Axel Kohagen

Wes Johnson, huh? This doesn’t feel good. I’ve read the articles and the blog posts and the comments. I’ve had a chance to digest this thing. So far, it doesn’t sit well in my tummy. Like a member of the clean plate club choking down a particularly bad supper, I gagged on Wes Johnson writing until I could feel despair grow in my chest. First of all, the Twins were paying him $250,000 a year? Doesn't Griffin Jax makes twice that? Hell, doesn't every player on the team makes at least twice what he does? If I’m getting my numbers right (and feel free to double check), Johnson will be making 500,000 more dollars a year. I expected to see him being roasted in the comments section for selling outtake, but it seems like a lot of people think $500,000 is an amount of money that erases a lot of loyalty. Take care of you and your own, because opportunities don’t come every day. If I sound a little bitter, it’s because I am. Don’t get me wrong, I’d take the job, too, and every dollar of that money. I would probably even ditch a team midseason. Except, I’d have a lot of trouble abandoning a team during a playoff hunt. Our pitching staff has already felt shaky, like a house of cards. This news is like opening a drafty door. Will everything collapse? I guess we’ll have to find out together. Johnson’s going to stick around through the series with the Guardians, which now feels even more important. Five games. Four days. Wes Johnson’s last chance to impart his wisdom on the pitching staff before he’s gone. Will he share some final lessons, or is this just another series for him? How will he hand off duties to Pete Maki? Maybe I’m too sentimental for my own good, but I feel like I’d take this a little personally if I were a Twins pitcher. This is their shot at winning it all (or, dare we dream, Minnesota? – winning one playoff game). It seems like team loyalty is a myth, along with the rest of the good ole days. Baseball is a data-driven business. You’ve gotta have ice in your veins to make it work. I’m not saying this is a bad thing. Or a good thing. It’s just an attempt at objectively observing the state of the game.

The Guardians took two out of three from the Twins, sending us down to second place. On Wednesday the 22nd, the Twins put up ten runs and still lost. Now it’s time for a three-game series against the Rockies and then a five-game series against the Guardians. Part of me wants these games to be as feisty and spirited as a parking-lot fist fight. We need a lot of runs to win games. Everyone needs to contribute, and the elite need to be at their best. Every at bat is personal now. Defensively, it’s time to pitch with a chip on our shoulders. We need to bring our best stuff every time we get on that mound. Cue “Street Fighting Man” by the Rolling Stones. Prep “What’s My Name” by DMX. We’re going to war on the base paths. That’s what my gut tells me, at least. I want to see the Twins overpower, outmuscle, and subdue their opponents. I haven’t played baseball since elementary school and here I am, fired up about how this team needs an attitude. They’re out there every day, putting in the work with practice, training, and coaches. I think the Twins probably realize these games are important, and I know they’re trying pretty dang hard to get the job done. They probably don’t need a scruffy-haired guy from Iowa telling them to be aggressive, yet here I am. B-E A-G-G R-E-S-S-I-V-E. What I’m really saying is I think the Twins are better than this. I think they should consider anything less than a divisional championship a wasted opportunity. Is it helpful for the team to look at it this way? Or, like Ted Lasso said, do they need to be goldfish with short memories and stay focused in the present? Really, I’m a hypocrite. When I did play sports, I never got motivated when the coaches started yelling about “leaving it all on the field” and “playing every down.” I felt like I was already doing that. Of COURSE I was already trying to do that. I didn’t get fired up – I panicked. I played sloppier because I was trying to give more than I had. I didn’t ask questions because I felt like I didn’t need help, I needed to work harder. If I didn’t understand things it didn’t matter. I just needed to do it harder. I quit playing sports in high school and didn’t enjoy them until much later, when I wasn’t in a constant state of fear and panic. So why hasn’t that kind of unhelpful thinking been worked out of me? Years of sports failure programmed me to buy into a cliché that didn’t work for me at all. Maybe it does for other people, but not for me. I know I don’t want to raise my daughter to push herself past the limit, risking injury and destroying joy. Maybe the first step is letting these Twins play these games as they see fit. Me wanting them to be ready to brawl doesn’t affect the team very much, but it does affect me. It’s time to challenge our motivations.

The Twins dropped the series to the Diamondbacks and, as of this writing, are only one game ahead of the Guardians in the division. Next up, a whole slew of games against those Guardians. Beware. I’m trying to maintain my optimism after the series loss in Arizona. It’s not going well. I tried to listen to the game on Sunday, but all that happened was that I got to hear the Diamondbacks hit a grand slam. A door to victory shuts. I switch my Echo Dot (a wonderful Father’s Day gift from my beloved wife and daughter) over to loud music and read about scary movies in Rue Morgue magazine. Giving up a granny is just a bridge too far for me. Grab a taxi – this one’s over. Part of putting the pieces of a winning team together is knowing which pieces don’t belong in the puzzle. And that is the tricky task awaiting the Twins. The pitching staff could use reinforcements, which means we need to get rid of some of our existing players. Specifically, I suspect we will be losing some of our bullpen arms. To be fair, we’ve already been shuffling around our assets between the pro team, St. Paul, and the injured list. To be fair AND honest, I have trouble keeping up with who we have in the bullpen on any given day. There are a few names that make me nervous when I hear they’re coming in to the game. I wonder if they’re nervous, too. Or, do they find a way to shut out the bad memories of being hit out of ballgames in the near past? Getting cut from a team has to hurt, so I don’t envy the decisions the baseball people have to make. Some of these guys bounce around the league for years. Some of them only get remembered when their name comes up, and all a fan can remember is that yes, they used to play for your team. Being an innings eater, low-leverage kind of pitcher is tough, gritty life. Retire and in six months you can go shopping anywhere without getting recognized. You can put “able to manage criticism from tens of thousands of people at a time” on your resume. But, like the book says, there’s a season for everything. Sometimes players have to go. If the Twins are still in the hunt for first place in the division after they’ve played all of those games with the Guardians, they need to be upgrading. In fact, they should probably be looking to upgrade now to ensure they’re still close to first place after these series.

Writing one column for every Twins series has made me realize how fickle a fan I am. If the Twins lose a few more than they win, I’m the first guy to say we’re all doomed. Twins win a few and I’m starting to plan for the playoffs. Win and strut about. Lose and pout in the corner. I’m the exact kind of fan that drives other fans nuts. Today, though, I feel as if I’ve arrived in a moment of clarity. The Twins are far enough into the season for me to say they are a play-off worthy team. There’s a lot of season left, and they still might not get there. But they could, and they really ought to. Maybe they’ll even win a playoff game along the way. Maybe we’ll even get to have the tastiest revenge of all. I feel comfortable saying this because the pieces are a little clearer to me. For starters (pun fully intended), we’re getting back several injured pitchers. Gray and Ryan threw against the Mariners. I believe Winder will be back soon, too. If they stay on the field, things look a lot better for the team. With better pitching on the mound, the Twins won’t have to score 7 runs a game to win. When they do need to score runs, though, I believe they have the bats. Buxton is hitting again, and Correa’s going to go on a tear soon. Maybe Kirilloff comes back and Jeffers gets it together. It could happen. Then there’s Luis Arráez. Like everyone else in Twins Territory, I’m currently in love with Luis Arráez. Every time he gets to the plate, he’s got a real good chance of getting on base. He’s money in the bank. Doesn’t matter what the count is – he’s going to get on base. So what would our revenge be? Well, if you haven’t noticed, the Yankees are doing exceptionally well this year. If you know a Yankees’ fan, you probably already know this. At the time I wrote this, they are atop their division with a record of 46-16. They could potentially break the MLB record for most wins in a season. I think it would be just spiffy if the Yankees did break that record. And then faced the Minnesota Twins in the first round of the playoffs. And then, this time, they lost. The Yankees 2022 season gets stabbed in the back and dropped to the floor with TC Bear dancing around it like Jim Morrison celebrating the lizard. I’m not saying that would make all the pain of our playoff losses go away. I’m just saying it would feel pretty good for a long time.

Thanks to Apple TV, my family got to watch a Twins game for a change. As luck would have it, we got a good one. The Twins crushed the Rays nine to four. Dingers abounded. I silenced my yelps of delight so my daughter would stay asleep. I enjoyed seeing some of the players I’d only heard about on the radio. I’m not sure I knew what Pagan or Larnach looked like. Watching Buxton hit a home run is a lot more fun than just hearing about it. He enjoys every second of his trot around the bases. I didn’t even know that Joe Smith was a sub-mariner. Speaking of things I didn’t know – Nobody told me the “Ray” in “Tampa Bay Rays” referred to a ray of sunlight. A harmless, pleasant, butterflies and tweety-birds ray of sunshine. I mean, they try to have it stand for the rays they keep in a pen, too, but is that so much better? To have your mascot be an animal so docile and sweet children can pet it? These used to be DEVIL Rays! That sounds like something malevolent from the sea! Something to fear! Not a little burst of sunlight. Why don’t they just start singing “You Are My Sunshine” instead of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game?” Before you say it, I realize the Twins do not exactly sound threatening. Seriously, though, take a good look at Minnie and Paul. They would mess you up if they wanted to. They are big, burly men with bats. And we have a bear. TC may be friendly, but he’s still a bear. You don’t see the Minnesota Twins putting a BEAR petting zoo out in the outfield bleachers. The Twins have to be tough from here on out. Have you seen what we’re putting on the mound these days? If the Twins let a guy go for a bucket of balls for an off-season trade, that bucket of balls would probably be pitching a game right about now. It’s bad. We need to get some of our better pitchers off the IL. Soon. It seems like the Twins need to score seven runs a night if they want to win. That’s a lot of pressure on our offense. Next up is a midnight series at Seattle. I remember when starting something at 9 PM seemed like a fine thing to do on a week day. Now I’m over forty with a kid. Nothing holy can happen after 9 PM.

When I went to bed last night, the Twins were up seven to three. I know what you’re thinking – how early does he go to bed? I have to get up early so I go to bed early. Anyway, the whole game turned into a Schrödinger’s cat kind of thing. Overly simplified, Schrödinger posed an interesting dilemma. First, theoretically, someone could place a cat in a box with a radioactive particle. Then, a radiation detector would be connected to a hammer. The hammer would be poised over a container of poison. If the radiation detector senses radiation, the hammer drops, the container of poison breaks, and the cat dies. Since all of this happens in a box, the observer would have no idea if the cat was alive or dead. Therefore, as I understand it, the cat is both alive and dead until the box is opened. This is quantum mechanics thing, and I won’t pretend to fully understand it, but there you go. When I was asleep, the Twins both won and lost the game. A lot of us fans have to live with that duality. Whether we’re asleep, away from electronics, or just tuned into something else, we live our lives while holding both possibilities in our heads. The Twins won. The Twins lost. Both true until the box is opened. Cynically, I expected the Twins had lost. After all, it was the Yankees. And we had a lot of innings to sneak our relievers through without giving up runs. We lay down and show our bellies to the Yankees like a Golden Lab puppy at an eight-year-old’s birthday party. Four runs were a decent cushion, but it didn’t seem like enough. Optimistically, the Twins could have won. A four-run lead meant it wasn’t even a save situation. We creamed the Yankees the night before, so it could be done. When I woke up, I checked my phone and opened the box. The cat was dead – the Twins blew it. I had my answer. Not knowing is the yellow light of baseball. If I can’t get green-lit with a victory, I’ll take a yellow light as opposed to the full stop of a loss. Last year, I even stopped checking the scores. All I did was come into work and ask my Twins fan coworker if they won or lost. I lived in the ambiguity because it was better to hold on to a theoretical victory than risk crashing into a confirmed loss. Baseball becomes so painful that paying attention is punishment. With as many runs as the Twins are giving up these days, it's easy to get pessimistic. We need better pitching. Quickly. Or we'll all just leave the box shut and go on with our lives.

The Twins took two out of three in Toronto, even in a depleted state. And if the Twins were playing without players, then the St. Paul Saints were stripped down to the bone as well. I wasn't sure what to expect from them when we watched them take on the Iowa Cubs in Des Moines. I know I didn't expect a record-setting day for home runs and a near double-digit victory for the Saints, but I was glad to see it. I sported my Rosario shirsey and Twins hat, but I'm sad to say my daughter did not match me. She came to the game in her Cubs shirt, ready to cheer for the opposing team. Her grandmother got to her and turned her into a Cubs fan right under my nose. Now, she loves the Cubs. She cheers for the Cubs against any other teams. The Twins. the Minnesota Vikings. the Iowa Hawkeyes football AND basketball teams. "Go Cubs, Go" the whole way for her. The plan was to bring up Evelyn the Twins Way. We'd start by watching games on the TV together, maybe attending a game or two as father and daughter. We'd play catch. Eventually, over time, we'd get to more complicated things like advanced statistics. By the time she hit high school, we would be analyzing Twins roster moves and cheering them on to victory. Except she's a Cubs fan. I wondered if this rivalry would get in the way of a good time, but as usual, baseball finds a way to work magic. On a bright summer Sunday, there was plenty of magic to be had for everyone. She got some lemonade and cotton candy. After she inhaled a football-sized clump of cotton candy, she settled into the game. Kirilloff tossed a ball into the stands and it bounced over her head. The man in front of her caught the ball and handed it to her. She beamed and held it up for a picture. Then she got a new Cubs hat, bracelet, and keychain from the team store. Finally, a T-shirt landed right next to me in the stands and I gave that to her, too. The game score didn't work out for her, but that didn't matter in the end. Through the glory of baseball magic and some disposable cash, my daughter got to live it up as a Cubs fan, amongst other Cubs fans. She went to bed wearing her new Cubs shirt, which was so big on her it fit like a dress. She was grinning from ear to ear. Is she backing the wrong team? Heck yes, she's backing the wrong team! But at the end of the day, we were all fans of baseball and everybody won. It's just one team had eight home runs and scored sixteen times. That felt pretty good.

In my last blog entry, I said the Twins needed a strong showing in Detroit to prove they were legit. During those five games, the Twins did not prove their legitimacy. Far from it. They looked bad out there, and they chalked up some injuries. Five games, and now success seems like it's falling out of reach. This column's getting posted later than I'd like because life got busy for a bit. During that time, I didn't get much of a chance to follow those five games. The final scores popped up on my phone like bad news from the doctor. I'm writing this now with my handsome grey cat by my side. I just saw my wife and daughter go past the window on our riding lawnmower. It's chilly, but it's definitely summer time. There's a Twins game coming up and, even though they won last night, I'm still bracing myself for more bad news. If things were different, I might already be done with this column and find myself outside, helping my wife tear up our backyard so we can do something with the hostas. It's always hostas. Do I really think a winning baseball team leads to better husbanding? Absolutely. It's a lot easier to motivate yourself to do the mundane things when baseball magic is just a few hours away. When you're a serious fan of a baseball team, you let other people know. And, because it's the nature of small talk, those people ask you about your team. It's like having imaginary grandchildren, only instead of pulling out pictures and bragging you list statistics and beam with pride. So here's hoping the Twins give us something to brag about in the Great White North. I've got to go figure out lunch for the family and maybe help out a bit with the yard work. My daughter just took over the radio and we're listening to Mira: Royal Detective instead of Primus, so I'm very motivated to leave the area.

This Royals series was inevitable. The air is filled with the business of summer. Schools are either out of session or winding down. Kids are making plans to play outside after being given more time off than they know what to do with. Parents put together the finishing touches on family trips. Family dogs look for sunny spots in the lawn where they can pant peacefully. Ice cream consumption is up. Air conditioners are on. Somewhere, someone is already bored. In the midst of this comes a lackluster series of four baseball games. The Twins split it with the Royals. They sure gave up a lot of runs on the way. I worry the Twins are seeing cracks in their pitching staff. There's a lot of baseball left. If the pitchers crumble, our bats have to do a lot of work to make up the difference. There's a great team in Minneapolis in this year, but I don't know if we'll ever get that team on the playing field at the same time. The coaching staff must make difficult decisions, and injuries severely limit those decisions. The Royce Lewis injury is probably the blow that stings the most. The Twins need to win the upcoming series against the Tigers to keep up their momentum. They've accomplished too much this year for moral victories to soothe the expectations of the fans. A playoff berth is a reasonable expectation, but a playoff win? That might be a bridge too far.

Confession time. I’m not a stat-head. I need to be clear. I THOUGHT I was a stat-head for many years. I love stat-heads. I love the way the game can be broken down into useful pieces of information. There’s something mind-boggling and magical about watching a game and knowing that, just below the surface, hundreds of calculations and adjustments are being considered and implemented. It feels so tidy to me. Every bit of baseball goodness is squeezed out of every player. Gut instinct is a fine place to start, but after it kicks in you’d better be digging for more data. I used to think I just needed more time to learn the numbers. I know the basics. I can read a slash line and fake my way through conversations that start talking about advanced statistics. Mostly, I’ve just learned to nod when I think someone said something that was probably correct. Conversely, I’ve learned to stay quiet when I think someone’s incorrect. I like talking about baseball, and sometimes I have to fake it a bit to keep the conversation going. It’s the same way you fake your way through speaking a foreign language. It’s been several years, though, and I haven’t taken the time to up my statistical knowledge. Personally, I’m more interested in the story of the game. The way loving baseball makes me feel. I love the characters that play the game and I love all of their idiosyncrasies. I love raw talent and rare occurrences. I love the long history of the game. I love the narratives fans create about their favorite teams and players, even if those narratives are sometimes statistically inaccurate. To flip an old saying, when you’re choosing between the truth and the legend, choose the truth but please, never stop sharing the legend! At least, not when the legend is good. Lately, the stories outside of the baseball diamond haven’t been so good. We’re stuck with some terrible narratives. We’re not given many choices, and when we are given choices, it seems like we fight over them instead of finding some sort of solution. People suffer. Baseball changed when the stat-heads figured out how to find the truth hidden inside the data. They changed the narrative. They changed the entire game. Now, we need that kind of scientific curiosity outside of the sport, because it’s clearly not working anymore. The game has to be fixed. There’s too much sadness in the stories we have to tell. There HAS to be a way we can get more out of life. More dignity. More humanity. More quality of life. Where are the stat-heads who will find answers to today’s problems? Are we ready to listen to them?

Sunday afternoon. I’m making PB and J sandwiches for my daughter, my wife, and myself. I turn the game on the radio for a little bit and it’s the third inning. No runs in at this point. The Twins had already won the series, so I kind of wonder if we were due to lose one. The sandwiches made, I turn off the radio and go into the living room with lunch. My wife cleans up from mowing the lawn and I’m watching a JoJo Siwa special. I’m thinking about how much I’d rather be watching the Twins play baseball. JoJo slides around the stage in her heelies. My daughter watches and plays Legos. JoJo keeps talking about how you can be whatever you want to be. If that were true, I’d be The Man Not Watching JoJo. My wife is ready to go so we get our daughter to tidy up and turn off the TV. She says she’s getting a little tired of JoJo, which brings peace to my troubled heart. I don’t hate JoJo, but I do hope for smaller doses. She’s much better than the YouTube show my daughter calls The Grown-Ups and the Kids. That show kills my soul. I check the score. 6-0, Royals. Just like I thought. We were going to win the series but lose the last game. Still a good showing. We drive to Target and arrive, with our shopping list on my wife’s phone. She returns some shoes. We go to buy a present for Evie to give the host of the first birthday party she’s ever been invited to. She’s thrilled, but mostly because she wants us to buy all of the toys for her. Fortunately, she corrects herself on that mistaken belief relatively quickly. I try to sneak a Jason Voorhees action figure into the cart for my Friday the 13th collection, but my wife shuts that down real quick. This will all come back to the Twins. I just need to set the stage. The biggest surprises of the trip to Target were the lack of shoes and softballs. I recently started playing in a very relaxed (no strikeouts, not a lot of running) softball game and I need new shoes and a softball to practice. I’m currently sporting an ovoid-shaped scrape on my right knee that looks like someone slapped a slice of Italian deli meat to my leg. I need better traction. There are very few shoes, and nary a softball. Not sure how Target can be softball-less in late May, but here we are. Nearing the end of our Target trip, we are shopping for a birthday card when I succumb to a nagging temptation to check the Twins score. I assume they already lost and, for whatever reason, the Athletic app just failed to notify me of the final score. I check my phone and see the Twins have tied the game. I show the phone to my wife. My jaw hangs open. I shove the phone further into her face. She agrees this is good news, but her eyes tell me two things. First, I need to pay attention to my family and not become obsessed with my phone, watching the updates come through pitch by pitch. Secondly, I need to get the phone out of her face and quit acting like a goober in public. Now I’m smiling and walking up the main aisle of Target. I’m nodding at other people because the Twins are winning. In fact, they are going to win. I know this in my heart, and I’m so happy I feel like everyone else is happy for me. Like we could all break into a musical number celebrating the approaching victory. We make it to the car before I check my phone again – this takes a lot of self-discipline. I sit down in the passenger seat and see it’s the bottom of the ninth. Duran is in, and Gamecast tells me those first two strikes get in there at over one hundred miles an hour. He gets an out and then the next batter fouls off a million pitches. There’s a mound visit and I worry about a potential injury to Duran. I worry, but I have to pocket my phone and unload sundries from Target. We get inside just in time to see the last out come up on GameCast. Comeback achieved. Twins sweep the Royals. I feel worn out from getting worked up over the game. I cook up some supper, get my daughter ready for bed, and relax. There are a lot of baseball games in a season. The Twins will need me to monitor the games closely, wherever I may be.

Thanks! I'm loving being back!

Being a hero means spending time in the abyss, mired down and challenged in every way. Royce Lewis has the potential for being a hero, but for now he’s spending a season in the abyss - in this case, staying patient in AAA. He’ll have to grow and add skills during this time, which is how heroes make their way back into the light. To stay a hero, he’ll need to transform into an even greater version of himself. If his brief time in the majors was any indication, he should have no problem doing that. Right now, Byron Buxton has emerged as a hero. The fate of a hero often depends on the whims of the universe, and so far Byron must not have angered them this year. Buxton is on the field more regularly, even with his limit of 100 games. He’s staying healthy. He’s adapted from his time in the abyss and matured as a player. In mythology, heroes often have supernatural help along the way. An elf or wizard adds their magic to the mix. A Greek god puts the wind into their ship’s sails. Baseball players seem to change through attrition, smoothed to perfection by water and time. The only player I can think of on the Twins’ team that had supernatural help was Chris Paddack. Richie the Rally Goat wasn’t enough, in the end, as he’s already had his second Tommy John’s surgery. The goat let us all down. As an aside, the goat let me down on a personal level. I bought my own rally goat to join in the fun. I made the mistake of showing it to my five-year-old daughter. She pushed the button for herself, listened to the thing bleat, and giggled. Then, you couldn’t get her to stop pushing it. She wanted to take it to bed with her. I imagined waking up in the middle of the night to that goat screeching at me. Anthony Hopkins asking me if the goats have stopped screaming yet. Too much. We put the goat on top of her dresser and we’re hoping she forgets about it. So, abandoned by his fate and fortune, Paddack heads back into the abyss. He is joined there by Alex Kirilloff and Miguel Sano. Fans seem less hopeful these three will rise and become heroes. Of course, before the season began, fans were less than hopeful about Royce Lewis. He had missed two crucial seasons (one due to COVID, one due to a torn ACL). Lewis grabbed hold of his opportunity. Now fans are almost disappointed All-Star caliber short stop Carlos Correa is coming back to replace him. Heroes take what they’re given and build themselves up. Unfortunately, if time in the abyss has crushed them from smooth stones into gritty sand, there may not be enough left to rebuild. Like the man says, there’s a last time for everything. Heroes either leave on top or fall down one more time than they get up. The fact that some achieve this kind of greatness, even for a brief while, is enough. The abyss waits. It is misunderstood; without its pressure and challenge heroes wouldn’t find the resistance to build strength. It takes away from many, but it gives to those gifted, resilient, and lucky. Buxton is here. Royce Lewis will return. Paddack, Sano, and Kirilloff must do the best they can with what they have.

The Twins won two out of three in their series against the Guardians. As luck would have it, we managed to go to the game they lost. It would’ve been much more fun if we attended the game where the Twins put up twelve and Royce hit his first home run, but we did not. We got the low scoring game, where the teams went into extra innings tied one-all. The cliché holds true, though. A bad night at the ballpark is still a good night. I went in good company and enjoyed the conversation. The weather was nearly perfect – just a little cold when we staggered into extra innings. The skyline, and the pale blue sky above it, deepened into darkness in a beautiful, natural way. Target Field is home for me. Now that we only get to one or two games a year, I have to drink in all of the experience and savor it for months. I will hold on to memories, like the cheeseburger and root beer I missed Urshela’s solo shot while buying. Seeing Rocco Baldelli get ejected after a Guardian baserunner crashed into Miranda and went bam-kaboom down into the dirt. Rolling my eyes when fans tried to start the wave and refusing to clap along with clap-along songs – Are there two clap-along songs now? Terrified of Kris Lindahl’s stretchy, seventh-inning arms. Wondering what that woman was doing, waggling a stuffed fish near the Twins’ dugout. Taking pictures of Duran, who I just found out is referred to as the “Durantula,” and I like that. Being annoyed with fans who walk in front of me while the ball is in play. I’ve noticed I have a very specific response to good plays. I yell “yup!” and clap my hands a few times. Same word, same claps. Same vocal inflection. Nice and understated, like a Midwesterner should cheer. As Meat Loaf said, two out of three ain’t bad. But it wasn’t enough to wash the taste of that Astros sweep from my mouth. Especially because of the game we watched. The Twins got hits. They put people on the bases. They just couldn’t get them across home plate. My wife said they didn’t have a lot of pop, and as she is in most things, my wife is right. This is a good team. They just need to get better at administering the coup de gras when they have the chance. Of course, there were a lot of young players on the field last night. Buxton didn’t play Saturday night, even though I wished really, really hard he’d show up to pinch hit in the ninth or tenth. Correa is still out. I find myself silently willing Miranda to start hitting well. Like he’s my younger brother. I just don’t want him to get discouraged. We need to all chip in on a basket of muffins or something. Now it’s time to take the Twins show on the road. We’d better do well against Oakland, even though the games will start too late for an old man like me to listen to. I’ll hold onto my memories and check the scores in the morning.

I remember the first time I got the wind knocked out of me. I was climbing a tree at my grandma and grandpa's farm. I missed a step, saw foliage tumble before my eyes, and landed on my back. I couldn't breathe. Then, when the oxygen came back, I sprinted into the house. I was more afraid of the sensation than I was hurt. I didn't know know my body would do that to me. By the time the Astros swept the Twins, I knew the feeling all too well. Life likes to suckerpunch you. My last blog post described the joy of victory and then, knocking us right out of the tree, the Astros served us the agony of defeat. They scored the runs. Our bats stayed quiet. We're injured and beaten. To be sure, we're far from done. There's lots of baseball left to play. A series like this was inevitable. It just keeps you off of the tallest branches of the tree for a while. Because the Twins have been playing well outside of this series, it's easier to get back to climbing. There are young players out there, showing they've got the skills necessary to play in the majors. New milestones are being recorded. Fans are forming attachments to players they'll cheer on for years to come. If we're being completely honest (and I do try to tell you the truth in this blog), I was tensed and ready for a gut punch in this series. The Astros are a very good team. We're heavily injured. Our pitching was due to be drug back into the muck. Maybe a little grit will do us a good. Plus, Justin Verlander. I just assume the Twins will lose when he's pitching against us. Would love to have seen that man in a Twins uniform, fighting for the good guys for a change. So the Guardians come in to town, ailing in their own ways. We find a branch close to the ground and hoist ourselves up. There's a new series starting, and it's time to get excited again.