The Rake Magazine

--Illustration by James Dankert

The things a guy will do for a free burrito. It's humiliating, but a deal's a deal, even when it's not much of a deal. A couple weeks ago I insisted I wouldn't write a damn word until the Twins clawed their way to .500. When it became apparent that that wasn't likely to happen anytime in the next, oh, four months, I said that I'd cough something up when they managed to sweep a series.

So now, since Zeller seems to have entirely lost interest in the greatest game ever invented, a game that he can never forgive for being so difficult for him to master and so damn easy for a fat guy like me, I guess I'll finally step into the breach.

I'll say this much for myself: I can fill a breach like nobody's business. And at a time when my weight, thirst for cheap beer, penchant for public urination, and economic status (such as it is) should have driven me into the greasy and indiscriminate arms of NASCAR Nation, I'm still a baseball fan. And I'm still a Twins fan, even though there are increasingly days when I curse the team with every labored breath left in my lungs.

I don't understand how a team can play like a bunch of slow-pitch softball hogs one day, and like a World Cup soccer team with a sieve for a goaltender the next. It makes no sense to me, and it drives me into raging fits of bellowing public (and private) spectacle. If you want to really ruin your Memorial Day picnic, go ahead and try to imagine Jumbo alone in his sweltering attic apartment in his ample white Jockey shorts, stomping around and howling and looking sort of like a red, sweating sausage that's spent too much time on the hot dog spinner at the SuperAmerica and is just about ready to explode.

There you have it. Welcome to my sad little world. The people who live below me spend a good deal of time banging on the ceiling with what sounds like a broomstick.

To make things even worse, my old friend Junie "Boneyard" Sandoval was crashing with me for a couple months after his battleaxe of a wife threw him out of their place in Fridley. He was in a bad way, but I was none too happy to have him in my private space, of which I occupy plenty all by my lonesome. It was hard to watch baseball games when my house guest insisted on listening to the Steve Miller Band's Greatest Hits over and over at maximum volume. I also don't like to watch anybody play air guitar, particularly another fat guy without a shirt on. I've known Junie since grade school, but I discovered that that's unfortunately not a good enough excuse to still be friends with anybody more than thirty years down the road. I realized that we had absolutely nothing in common other than that we were both thrilled to see Dennys Reyes, a guy almost as fat as either of us, pitching in the Major Leagues, and we both shopped at the Big and Tall Men's clothing store. Neither of us is what you would call tall, but I suppose we fit pretty much any reasonable definition of big.

Things finally came to a head --or, rather, to blows-- when I walked into my apartment the other night and found Junie wearing my clothes, eating my Captain Crunch with my spoon, out of my plastic ice cream pail. I also discovered that he'd apparently spent the day drinking his way through the last of my chocolate milk and beer. I always have plenty of beer on hand, which would explain Junie's extreme state of inebriation.

I kicked his drunk ass out of my apartment and sat down for the first time in weeks to watch a baseball game in peace. I was pretty uptight and regrettably stone-cold sober, but the Twins lit up Milwaukee for sixteen runs (and coughed up ten: the softball hogs and the sieve goaltender were in the house). It was a beautiful night, my apartment hadn't yet been transformed into an inferno, and I was mercifully reminded that I'm still capable of experiencing something approaching serenity on an occasional basis.

The Twins are 6-2 since I sent Junie packing, and though I'm sure as hell not stupid enough to get truly excited by that fact, I still have to admit that the basic math of the the last week would have me breathing a little bit easier if it wasn't a hundred degrees in my apartment, if I wasn't in such lousy shape, and if I was, in fact, actually capable of breathing a little bit easier. Which --tough luck for me, I suppose-- I'm unfortunately not.

While I'm waiting on Uncle Jumbo I'll pose this question: Have there been any Dick Such sightings in or around the Metrodome lately? Because I'm really struggling to understand the Twins' 5.44 ERA and the abysmal performances of Brad Radke, Carlos Silva, and Kyle Lohse.

It's not such a struggle, really, to understand the Lohse situation, although I do wonder when the last time was that a guy making four million dollars a year got sent to the minor leagues? As Ron Gardenhire has pointed out, that's a seriously old-school baseball move.

Lohse, of course, has been a perpetual mystery. At the Hot Stove League banquet a couple years ago umpire Tim Tschida went out of his way to mention what terrific stuff Lohse had, and intimated that he might have the best pure stuff on the Twins staff.

When Lohse first made the rotation he was pretty much exclusively a fastball-slider pitcher, but at some point he started messing around with a curveball and the occasional change-up. He doesn't exactly seem to be a deep thinker, or even much of a student of hitters, as I've seen him make the same mistake to the same batter time and again. Lohse has always struck me as a nice, soft-spoken guy, but he also clearly has a stubborn streak coupled with some deep-seated insecurities, which can be a lethal approach for a professional athlete. He's also spent way too much time dinking around with his approach.

It's possible, I suppose, that he's simply never actually had an approach, which would explain the schizoid nature of his performances the last several years. At various times he's scrapped the slider, then scrapped the curveball, only to have both pitches reappear at unpredictable times.

No less an authority than Bert Blyleven has praised Lohse's curveball, but it's a pitch that requires confidence, and the willingness to shrug off the occasional mistake that gets punished. It's clear at this point that Lohse makes way too many mistakes, and doesn't respond well psychologically to punishment.

He's being punished in a big way right now, and it remains to be seen how the demotion will affect him (or even if he'll accept it at all). Lohse is still just 27 years old, and he already has 107 decisions in the Major Leagues (a 51-56 career record, with a 4.90 ERA). The really sad part of this whole saga is that there was a time not all that long ago --before he once again beat the Twins in arbitration and his confidence disappeared-- when he had real trade value.

He sure as hell doesn't have much trade value now.

The positive in all this is that every kid growing up following a pro ball team should have a player to root for with a name like Boof Bonser.

Seriously, is that not the best name in Twins history? (And this is a team that's had some damn good names.)

--Illustration by James Dankert

People have been wondering what happened to Uncle Jumbo. That is, of course, the million dollar question, and a question whose answer apparently lies somewhere far in the man's distant past.

All I can tell you is that something did indeed happen. There's no doubt about that. And something always seems to be happening to Jumbo. One consistent thing that happens is that he disappears for long periods of time. It would be hard, you might think, for such a large object to disappear so completely from the radar, but he nonetheless has a knack for doing just that.

I've always liked to think of these disappearances as sulking retreats. I can also generally assume, I've learned, that he's pissed about some imagined slight. Other friends have diagnosed him as suffering from depression, social anxiety, or kidney failure. I believe it's nothing more complicated than pure misanthropy.

Jumbo's always been a pain in the ass, but in his younger, presumably happier days this quality could often be both endearing and entertaining. Not so in recent years, I'm afraid. Back when we were both younger he used to routinely fret about the day when there would no longer be a single Major League player who was older than he was. That, Jumbo always claimed, would be a form of death, and the end of his days as a fan.

Despite the existence of Julio Franco on a Major League roster, I'm almost certain that long-feared nightmare is now staring Jumbo in the face, and I stopped hearing from him about two-thirds of the way through last season. For various reasons (mainly because he's such a pain in the ass) I also stopped trying to initiate contact with him.

Before his disappearing act last year I was engaged in almost constant wrangling with Jumbo over the terms of what he insisted on calling our "contract," which was never really anything but the vaguest of arrangements. He insisted that we needed to renegotiate, and made what were increasingly ridiculous and wholly unreasonable demands.

Jumbo wanted a company car, for instance. It's true that I do have access to what is technically a company car --a 1986 Chevette with 149,000 miles on an odometer that hasn't worked in two years-- but I share the piece of shit with Brian Sandberg, another member of the Rake's brain trust, and I seldom get to actually drive the thing.

Jumbo also spent months bitching about the computer that was provided him --free of charge, I should mention-- by Rake management. He claimed that the computer was a prehistoric Radio Shack PC, the Tandy 2000, and that it was full of bugs and cluttered with advertising spread sheets from the late-eighties. That was nonsense, of course. The machine was actually an IBM 5150, an older but perfectly serviceable computer.

In apparent protest Jumbo began typing his columns on a manual typewriter and faxing them to the Rake's offices from a Mail Boxes Etc. outlet in St. Louis Park ("Real Men Work Manual," was always scrawled on the cover sheet). These documents --consisting as they did of pages of single-spaced text with scads of hand-written corrections and digressions-- were virtually, if not entirely, illegible, and a decision was made (not, I must admit, by me) that we wouldn't post them.

I still have some of these columns on my desk, and many of them have absolutely nothing to do with baseball. In one of them --"The Kiosk King"-- Jumbo writes of his attempt to work at every kiosk at the Mall of America. He recalls being fired from a calendar kiosk for barfing into a plastic bag and getting hired less than an hour later at a kiosk that sold (or so he claimed) nothing but rocks.

He also submitted a column in which he recounted in horrible detail his colonoscopy, and claimed that his older brother, Rich, had been "Born Again, no less than eight times."

I tried for a time to reason with Jumbo, and to steer him back to the topic of baseball. The final straw, I suppose, was when he submitted a fantasy in which he was driving a lawn tractor and dragging a naked John Gordon around the infield of his old high school stadium in Blooming Void. This spectacle, if I'm not mistaken, was supposed to be some sort of fundraiser for kids with disabilities.

When I refused to post that column Jumbo disappeared on me, and the entire baseball season proceeded to go straight in the toilet.

As much as he has tried my patience, and as difficult as he can be, I have to admit that I miss Jumbo. I started trying to get back in contact with him in March, and managed to eventually track him down through his mother. When I finally talked to him he sounded under the weather, said he had severed all ties with the Rake, was working happily at Cracker Barrel, and directed any further inquiries to "his lawyer."

I told him to call me if he changed his mind, and I came into the office on Monday and discovered that he had left a message on my machine at three o'clock Sunday morning. He was, he said, ready to "talk turkey," and requested a meeting with the publisher and the Rake's team of attorneys.

Such a meeting proving impossible, Jumbo settled for a brief phone conversation with Domenic Cossi, the Rake's manager of New Business Development. As a result of this abbreviated negotiation, I am told, Jumbo has agreed to make "the occasional contribution" to this space in exchange for "an undisclosed amount of credit at Chipotle, a Da Vinci Code coffee mug, and a copy of Rudy Perpich: The People's Governor, warmly and personally inscribed by Deputy Editor Julie Caniglia."

I'm told that I might expect Jumbo's first contribution by as early as Friday, but I'm not holding my breath.

Lord have mercy! What team was that?

Nineteen hits? Six walks? Fifteen runs?

Kevin Millwood gives up nine earned runs in one-and-a-third innings and his ERA only rises to 5.13? How could that be possible?

And what the hell has gotten into Michael Cuddyer?

That game was ridiculous.

This team is ridiculous.

They're going to kill us all.

So this is what it's come to:

Twins put up a fight in loss

How sad. How very, very sad.