radke and his family led “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” during the 7th inning stretch.

    As expected there were also lots of fine video tributes to Herb Carneal, and a pre-game teaser on the anniversary of the 1987 championship team.

    The Cremation Society of Minnesota had a group in attendance, and Sid Hartman read the paper and indulged in his customary ice cream.

    Finally, the game clocked in at two hours and 56 minutes, which is about a half hour too long for a cranky old dog like me. It was a long-ass day, but bear with me; I should be rounding into mid-season form in a few weeks.

    Tomorrow: Boof vs. Oriole right hander Daniel Cabrera (6′ 9″, 269, according to the Baltimore media guide). Advantage: Boof.