The Rake Magazine

Fantasy baseball is one of them. Fantasy league is even worse. There's something essentially emasculated about these terms, and to use them in the form of an admission --"I am in a fantasy league"-- seems somehow shameful. I've no doubt that a first-rate thesis could be written on the homoerotics of fantasy league baseball, but I'm not about to be the man to muck about in the subject. I'm not that desperate to be a pioneer.
I also can't deny that I have, in fact, been in a fantasy league, participated in just such a fantasy, but I am unable to feel proud of this fact.
I certainly have nothing against those who continue to derive enjoyment from such unwholesome activities, but I think the whole thing requires too much explaining to sane people to be truly healthy. I just can't bring myself to say those words with a straight face anymore.

It's like going up to the counter at Wendy's and having to order a "Biggie" fries. I refuse to do it. Get a more dignified phrase, I say.
I went into a Wendy's the other day and tried to order a chicken sandwich and a large fries.
"Biggie fries?" the woman asked.
"Large," I said.
"Large or Biggie?" she asked.
"I want the largest you have," I said.
"The Biggie?"
"Is that the largest?"
"The Biggie is the largest."
"Look," I said, "I'm not going to play this game. Why don't you just call it a large like everyone else?"
The woman was clearly exasperated. "Do you want the large or the Biggie?"

I wasn't about to demean myself by taking the bait.
"Fine," I said, "Just give me the large."

I have every reason to believe our lads are steroid-free (seventeen reasons, in fact --that being the number of seasons since a member of the local nine has hit thirty homeruns), and I wouldn't expect to hear of any dirty piss tests emanating from the Twins' clubhouse any time soon.

The truth is that the organization hasn't had any obviously synthetic muscle-heads or otherwise unnatural mirror-candy since they got rid of the superhumanly-ripped tandem of Rich Garces and David West some years ago.

Everybody, from the coaching staff to the fans in the chat rooms, has been hard on Luis Rivas the last couple years. Most of the criticism directed at Rivas has been justified. The guy had obviously developed some bad work habits that were showing up on the field with a glaring regularity. At times --most of the time-- he seemed to be in a state of either depression or profound indifference.
Rivas, like his old double-play partner Cristian Guzman, is a tough guy to read, and I'm sure much of that has to do with the language barrier. There isn't a coach with the major league club who speaks much Spanish, and there are few --if any-- Spanish speakers among the regular contingent of local media, with the result that Latin players seem to rely on each other to work their way through translations of messages from on high. They also tend to stick together in the clubhouse, playing cards and hanging out at their lockers.
Rivas, though, is an interesting case. I'm not sure how tight he and Guzman were, but they lockered next to each other, and I'll be curious to see how he responds to Guzman's absence.
This is obviously a pivotal year for Rivas, one way or the other. Despite four full seasons in the major leagues he is still just 25 years old, the same age as prospects Jason Bartlett and Terry Tiffee, as well as Michael Cuddyer, the guy who assumed much of his playing time down the stretch last year.
Rivas's recent reputation as something of a lazy player is sort of difficult to get your head around. In 2002, when the Twins took the unusual step of honoring Cleveland's Travis Fryman with a pre-game ceremony on the occasion of his retirement announcement --the sort of thing clubs usually do for Hall-of-Fame-caliber players-- Ron Gardenhire said the gesture was a tribute to the way Fryman had played the game. I remember going around the clubhouse afterwards asking various guys which of their teammates was Frymanesque in that regard. The experience stuck with me because two out of the four or five players I queried mentioned Luis Rivas. I actually dug out my old notebook just to make sure I was remembering correctly.

So what happened between then and now? Who knows, really. Rivas had some injuries, most notably late in that 2002 season. Maybe after having a job handed to him at the age of 21 he got complacent. Perhaps he should have spent a couple more seasons getting seasoned and hungry in the minor leagues.
Whatever the case, he's still pretty damn young for a major league veteran, and though you'd like to have seen more improvement in his numbers and performance over the last four seasons --Luis's been nothing if not consistently mediocre across the board-- maybe it's not too late for him to figure it out. Conventional wisdom has always suggested that for the the majority of players the key --often peak-- years are between the ages of 25 and 27, so I'd guess this is the season we're going to find out what's up with Rivas, one way or another. He certainly doesn't figure to get too many more chances, and he's been lucky the Twins haven't had a lot of other options.

That, of course, was purportedly legendary whack-job Joaquin Andujar's favorite word, and it should be the mantra of every fan at this time of the year, when it's easy to get carried away with the first optimistic rush of spring training.
It's hard, though, not to get carried away. The day pitchers and catchers report is the true Groundhog Day on any real baseball fan's calendar. I'm not even sure what it means if the groundhog does or doesn't see its shadow, and I don't much care. I also don't have any idea if a groundhog is the same thing as a woodchuck, or what God's purpose is for either of them (if, in fact, they are different creatures --maybe somebody can enlighten me).

At any rate, an animal coming up out of its hole must be some kind of sturdy, all-purpose metaphor for the triumph of the human spirit, or at least that's the way I'm going to choose to spin it given the winter I've had.
They're playing catch and swinging bats in Arizona and Florida, and that's all the assurance I need that spring in the Midwest is right around the corner.
Every year about this time I start getting a hankering to head down to Florida myself, and if my track record is any indication I'd say there's a 50/50 chance I'll pull the trigger at some point in the next couple weeks and jump on a plane.
In the meantime, I don't expect any real surprises in the Twins' camp, even though a number of pitchers have already come up with mostly gimpy injuries. Otherwise, though, this is about as locked in as the team's roster has looked in years, but it really is true that youneverknow.

I'll go into full analysis and prognostication mode any day now, maybe even tomorrow. God knows, you won't want to miss that, so check back.
Also, I've been thinking about this all winter, and I'm curious what you might think: What's the worst trade the Twins ever made? And how about the best?
I have my own suspicions, but I'll wait and see if anybody else has anything to say, or if there's anybody else, period.

Welcome to this thing, yet another old thing reconfigured as a new thing. It'll be mostly about baseball, but I have a wandering mind, so it'll likely occasionally stray pretty far afield --at some point, I suppose, I'll feel compelled to talk about other random nonsense as well. Sometimes the random nonsense and the baseball will intersect in strange ways. I might, for instance, tell you about the time I saw Boxcar Willie throw out the first pitch in a Southern League game.

Willie was wearing overalls, of course, and uncorked a wild pitch to the screen. I could then seque into the story about being present on another occasion when Boxcar Willie had a street named after him in Branson, Missouri (he was wearing overalls). Every time I see a celebrity of even the most forgotten, nearly-dead sort at a baseball game I'm for damn sure going to tell you about it. Like this: I once saw Don Knotts and Norman Fell at Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City on the night Paul Molitor got his 3000th hit.

I might ask you to tell me the strangest person you've ever seen throw out the first pitch or sing the National Anthem at a baseball game. What the hell, as long as I've already mentioned it we may as well get that out of the way right now.

Mostly, though, as I said, I'll write about baseball, because baseball is one of the few things I'm passionate about in a world where the things I'm passionate about are diminishing by the day.
I say this even though baseball has nearly destroyed my life, and may yet manage to finish me off. I think it was F. Scott Fitzgerald, talking about Ring Lardner, who once observed that baseball had ruined more good writers than alcohol. I'm not going to pretend to be a good writer, but I can tell you that I've done more than a little dabbling --dabbling is almost certainly not the right word-- in both baseball and alcohol, and I'm pretty sure baseball has taken more years off my life.

Perhaps not all truly obsessive baseball fans are stunted oafs, but a great number of them are, and I don't suppose I'm any exception.
I once ran away from home to work at a spring training ballpark (sure, I was 25 years old, but like I said, I was a stunted oaf). I've been to more baseball games than I could count, although I've scored every one of them, and the scorebooks are heaped in my basement along with several thousand baseball books, a couple hundred mitts, and scads of other baseball-related nonsense.

I've tried to wean myself over the years, but to no avail. The overpaid, cheat-at-any-cost bastards and their cretinous overlords have got their hooks in me for good. If I were to wake up one morning in April and read in the newspaper that Derek Jeter had been arrested for having a freezer full of human body parts, dead cats, and growth hormones in his basement I'd immediately skip happily along to the boxscores and by six-thirty I'd be in my seat at the Metrodome with a scorebook in my lap.

I have nothing whatsoever against complete monsters as long as they can swing the bat and make the necessary plays in the field. As soon as their production starts to slip, you're welcome to lock them up for the rest of their lives as far as I'm concerned.

I could tell you about all the reasons why I love baseball despite its many serious flaws and blemishes (unsightly steroid rash, most prominently, and Bud Selig), but people do that all that time, and you'll surely have noticed by now that they're always essentially the same reasons: the perfect accounting of the game, the absence of a clock, the rich history and repository of statistics, the easy and expert comparisons those statistics make possible for even the most casual fan, the lulls that allow time for plenty of idle conversation, the quirks and characters and long season.

That's all absolutely true, but Roger Angell and George Will and a host of others have been going on about that sort of thing forever, and sometimes it can almost make me resent the sheer perfection of the game. If it were a little less tidy and entrenched maybe most of the highbrows would go back to their chess boards and fat volumes of political philosophy and Civil War history.

Mostly, I have to admit, I love baseball because it takes up so much time that would otherwise have to be taken up with something else, and I don't have much in the way of something elses in my life. Spring training, 162 games, the postseason --that's essentially eight months steeped in obsession, and over a lifetime that adds up to an awful lot of the most basic sort of prison subtraction.

I like the way we've all come to take for granted the ridiculous uniforms of the sport. I love the fact that there are no cheerleaders. I love the suicide squeeze (and despise the sacrifice bunt) and the grand slam --or, as my wife calls it, the four-run thing. I love the various plot lines and dramas large and small that play out over the course of a season, the countless opportunities for pure joy and abject misery.

I'm not sure baseball builds character, but I do know that it creates characters, and I adore characters. The game also doesn't necessarily reward devotion, but it does reward attention, and for the attention deficient it's like a daily Ritalin injection directly into the heart of the cerebrum. I can't think of any other thing that can make me sit still for four hours at a time.

And after four months of bouncing off the walls I can't tell you how good it's going to feel to be able to sit still again, even if I once more end up with my heart yanked out of my chest and kicked into the gutter with the last leaves of autumn.

This, though, will be about those months when my heart will still be beating, hopefully like a man's with a gun in his mouth. Seriously, that would be a good thing. That would be a seriously good thing.
I'll be here --and elsewhere-- all year. Feel free to drop me a line any time. I'd be happy to hear from you.