Baseball Interlude...or...The Many Merits Of The Minnesota Twins

Mrs. Hasslington and I walked to a local watering hole last evening in order to watch the Minnesota Twins compete in a one-off "play-in" game against the Chicago White Sox at U.S. Cellular Field in Chicago. This past Sunday was the official end of the "regular" baseball season, but the Twins and White Sox wound up tied for the American League Central Division title at 88 wins and 74 losses apiece. Hence, they had to play an extra game in order to see who would advance to the playoffs (eight of the thirty Major League Baseball teams make the playoffs each year), which begin today and tomorrow and continue until the end of the World Series a month from now.

I have no idea why a coin-flip was used to determine the site of the "play-in" game, given that the Twins beat the White Sox more times than the White Sox beat the Twins this year--the Twins were "rewarded" for this not insubstantial accomplishment by having to travel to Chicago in order to play this critical game in front of a hostile crowd. (Ominously--if also appropriately, given their team's colors--the vast majority of the crowd were wearing black clothing; whole sections of the stands were so uniformly black that they seemed to melt into total shadow, which made the stadium look like a real-world manifestation of Lord Voldemort's dream universe.) But a coin flip was the determining factor, so the Twins dutifully entered the lion's den.

They played quite well, given that Chicago's John Danks pitched the game of his career (so far). Danks didn't allow a single run to cross home plate (with some help from Ken Griffey, Jr. and A.J. Pierzynski, who combined for a nifty throw-and-tag-out of the Twins' Michael Cuddyer at home plate). In fact, Danks hardly allowed any Twins hitters to even reach base. So it was up to Minnesota's Nick Blackburn to match Danks, which he very nearly did, allowing only one run on a Jim Thome home run that was hit so far it nearly landed in Indiana. The final score was Chicago 1, Minnesota 0. The Chicago White Sox don't play baseball as fundamentally well as do the Twins (hardly anyone does), but, like most teams, they have a lot more power at the plate than do the Twins, and last night that power made the difference.

Baseball can be a silly and simultaneously heartbreaking sport--I tend to consider both of those good qualities--and this season was a case in point. Prior to the start of the season, the Twins were expected to be pretty terrible, given their youth and inexperience, and yet they displayed a maturity beyond their years, which translated into a very strong--if sometimes understandably uneven--season. They and the White Sox played the usual 162 games apiece, yet the two teams failed to outdistance each other the way they outdistanced the other teams in their division. Thus, for the eighth time in baseball history, a "play-in" game needed to take place. And exactly one awful pitch from Nick Blackburn to Jim Thome, which Thome hit into the stratosphere, made the difference between the playoff-bound team and the team for whom the season is now over. One pitch and one swing in a 163 game season separated the two very evenly-matched teams. (And some people wonder why baseball fans are so superstitious.... For my part, I had a pint of Fat Tire during the game; Fat Tire is a Colorado beer, and I drank it because the last team to win a "play-in" game was the Colorado Rockies. It didn't work...this time.)

According to Alfred, Lord Tennyson (channeling an aged Ulysses), "Though much is taken, much abides." That statement is very true when applied to the Twins. Though they lost yesterday and are at present very disappointed, Joe Mauer (who, like me, grew up in Saint Paul, Minnesota) yesterday became the first catcher in Major League Baseball history to win two batting titles, the other coming in 2006. Given the fact that catchers go through far more physical strain than players at any other position, this is an extraordinary feat for the still very young Twin. His teammate Justin Morneau, the slugging Canadian, drove in (far) more than 100 runs for the third consecutive season, becoming only the second Twin to accomplish that feat (the other being Harmon Killebrew, many years ago), and he still has an outside chance at winning the Most Valuable Player award (which he also won in 2006), though I now think that Boston's Dustin Pedroia will edge him out in MVP voting. And the youngsters--the entire starting pitching staff, as well as Alexi Casilla, Denard Span, Delmon Young, and a few others--matured at eye-poppingly speedy rates as the season moved on. Much abides, indeed.

I'm often asked why I'm obsessed with baseball and not with any other sport (my second favorite sport is ice hockey, by the way), and the only thing I can say in response is that for me baseball encapsulates much of what is right with America and very little of what is wrong with America. For instance, far more often than not, to win a baseball game, a team must be cohesive, innovative, confident, smart, and, just as importantly, head-scratchingly quirky. A winning team also needs to be very consistent without ever being overly-predictable, which is a difficult tightrope to walk over the length of a full season, particularly after you've played each of your division rivals fifteen-plus times and have to somehow find a way to beat them a few more times. Finally, a winning team must realize that baseball is often very much a game of chess, and therefore demands precision planning and technical analysis, but, somewhat conversely, poleaxing over-thinking is deadly and should be avoided at all costs. And, yes, a little hokey superstition, at both the individual and team levels, is often helpful, as weird as that sounds.

It's my belief that if more Americans listed baseball as their favorite sport (it is, after all, the official national past-time)--and if they actually believed it to be their favorite sport--the United States would be better off for it. At any rate, I for one feel better off for watching Twins games (when I lived in England, I used to stream them off of the internet, much to the puzzlement of my British friends). It's a pleasure to support a team who, regardless of whether they win or lose, play the game the way it was meant to be played. I'm afraid the same cannot be said for all Major League teams these days.