The Rake Magazine

It's always nice when you're scuffling to get some wins from the back end of your rotation. It would be even nicer at this point to see the Twins start putting together some big innings and throwing some crooked numbers on the board to give the pitching staff a little breather, but I'm not about to complain.

Already people are starting to trot out the usual discouraging math that purportedly demonstrates how seemingly impossible it is for the Twins to catch the White Sox. You know what I'm talking about; you see this sort of thing every year about this time, particularly when one team is maintaining a blistering pace. It always involves daunting long-range projections --if the White Sox fall off to a .500 pace the rest of the way, for instance, the Twins would have to play at some unreal clip to catch them.

We've been on both ends of this sort of speculation in recent years, and should know by now that baseball is more than anything else a game of one- and two-week stretches. Even in late June a big lead can evaporate in a hurry. How long, for instance, did it take for the White Sox to stretch their lead from three-and-a-half games to nine games? Not very long. And why was that? Because while the Twins were going 2-8 during that period, the Sox were going 8-2.

I'm certainly not overly optimistic, but I do think Chicago is long overdue for a couple bad stretches, and if the Twins are going to capitalize they're going to have to put together some 8-2 runs of their own. Wins from Kyle Lohse and Joe Mays are a good way to get one of those going, as are ten games against the Royals and the Devil Rays between now and the All Star break.

I think the stretch leading up to the break is crucial. The Twins are going to have to whittle Chicago's lead in half --at least-- because the rest of July after the All Star game looks pretty brutal, at least on paper. Minnesota will close out July with series against Anaheim, Baltimore, Detroit, New York, and Boston, and the last eleven of those games are on the road. Chicago, meanwhile, will have four games with Cleveland, three with Detroit, and three with Kansas City.

Perhaps this is nothing but a coincidence, but does anyone else find it strange that seven of Torii Hunter's team-leading fourteen homers have come in seventeen games against National League teams, while it's taken him 55 games against AL opponents to hit his other seven? You'd certainly think the NL teams would have the same scouting reports, but I sure as hell can't remember seeing very many AL pitchers throw Hunter so many fastballs right down the middle of the plate. Does this say something about some difference in pitching philosophy between the two leagues? I have absolutely no idea, of course. Maybe Torii's just hitting his stride and it's all been a fluke matter of timing.

It looks like the problem with the comments, by the way, has been ironed out. Apologies for the snafu.

That sure was a disgracefully entertaining game. Or an entertainly disgraceful game.

Frankly, my head hurts too much right now to decide. So: Your call.

I was just glad I stuck around long enough to see that blast by Morneau.

--Illustration by James Dankert

Last night was a train wreck all around. I drove down to my old home town, Blooming Void, to attend my 25th high school reunion. To be perfectly honest with you, I'm not quite sure what I was thinking.

When I got home from work I tried without much success to prime myself for the experience by taking a shower, blasting REO Speedwagon's "Riding the Storm Out," and running an electric shaver over my face while eating Captain Crunch out of a one gallon plastic ice cream bucket.

I have no business going to a high school reunion. The whole notion of a reunion implies that the reunited were, in fact, once united, that there was some sort of a union to begin with. I have known no unions. I was one of those bulky specters that haunt every high school hallway, I suppose. I did play baseball, but baseball at Blooming Void was right up there with the ham radio club (of which I was also a member) in terms of status or attention.

Blooming Void is a small town, despite which I would have a hard time identifying more than a handful of people from my senior class in the high school yearbook. Being naturally awkward and anti-social, I had few friends, and none of us were big on doing things. We mostly sat in our bedrooms or drove around in our cars making inane small talk on our CB radios (Jumbo's handle: Hair of the Dog).

South of Lakeville I pretty much lost my resolve, and more or less made up my mind to avoid the reunion altogether. I've had quite enough disappointment and trauma in my life of late (thank you, Twins, thank you so very much).

When I got to Blooming Void I drove around town aimlessly for awhile (there is, really, no other way to drive around Blooming Void). I drove past the Elks Club, site of the reunion, perhaps a dozen times, listening to the Twins game on the radio. I told myself that if the Twins managed to take a three-run lead I would go to the reunion and celebrate in a desultory fashion.

By the sixth inning I was sitting at the bar in Glum's, my favorite local watering hole, watching the game on the TV. The bartender was some vaguely familiar character, and he kept trying to make small talk with me. At one point he observed, "I think you were the first guy I ever heard make an armpit fart." I guess, if nothing else, that's a little something I can hang my hat on.

You probably saw the game, or listened to it. There was nothing to celebrate, nothing at all. Still, I sat there at the bar until the bitter end, drinking beer and eating Slim Jim after Slim Jim. I must have spent $20 on Slim Jims.

I ended up heaped on my mother's living room couch at 1:30, nursing a sour headache. If you spend more than an hour in my mother's house there is one phrase you are virtually guaranteed to hear, and that phrase is "What's that smell?" I was awakened by those words at 6:30 this morning, squawked repeatededly from, first, the top of the stairs, then the kitchen, and, finally, inches in front of my face.

As my eyes slowly focused I saw my mother looming there above me. From the look on her face she could have been scrutinizing a mysterious and particularly disgusting species of insect.

"Good Lord, look at you," she said. "Remind me: have you always been such a mess?"

Look, there's not a bigger Tom Brunansky fan in all of Twins Territory, but this team's in trouble and in dire need of some pop in the middle infield.

So, as much as it pains me to say this, I think it might be time for Andy MacPhail to pull the trigger on that long-rumored Bruno for Tommy Herr trade. Herr could be just the guy to light a fire under this ballclub.

Also, bad news, I'm afraid, for the lonely bachelors out there: Baseball knowledge will not help you pick up girls.

Okay, honest to God, that's just about enough of this nonsense. I believe we've reached the point where the bump in the road has officially turned into a rut, and it's damn hard to explain what's happening to this team right now.

This is one of those times where you could point your finger in just about any direction in the Minnesota clubhouse and you'd be looking at somebody deserving of a share of the blame for this stretch of sustained wretchedness. It's especially painful to be reminded of what a miserable game and utter waste of time baseball can be.

Under the happiest of circumstances baseball requires a ridiculous time commitment from the serious fan --a game like tonight's, for instance: let's say you got down to the Dome at five o'clock for the virtuous Admission Possible picnic; then you sat through nine excruciating innings in which the Twins managed just five hits and two runs against Detroit's Jeremy Bonderman, and Kyle Lohse got the snot knocked out of him by the Tigers.

It was an ugly game all around, a well-rounded exercise in futility, yet dispatched in a mercifully brief two hours and thirty-eight minutes. Still, that's almost five hours carved out of your life right there. By the time you got to your car, negotiated your way out of downtown, and got home it was probably 10:30. Presumably you worked today as well, and it was a weeknight.

If you're a serious fan, though, you likely tuned into Baseball Tonight or checked out the internet when you got home to see how the White Sox did (they won again, of course, behind another splendid performance from Jon Garland, stretching their lead in the Central to a truly dispiriting nine games).

So: You just buried seven or eight hours of your day in a hole in the ground; you'll never get a single minute of any of those hours back, and, with the exception of the pleasant and inspiring prelude of the Admission Possible event, you don't have a single fond memory to show for your evening.

You can't even begin to imagine how exhausting this sort of thing must be for the players, who got to the ballpark hours before you did and had to drive home through deserted streets long after you departed. You'd think, though, that it must be very exhausting.

And you certainly hope they're as tired of it as you are.