I’m currently watching the Minnesota Twins play baseball. It’s not something they’ve been very good at lately. They lost something like a hundred games last year and ever since they lost to the Yankees in the playoffs for the seventh straight year, they’ve been dogshit.
So it’s notable that they’re pretty damn good this year! They’re tied for first place or something like that, Miguel Sano is crushing balls to Mars and Byron Buxton is Angels-in-the-Outfielding his way to some trulyimpossible catches.
Last night, they even piled up twenty-one goddamn hits and came back from a 6–0 deficit to win 14–7. I watched it while at my weekly bar trivia and for the first time in years, I waited to go to the bathroom so I could watch a Twins at-bat finish up. We got some GOOD Twins baseball!
This delightful start to 2017 has brought memories of the mid-2000s Twins to mind. Twins teams that regularly made the playoffs in cliff-hanger fashion and featured casts of characters that I could readily recite: Johan Santana, Bobby Kielty, Doug Meniciwicsixivivxz, Christian Guzman…etc. Those teams were a fucking blast! Good baseball is a fucking blast! These 2017 Twins are bringing back that grade school feeling that anything could happen in the puffy Metrodome and I better get in my blue bean bag chair and watch.
Anyway, good baseball is so damn good! Each character on the team adds a little dose of their own madness to the mix, each pitch is preceded by five seconds of excitement and terror at what could happen and each home run feels like a goddamn miracle. Somehow, seven shutout innings of kind of boring baseball is the greatest joy to watch in the world, especially if Jose Berrios is throwing. Is this how Cardinals fans feel all the time? Or are they sick of the prolonged excellence? Every time my friends who are Cardinals fans or Cubs fans talk baseball, my eyes have glazed over. But that’s because the Twins were bad! Now look at me, tapping out a damn blog post about them.
I want to run through the streets saying HEY EVERYBODY! THE TWINS ARE GOOD AGAIN! YOU CAN TURN YOUR RADIOS BACK ON! MIGUEL SANO HAS ADORABLE MINI DREADS THAT POKE OUT UNDERNEATH HIS HELMET!
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