The Rake Magazine

First off all, it's all already a blur, but were those really the Suburbs I saw playing "Rattle My Bones" out there on the field at the Dome before the game?

I like that idea. I like that idea a lot.

I also very much like the idea of the Twins taking an early lead in this game.

Back in the spring, could you --could any of us-- have imagined that this team would be playing a game in October with Boof Bonser on the mound and Jason Tyner as the designated hitter? How many people in today's sold-out Metrodome crowd do you think had even heard of either of those guys before this year?

Among all the other good things that happened this year, it's sometimes easy to forget that the long-running Bleak House stadium saga finally came to an end, and before long we're not going to have to spend too many more beautiful days sitting indoors watching baseball in this teflon dump.

Eleven groundball outs through five, including six to the shortstop.

And just as I finish typing those words, Michael Cuddyer launches a 411-foot homer into the left-field bleachers to cut Oakland's lead to 2-1.

...And Justin Morneau ties the game with an upperdeck blast to right.

Adios, Estaban Loaiza. If I were Ken Macha I think I might have considered yanking him after the Cuddyer shot. But what the hell, I'm not Ken Macha.

It's a new ball game. And I think it's worth mentioning that they played the Replacements' "I Will Dare" before the home half of the sixth.

Inside-the-park homerun?

An 0-2 wild pitch with a runner on third?

All those half-assed at-bats in the seventh and eighth innings?

The inability, time and again, to get a big two-out hit?

Four runs in two games?

S'Awright.

I don't know what else to tell you.

Maybe God doesn't work day games.

Pop-ups, Nick Punto, Barry Zito's curveball, the wondrous Johan Santana, and a measure of redemption for Rondell White. 55,542 screaming fans. The tying run on third base with two outs in the eighth and the AL batting champ at the plate.

And the guy who killed the Twins was a player that pretty much everybody --including Minnesota-- passed up in the off-season because he could barely pass a physical.

Forget the bullshit noon start, that was a prime-time baseball game if ever there was one.

And, sorry, but I have no idea why Jesse Crain was the first guy out of the bullpen.

Before the game some guy in the press box gloated to me that he'd picked the Twins to win it all before the season started. I felt compelled to point out that while he may have picked this team, he sure as hell never picked this team.

Finally, I'm happy to report that Wayne Hattaway was in the house --he arrived in the second inning-- and looking fantastic in full cowboy outfit. The medical news so far is nothing but good, and Wayne says he'll be on the plane to Oakland.

Is it not against all natural reason that God out of his mere whim deserts men, hardens them, damns them, as if He delighted in sins and in such torments of the wretched for eternity, He who is said to be of such mercy and goodness? This appears iniquitous, cruel, and intolerable in God, by which very many have been offended in all ages. And who would not be? I was myself more than once driven to the very abyss of despair so that I wished I had never been created. Love God? I hated Him!

--Martin Luther, in Roland Bainton's Here I Stand

America is always in desperate need of new heroes, and what could be lovelier for this cynical, hard-hearted nation (not to mention for a sport with a spastic, rubber-jowled, spit-spraying, pencil-necked, talking lapdog for a commissioner) than a hero named Boof?

Honestly, I can't think of one thing.