Early in my adolescence I played baseball one summer on a traveling team with this fat kid from a smaller town fifteen miles from the place where I grew up. I swear, this guy was the funniest, most bitterly cynical fourteen-year-old on the planet. He was also the best hitter I ever played with or against, just a monster who could spray the ball all over the field and hit homeruns with ease in every tiny youth league park around southern Minnesota. He couldn’t run for shit, of course, and wasn’t much in the field, but he played a serviceable first base for our team and more than made up for any defensive lapses with his bat. If I remember correctly this kid drove in something like seventy percent of our runs that summer, and hit more homeruns than the rest of the team combined.
He ended up playing high school ball in his tiny hometown of Blooming Void, and had a career that was the stuff of local legend. I suppose because he was fat and not much of a student he apparently didn’t get any scholarship offers to four-year colleges, and ended up playing two years for a junior college in Kansas. That JC had a reputation of being a sort of farm club for major college programs, and he easily led his team in every major offensive category in both his seasons in Kansas. A half dozen guys from his team went on to play Division One baseball, but that was the end of the line for him.
He went back to Blooming Void and worked at his old man’s hardware store. I’d always followed his career with interest, and would regularly hear about his exploits through the grapevine or in the pages of the local newspaper, but once he hung it up I pretty much lost track of him.
Five years later, though, I bumped into him at a Twins game at the Dome, and we started hanging out a bit and eventually ended up working together in a downtown parking ramp, where we had many a ferocious Whiffle Ball battle on the top level after hours.
By that point he had been transformed into Uncle Jumbo, a name that had allegedly been conferred upon him by his nephews. As the story went, when one of the nephews was a tot he’d misunderstood Jimbo as Jumbo, and the name stuck. It didn’t seem to bother Jumbo in the least, and he adopted it with enthusiasm.
Jumbo was the worst person in the world to watch a baseball game with. He was a perfectionist, naturally belligerent, and a prodigious beer drinker, which was a terrible and combustible combination for a fan of any sport, but particularly dangerous for a baseball fan. He couldn’t accept the fact that even the best teams would lose fifty or sixty games in a season; this seemed to him a wholly unreasonable definition of success, and thus he found the game brutal and punishing. Every single loss, and an overwhelming majority of the victories, left him bitter and preoccupied.
Jumbo was nonetheless a glutton for punishment, and a perfect specimen of a baseball masochist. He allowed the sport to ruin his prospects in life, refusing to consider any job that would not allow him to absorb every inning of every game of every season, whether in person, on the television, or via the radio. This flexibility was his sole criteria for suitable employment, and thus he was limited to a series of stationary, dead-ass jobs, mostly in parking ramp booths or security desks. When I again lost track of him he had allowed his phone to be disconnected and was washing dishes in the kitchen of a dive bar in south Minneapolis.
Then, unexpectedly in the late-nineties I started seeing Jumbo’s byline in a weekly publication called Minnesota SportsPage, where he documented with often appalling candor the extent to which baseball was ruining his life. Those were very dark years for Twins fans, and Jumbo’s ruminations were frequently apoplectic, virtually always irrational, and often painful to read. They were also somehow grimly entertaining, perhaps because I knew the man and understood on some level the extent of his dark obsession.
Eventually Jumbo got the gate at Sportspage, and settled back into the life of the anonymous and unhappy fan. I found him again recently, working the night security desk at the office building where my wife is employed, and we’ve been going back and forth for a couple months trying to reach an agreement that would have him contributing a column here at Warning Track Power once a week.
I’m happy to say that the deal has finally been struck: an official Spalding stickball bat, a well-worn Boog Powell Rawlings Trapper first baseman’s mitt, a signed copy of Tony Oliva’s autobiography, a roll of Copenhagen, and a sealed DVD of Tawny Kitaen’s The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik Yak, in exchange for one season’s worth of Jumbo columns.
Jumbo has assured me that he’ll be good to go by next Friday, and in the meantime I’ll post one of his original, early columns (from opening day, 1996) by way of an introduction. I’ll also have my own season preview sometime tomorrow.
Uncomfortable admissions have long been one of my specialties, so here’s a whopper: I once wore a toga emblazoned with Lenny Faedo’s number to a Twins opener. I’m not sure what I was thinking, but in those days I was convinced that my one real shot at acquiring self-esteem and some kind of identity was to become a ballpark character, one of those guys –and they are almost always fat –who leads cheers from the top of the dugout. I had a little bit of nerve in those days, coupled with a pretty serious drinking problem.
The first time I got hit with a well thrown Frosty Malt though, my nerve evaporated and I assumed my place in the rolls of the large and anonymous. In Minnesota, of course, any show of public enthusiasm is grounds enough for a drunk and disorderly citation.
It still chaps my ass that the symbol of the rapturous Minnesotan will forever be that ridiculous Homer Hanky. That whole phenomenon really bothered me. It struck me as so –and I’m going to use a potentially objectionable old junior high school adjective here– femmy. You know? 50,000 people bouncing up and down on the edge of their seats and waving handkerchiefs, for chrissakes. If Western movies taught me anything it was that waving handkerchiefs was how gals said goodbye when their men rode out of Dodge or went off to war or just plain got the hell out of town. It was, like, a school marm thing.
I wasn’t gonna get caught dead waving a handkerchief. But I did, of course; I waved the hanky, along with all the rest of the idiots. And to this day that’s the only thing about that entire season that I feel really lousy about. Well, that, actually, and the fact that I got so stinking drunk on 3.2 beer during the first game of the playoffs that I threw up in a Metrodome concourse, something I swear to God will never happen again.
Remember Lombo, though? Remember that scrawny little bastard running around and waving that towel? That also chapped my ass. Another obvious lesson from the Westerns, right? Waving the white towel is the universally accepted form of surrender. I mean, come on, moron, you just won the World Series; is it too much too ask that you comport yourself in an appropriately masculine manner?
I’M NOT A BIG FAN of life’s great moments. Birthday’s are right up there with stepping on the scale for me, and I would skip my own wedding if I could somehow pull it off. A wedding, I mean, you know, finding someone who would marry me. Nonetheless, opening day is the only calendar occasion I still observe with anything resembling religious devotion. I never miss opening day. I once quit a job so that I could be in attendance on opening day – granted, it was a job at Arby’s, but still. For years I would sit at home and drink like crazy before the opener, but I’ve mellowed quite a bit with age, and the last few years I’ve had a few beers at home and then gone to Baker’s Square for a pie. It’s not much as far as traditions go, but what the hell? It works for me.
