Category: Sports

All right, the Twins are now 1-5.

That’s not good. That changes things considerably on the attitude front around here. So I say –pledge or no pledge– let the bitching begin.

And it’s not just that the Twins are 1-5 that so offends, of course; it’s how they’ve played in going 1-5. Which is terrible, frankly: brutal, uninspired, lackluster, punchless (and punchdrunk), feckless…what the hell, you get the idea. You’ve probably been paying attention. You probably own a thesaurus.

Still, how about these apples: A team batting average of .225 and an on base percentage of .270. The whole freaking team has been playing like Luis Rivas, in other words –like Luis Rivas having a particularly bad week. Opponents, meanwhile, have been hammering Minnesota’s pitching to the tune of a .333 BA, .369 OBP, and .529 slugging percentage.

A team would be mighty damn happy to have one player with those sorts of stats, and the Twins have made the entire Toronto and Cleveland line-ups look like one mighty damn good player.

That won’t continue, certainly. That can’t continue. I’m still pretty confident the pitching will get much, much better. The offense, though, good lord, we can only hope that’s not another story, or rather the same old story we suffered through all last season.

I can’t listen to that story much longer. It’s a lousy story. It makes me jittery, then it makes me belligerent, and eventually it just makes me very, very sleepy.

SILVER LINING:

Two words: Francisco Liriano.

If you look at Liriano’s line from last year (23-and-two-thirds IP, 19 hits, 33 strikeouts, and seven walks), it’s hard to fathom how he ended up with a 5.70 ERA. Somehow the kid managed to give up four homers and fifteen runs, that’s how.

Looking at him now, you get the feeling that with a bit more time Liriano would have straightened out that ERA in a hurry. And unless you were just feeling contrary you’d also have to strongly suspect he’s going to end up in the Minnesota rotation, sooner rather than later.

The Twins are 1-3. So are the White Sox and the Yankees. The Detroit Tigers are 4-0.

Should we draw any conclusions from this information? We should not. Of course we should not. Surely there is not one among us who is that foolish or that rash.

I have promised myself that I will not bitch until at least late April, and that I will not panic until June.

Based on the very small sample size of the data at hand we can certainly say that the team’s pitching has been…well, it has been mostly shit. I have faith that it will get better, much better.

What choice do I have? It is early April, and this is a month of faith and promise, of potential and resurrection. For a baseball fan, April is delusion’s safe harbor.

I hope that this will not be construed as bitching, but like many other Twins fans I cannot understand the decision to send Jason Bartlett back to Rochester. It doesn’t make a lick of sense to me, but for the time being I will accept that decision, and I will accept Juan Castro at shortstop.

I’m also going to go out on a limb and express my modest support for Tony Batista, who does not look nearly so fat as advertised. I understand the grumbling about the man, and understand that he has a career on base percentage of .298. But I also find it somewhat impressive that Batista had 32 home runs and 110 RBI for the 2004 Montreal Expos, a team that went 67-95. He has hit thirty home runs three times in his Major League career (and forty homers once, in 2000, for Toronto) and driven in 100 in four seasons. His career slugging percentage is .458. He is allegedly only thirty-two years old, and is said to be a first-rate clubhouse character.

Yes, I suppose Batista will make a lot of outs. There are, though, plenty of other current Twins who have a history of making a lot of outs, and not many of them (none of them, in fact) have hit thirty home runs. Ever.

One of my all-time favorite Twins was Gary Gaetti. Gaetti made a lot of outs. He had a career OBP of .308. He also hit a shitload of home runs. Granted, Batista can’t play third base the way Gaetti could, not by a long shot, and that fact probably has a good deal to do with the fact that Juan Castro is now the team’s starting shortstop rather than Jason Bartlett.

Still, it’s early April, and I’m going to reserve judgment on Tony Batista. My earnest hope is that he will not be nearly so bad as so many people seem to hope he will be, and I can’t for the life of me understand why anyone would hope such a thing.

Sixteen hits, thirteen runs, three home runs, a grand slam, a nice recovery by Brad Radke, and a swell 2006 debut for Francisco Liriano.

Very encouraging, I’d say.

But this is what I really want to know: Rogers Centre? What the hell kind of name for a baseball park is that?

Seriously, that is just so wrong.

 

I guess this is really it, huh?

My God, it doesn’t seem possible.

One of my problems with baseball of late is that everything that could conceivably be said about the game in its past and present incarnations has already been said. I feel like I’ve said plenty myself, and the older I get the more I’m certain that I spend much of my time repeating myself.

But what the hell, I guess I’m back to repeat myself some more.

I think it was Tom Boswell –or maybe it was Tom Bosley, or possibly even James Boswell– who once said “Time begins on opening day.”

That’s utter hogwash, of course. For anybody who’s really helplessly conscripted to baseball, time ends on opening day. From here on out, right up until winter starts tearing down the autumn foliage (which generally and cruelly coincides with the precise moment when the last out is made in the last World Series game), my days are pretty much shot to shit.

I spent the winter trying my best not to even think about baseball (this was a first, at least since those lost adolescent years when I was too busy snorking into a bong to pay proper attention to hygiene, let alone professional sports). I was tired of steroids, whose presence in Major League clubhouses over the last decade was apparent to anyone with even compromised eyesight and half a brain. I was disgusted when the baseball establishment ignored this obvious reality as records were being obliterated and power numbers were going through the roof.

We all knew what was going on, of course, and why Bud Selig and the baseball establishment was pretending nothing was going on. Nobody wanted to acknowledge the presence of steroids and the effect they were having on the game for the obvious reason that baseball needed all those fireworks and all the attention they brought.

Because without Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds et al, Major League Baseball would have been in big, big trouble, and the Pooh-Bahs might have had to acknowledge the serious economic problems they were facing. Without all those home runs and all the money and attention they brought to the game, I’d have to imagine that an awful lot of those new stadiums –many of which will spend much of the coming season half empty– would never have gotten built.

I’m still sick to death of steroids and inflated offensive statistics and the ever escalating economic absurdities of the sport, but I’ve realized in the last few months that I still love baseball. I can’t help myself. Kirby Puckett died and I was shattered, but I was also reminded of how much pleasure –personal and, more importantly, communal pleasure– and real joy baseball has given me over the years. The game is hard-wired in my brain, and the moment the snow started disappearing from the city parks and the baseball fields –the baseball diamonds— started to emerge, I realized I was getting antsy.

One night a few weeks ago, without even quite realizing what I was doing, I found myself in the bookstore, standing in the checkout line with a pile of baseball annuals in my arms. I started picking up the newspaper again, and scanning the notes from the spring training camps.

Yesterday, as I read through the baseball previews in the Star Tribune and the New York Times, I recognized that I was genuinely excited. My hiatus from the game, which stretched back to sometime around last year’s all-star break, was good for me, but it’s time for me to take baseball back, to bring it back into my life.

I’m ready for another season to begin, ready for the old comfortable routines of box scores and evenings at the ballpark and Baseball Tonight, for road trips and radio broadcasts. And, as always, I’m fully prepared –well, perhaps not fully prepared– for the usual surprises and disappointments, and am holding out hope for more of the former than the latter.

I will also say this, as prelude to a whole bunch of other crazy and contradictory stuff I’ll eventually get around to saying: I think the Twins are going to be a pretty damn good baseball team. That might be wishful thinking, but there haven’t been a whole lot of years where I’ve even been willing to indulge in that sort of wishful thinking on opening day.

And from a purely personal standpoint, that’s as good a way as any to kick off another baseball season.

I recognize that it’s likely ridiculous to hope for anything resembling consistency from the Twins at this point, but that doesn’t, of course, stop me from hoping all the same.

And that –the continued, irrational investment of hope– is what makes a game like yesterday’s so damn frustrating. The two steps forward, five steps back routine has grown maddening in the extreme. So I must say that I, for one, was more than happy to hear about Carlos Silva popping off (and only in a place accustomed to relatively benign and even tranquil clubhouse chemistry could such a mild outburst of frustration be regarded as newsworthy, let alone as rocking the boat).

I’m sort of wishing at this point that there’d be a real air-clearing donnybrook to lively up this team (and give us all something truly interesting to write about for a change).

I will admit, though, that Brad Radke –being Brad Radke– openly pondering thoughts of suicide was pretty damn interesting as far as recent news about this team goes. It was also pretty seriously disturbing, even if you do happen to be familiar with Radke’s private headbanger reputation and taste for Metallica.

Which Twins would you most like to see square off and kick the snot out of each other right now? From among the characters in that clubhouse what would be your dream card, and how would you handicap it?

I’ll have to think some about that question myself. A couple years ago I would have automatically said Rick Reed and whomever was most likely to severely imperil his career, but right now it’s a tough question. I’m not really thinking about a pure mismatch at the moment; I’d much rather see a tough, closely-fought contest in which both combatants walk away with minor contusions and a grudging respect for each other.

Also, can you point to one sustained stretch all season where the Twins played consistently satisfying baseball? I know there were a couple of modest winning streaks, but if I recall correctly even those were marred by inefficient offense and the occasional uninspired effort.

Finally, consider this question, if you would: Is there one player, coach, or member of the organization that you could point to as most directly accountable for the frustrations of this team? Or maybe this one: Is there one game or series you could single out as the moment when you sensed the train starting to come off the tracks?

Certainly in recent years we have had more pleasant, more beneficent moments (i.e. Torii Hunter’s collision at home plate against Chicago a couple seasons ago, or Corey Koskie’s back-breaking homer versus Cleveland that salvaged the series, and the season, last year), but I’d be hard pressed to pin the malaise of 2005 on any one person or moment.

I’ll think about it, though, and I’ll make an effort to look. Because I’m sure somewhere back in the summer sprawled now behind us there is a place on the road where the Twins took a disastrous wrong turn.

Maybe it’s finally time that we all relaxed, kicked back, and found this sorry, sweet-and-sour spectacle of a season as amusing as it really is. Because it truly can’t get any funnier than what we saw tonight.

It’s not likely, in fact, that we’ll ever see anything quite like it again: a walk-off victory that featured nothing more than two bunts and two throwing errors. That’s not small ball, friends; that is what you call Little League heroics.

And I suppose I’d be remiss if I didn’t also add: another unrewarded gem from a starting pitcher and another night of futility at the plate, with a blown save thrown in for good measure.

Let’s be honest with each other: that game shouldn’t count.

I have wasted my life.

I apologize for my unexcused absence, my silence, my disappearing act.

It’s been a long, weird summer, and the weirdness of my neurological life has been disturbingly mirrored by what’s happened to the Minnesota Twins. I can’t begin to explain any of the weirdness, can barely even be bothered to try anymore.

I think it’s probably best to chalk it up to an empirical blackout and leave it at that.

Good lord, though, if ever there was a stretch when I could have used a pick-me-up from the local baseball club it was the stretch I have recently been living through. And the truly discouraging thing about this season, and this summer, is that for as long as I can remember baseball has provided that pick-me-up, or at the very least a consistent and satisfying diversion through all manner of black patches and disoriented slumps.

That’s what the baseball season, in a nutshell, has always represented for me: a blessed time of orientation and order and routine. A period when I could provide a strict accounting for some portion of my days, and a clear, focused outlet for my obsessions.

I stumbled off the path at some point back in early July, at almost exactly the same time that the Twins stumbled off the path and strayed so far that it was clear –despite resolute denial on my part, and on the part of so many other fans– that they would never manage to find their way back.

Here’s the thing about baseball, which I continue to adore: a baseball team can be loveable and entertaining in so many different ways that it’s truly difficult to put a dog off its food (as Uncle Jumbo has described his recent reaction to this season). A genuinely lousy team can be supremely entertaining and worth rooting for almost precisely because of its futility. There have been many, many teams in Twins history that have been compelling to me almost solely because they have been so comically, hopelessly inept. It’s a classic dysfunctional, even abusive relationship.

Through the bleak years of the early 1980s I routinely went to thirty to fifty games a season at the Dome, this at a time when the average attendance often seemed to rival that of a Sunday service at a suburban mega-church, or even, on some afternoons, a meta-church. The atmosphere was, of course, far less reverent, befitting a congregation that believed in almost nothing except beer, a cheap refuge, and the inevitability of futility and disappointment. Those versions of the Twins offered a crash course in all manner of entry-level philosophy (stoicism and existentialism, most notably), and exposed glaring holes in the average die-hard fan’s hard-wired child psychology.

Still, I had a tremendous time at the ball park back then. Some of my all-time favorite Twins characters were a part of those teams, starting with manager Billy “Slick” Gardner. Those were also the years when we had our first look at the wave of players that would turn the long moribund franchise around and win the state’s first world championship in 1987: Kirby Puckett, Kent Hrbek, Frank Viola, Gary Gaetti, Tom Brunansky, Randy Bush, and Tim Laudner.

A game then felt almost like purely private theater, and there was no attempt on the part of Twins management –none whatsoever– to entertain or occupy the fans that did show up. There were no bobblehead giveaways, no kiss cam. Every once in awhile they might give away a shoe horn or a ruler.

Loving and intensely following a lousy team is perhaps the ultimate manifestation of true fan psychology. Nobody’s climbing on the bandwagon. There is no bandwagon.

A very good team, a team that delivers on promise and expectations, is also a wonderful, sustaining pleasure. Of course. As is a team that utterly confounds expectations by playing well above its expected level. We’ve seen all sorts of teams that fit that description, including the 2002 version of the Twins.

In truth, the only type of team that can utterly crush you as a fan is the team which enters the season with the highest expectations and proceeds to time and again confound those expectations in myriad and maddening ways. I can’t think of another team in Twins history that has ever carried such high expectations into a season, or dashed them so thoroughly, and so often, as has this team.

I feel almost as if the Twins have stolen hope from me crumb by crumb, every so often turning around and, in an effort to make nice, allowing me to lick one of my own offered crumbs from their sweaty palms, only to promptly grab me by the throat and force me to regurgitate every single one of those measley crumbs.

The hard thing to swallow about this season –besides all those crumbs of stale Dome Dog buns– is that this has not been a classically bad team. The pitching has been far too splendid to classify this as a team of abject futility. No, what this has been is a team of heart breakers and betrayers. It’s been a marriage in which one partner has been constant, and has worked hard to make the marriage work, while the other partner has dicked around and broken every promise it ever made.

That’s a very hard team to root for, and I have never had such a hard time rooting for a team, never felt such genuine frustration and anger in the wake of so many games.

There have been a lot of miserable games that left a lingering sour taste in my mouth this year, but yesterday was almost certainly the capper. It may have been the most shameful game in team history, as I believe a number of players openly acknowledged in its aftermath.

Everything the offense of this team has done wrong this season –and they have done so many, many things wrong– they managed to do wrong yesterday. Looking at the boxscore of the game is the closest you’re ever likely to come to staring at a mathematical impossibility made horrifyingly, irrationally real. You cannot make sense of a mathematical impossibility.

Runners in scoring position in eight of the nine innings. Sixteen base runners, thirteen hits, zero-for-ten with runners in scoring position; botched sacrifice bunts and stolen base attempts; double plays; runners at second and third with less than two outs left stranded.

Zero runs. Against the Kansas City Royals (43-88).

The fourth 1-0 game in the last three weeks.

And, in perhaps the ultimate indignity of the entire season, Denny Fucking Hocking scoring the winning run in the bottom of the ninth, with Terry “Moses” Mulholland on the mound.

Really, it’s almost more than a guy can bear.

I’m back, though. I’ve made my own way out of the woods, and I expect to be here the rest of the way, gargling bile and doing my damnest to extract a bit of ivory from a dog’s mouth.

Just you watch: the Twins will now proceed to go on some kind of unholy tear, winning twenty-three of their next thirty games, and they’ll still come up short and miss the playoffs.

That would be just my luck. Yes, my luck, because it’s clear the mess of this season to date has been purely a personal thing between the Twins and me. They’ve had my number all year, and it’s played out exactly like one of those backyard fights I used to have with my brother all the time; I’d finally get him pinned to the ground, he’d plead peace, and the instant I released the little bastard he’d take another swing at my teeth and we’d end up right back where we started.

I’ll give the Twins this much credit the last week: they’ve at least been watchable again. For awhile there I was reminded of the time in the late nineties when, at the tail end of yet another wretched game in yet another wretched, knee-walking season at the Dome, a visiting scout in the press box turned to me, shook his head, and said, “You’ve got my sympathy, brother. This team ain’t worth free.”

But, still, it’s been the pitching, stupid. The team hasn’t really won one game with the bats. They’ve just been out-pitching the other guys, and I guess the good news –with Liriano and Baker on the way– is that I don’t think it’s going to take much tweaking and twiddling to make this a very good baseball team once again.

I’ll tell you what’s pissed me off more than anything else this year. The lack of offense has been maddening, no doubt about it, but it’s been the mental breakdowns we’ve seen all season that have really fried my patience. Failure to execute in fundamental situations –advancing runners, laying down bunts, swinging at good pitches in hitter’s counts, the inability, with less than two outs, to hit a simple fly ball with a runner at third, or a ground ball to the right side with a runner at second. I mean, really, all we’re asking of guys in these situations is that they make a lousy freaking out, and they’ve all pretty much demonstrated they can at least do that; they just can’t do it when it actually might count for something.

There have, of course, been all sorts of other breakdowns and brain farts, the kind of stuff you shouldn’t expect to see in Legion ball, let alone in the big leagues: How many times, for instance, have we seen guys at second base get thrown out trying to advance to third on a ground ball hit right in front of them?

Lots of times. Too many times. More times than I care to remember.

And have you noticed how often various Twins have completely lost track of how many outs there are in an inning? There was the infamous Shannon Stewart screw-up, of course, but there have been scads of other instances that, while they may not have been as costly, have nonetheless demonstrated that this team hasn’t really had a proper focus all year.

This has been a season of missed signals and missed opportunities. A season of shameful squandering and dashed expectations. It’s not over yet, though, and there’s no denying it was hugely satisfying to see the Twins beat the White Sox at their own game –the blueprints for which they basically stole from the Twins.

For one night, at least, our disappointing club looked like the Twins of the 2003 stretch, and it was fun to watch.