The Rake Magazine

I'm trying to crawl back into baseball, which essentially means crawling from the wreckage of last season, when various nagging injuries cut the year short for me and led to disappointment and then flat-out indifference.

I've never in my years as a fan had a season like 2005, and I'm hoping that it was nothing but one of those inexplicable mid-career hiccups that you see so commonly in the statistical line on the back of so many baseball cards.

The ruptured spleen that finally shut me down for good in August appears to be fully healed, and the doctors have given me the go-ahead to resume rehabilitation in earnest.

Warning Track Power has long been the engine that drives Rake Media Worldwide, and I deeply regret the toll my absence has taken on my co-workers, many of whom have lost their jobs or been saddled with extra responsibilities as the advertising revenues generated by my labors have slowly evaporated. Back in late October, the company health club and juice bar was temporarily closed, and let's just say that I wasn't exactly unaware of all the fingers pointed squarely in my direction.

I'm not making excuses, but, frankly, that's created a lot of pressure on me during my long hiatus, and I've no doubt there's been a great deal of grumbling behind my back about my work habits and desire. I certainly can't blame anybody for thinking that I'm a malingerer on the level of a Juan Gonzalez.

I'm not, though, I swear to you. I've just had a few bad breaks of late. I honestly feel like I've still got a few good years left in me, and if I have to go to Japan --or even the Northern League-- to resurrect my career, so be it.

For now, though, here I am, trying to climb back on a slow moving mule.

I know that an awful lot has happened while I've been gone, and I regret to say that I have only the vaguest of ideas of what that "awful lot" might mean.

Since I've emerged however tentatively from my hibernation, though, I did notice that the Yankees signed Johnny Damon, which was an unpleasant and disheartening bit of news. I don't tend to like grown men whose names are Johnny, unless their last names are Carson or Cash, but Damon was a fun player to watch during his time in Boston. He's also, though, always been something of an enigma to me. I have a hard time understanding how a guy with a career on base percentage of .353 scores so many freaking runs and has a reputation for being such a terrific leadoff hitter. Damon will be thirty-two this season, and his career numbers across the board (a BA of .290 and slugging average of .431) are nothing really special. I suspect that now that his hair is gone and he's no longer playing half his games at Fenway Park --with Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz batting behind him-- he'll become the latest Yankee free agent bust.

I also noticed that the Twins went on their traditional spending spree and added Luis Castillo, Tony Batista, and Rondell White. Each of those guys could fill some holes or, given their histories and the recent good fortune of the Twins, create some holes.

I like Castillo quite a lot. He's a terrific defensive player (with three Gold Gloves), but his primary offensive value is his OBP (.391 last year in 122 games; .370 for his career). He'd score a boatload of runs batting in front of Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, I'd bet that much. The main problem with Castillo is that he was gimped up for a big chunk of last year and apparently no longer runs well. The guy has hit .300 four of the last six seasons, yet he hasn't managed to leg out twenty doubles in any of those seasons, and he has almost no power. Given the Twins' success in driving in base runners last year, I'd have to say that the value of a singles hitter who plays good defense is somewhat questionable, at least until the team develops some real run producers from the 3-5 spots in the batting order.

Rondell White could be one of those run producers, I suppose. White's a good hitter, but he's been injury prone. The Twins will try to keep him on the field by using him as the DH, but he's not a particularly fearsome designated hitter. In his thirteen seasons in the Major Leagues, White has never driven in or scored 100 runs. He's never even driven in ninety runs, in fact, and he's never hit thirty homeruns. He's averaged something like 120 games a season over his career, and played in a total of 218 over his last two seasons in Detroit. They guy has played for six teams in the last five years, and I always assume there's some good reason for that.

Tony Batista might be the acquisition that's led to the most rolling of eyes among fans, but I'm not entirely sure why that is. Batista played last year in Japan, but in the preceding seasons he was the closest thing to an offensive lock that the Twins have had in years. His track record says he'll stay healthy (in the five years before heading to Japan he played in 157, 161, 161, 156, and 154 games and averaged over thirty homers a season). He's still only 32 years old, and in his last season in the majors, with Montreal, he hit thirty-two homeruns and had 110 RBI. Batista isn't going to hit for average (he's a career .251 hitter) and he'll get on base as infrequently as Luis Rivas, but he's at the very least proved that he can hit the ball out of the park and drive in runs, and I'd think that would be plenty of cause for optimism among Twins fans.

The moves that the White Sox have made should not, however, be cause for much optimism among Twins fans. I'll admit that I don't even know all the moves the White Sox have made, but I do know they signed Jim Thome (and re-signed Paul Konerko), and that is dispiriting news.

The only silver lining there is that Rick Reed is no longer occupying a place in Minnesota's rotation, so we will at the very least be spared the spectacle of watching Thome launching Reed's pitches off the tarps in the upper deck.

--Illustration by James Dankert

Here's a new wrinkle in the gray, clanging days before Christmas: Uncle Jumbo has been playing miserable pet store Santa Claus, wrestling squirming cats and dogs and even the occasional bird or lizard in my lap while a wrinkled and alcoholic little temp-pool elf tries to snap photos for somebody's sad little Christmas card. Pity the poor bastard who finds himself on one of these people's mailing lists.

What a way to ruin somebody's holiday season. Last weekend I spent forty-five minutes trying to balance two very confused greyhounds on my lap. Try it sometime.

It's all a sad story, but here's the short version: I got fired from my hotel van gig for general off-season misery and an attitude unbecoming of a shuttle stooge. It's the third time I've been canned from the same job, and they'll eventually come calling again when they realize once more that this world is not exactly full of people who A) have a valid drivers license, B) a clean driving record, and C) actually want to drive a hotel van. Ninety-nine out of a hundred applicants cannot put an honest check in any of those boxes, and I will eventually get my job back, attitude or no attitude.

Meanwhile, I toil and suffer through the baseball off-season, muttering through every day and nurturing a tator tot addiction that has reached alarming proportions. Or maybe that should be portions. I am putting away a pound of tator tots a day, and last weekend found myself driving to the Rainbow at two in the morning for a new bag. I'm not proud of myself.

The Santa Claus thing is of course a very temporary mistake, but I have very little patience for job hunting, involving as it does initiative and ambition, qualities of which I am in very short supply. Until of course it reaches the point where it involves desperation, something which I can generally muster in spades, and at which point I will very reluctantly agree to wash dishes at Old Country Buffet.

I would love to be a different person, I really would.

God don't make no junk, my mother likes to say, which is of course nonsense.

Oh well. One of my goals for this off-season was to find a bowling alley I can depend on, which is not as easy as it might seem. I enjoy bowling, but the problem is that I don't like to have people watching me while I bowl. That, and the fact that I like to have access to a good hamburger while I bowl, has made it difficult to find an alley suitable to my needs. Plenty of the bowling alleys around town serve up a good hamburger, but most of them are crowded with people who are either good bowlers or loud bowlers. I can't stand either type, and because I pose something of a spectacle when I do bowl and attract gawkers, I am forced to either stay home, or to venture out to one of the mammoth lanes in the middle of the night when the kitchen is closed, and I am unable to get a hamburger. The only thing I ever envied about Elvis Presley was that he had his own bowling alley and a cook at his disposal.

This morning I'll be going down to Blooming Void to spend Christmas with my mother, staring at her creepy little fake tree bleached blue by the years and strung with patchy tinsel. My brother has a family now, and every year they find something better to do, so it'll once again just be me sitting there on the couch eating peanut brittle and listening to my mother wheezing through Christmas carols on her Lowry Genie organ. When she goes to bed I'll sit up half the night watching videos and beach volleyball and horror movies and whatever else the third-rate little cable system they have down there manages to suck out of space.

Down there in Blooming Void they still show David Lee Roth and Billy Idol videos late at night. "David Lee Roth," I'll think to myself while nursing an egg nog, "The kind of guy who wears a silk scarf swimming in the ocean, that lucky, shitty bastard." If tradition holds I'll fall asleep on the couch and drift into a recurring winter dream: I'm in a large abandoned office building, standing at a urinal in the dark, my forehead resting against the cool tiles on the wall.

Through the giant windows on all sides of me a city stretches away in darkness, punctuated here and there with random displays of blue Christmas lights. Stringers of blue lights dully glowing from the eaves of dark houses and the skeletal trees along the boulevard. Hardly a moon over the world, and not a star in the sky. Nothing moving anywhere. Clouds of gray heat boiling from chimneys and squatting on the neighborhoods.

Then, from somewhere far below me, I hear a large choir singing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," the most mournful version I have ever heard, or ever hope to hear. The singers sound like people trapped in the bowels of a sinking ship, holding hands, waiting for the water to find them.

And when I wake up it will be Christmas morning, and the world will have made its first turn out of winter, and my heart will begin its real straining out of the darkness, jogging towards the light, toward Spring Training.

And that, to me, is the real meaning of Christmas.