Being Catholic, I look to the saints for comfort and instruction.\u00a0 Pam makes me keep it in the basement, so you won\u2019t see it when you come in.\u00a0 But I have a small altar to St. Jude, the patron saint of desperate and lost causes.\u00a0 In front of a holy card and votive candle are my Twins hat and Rod Carew mini bat.<\/p>\n
There was so much hope.\u00a0 There is always hope.\u00a0 That\u2019s the nature of being a fan.\u00a0 Then, like a geranium after the first freeze, life was sapped out of the hope.\u00a0 I\u2019ve resigned myself to knowing the Twins will never beat the Yankees in a playoff game in my lifetime.\u00a0 Grandson Levi is four.\u00a0 Maybe, just maybe, in his.<\/p>\n
Back in May, I wrote about how Twins fans were dealing with incredible success.\u00a0 Reticent Minnesotans don\u2019t typically express joy well.\u00a0 For six weeks, the Twins were the best team in baseball.\u00a0 Improbably, they were one of the best teams ever in that span. \u00a0It is of course a 162-game marathon, and some struggles followed.\u00a0 Cleveland actually caught the Twins in August.\u00a0 Then with both teams fighting injuries, the Twins punched their way to the Division title.<\/p>\n
With that came the chance to play the Yankees.\u00a0 Which I don\u2019t want to talk about.<\/p>\n
What a season it was.\u00a0 The Twins set all sorts of homerun records.\u00a0 That was as likely as me winning the lottery, and I don\u2019t play.\u00a0 Almost every hitter spent time on the Injured List, and others stepped up.\u00a0 The starting pitching was great, and the bullpen was bad.\u00a0 Then the starting pitching was bad, and the bullpen was great.\u00a0 It was a team that could come back from any deficit.\u00a0 There was a 17-inning game and an 18-inning game.\u00a0 They even beat the Yankees twice!\u00a0 No.\u00a0 Really.<\/p>\n
My baseball friends and I were in a funk for a day or two after the Yankee sweep.\u00a0 Baseball is a game where the worst teams win sixty and the best teams lose sixty.\u00a0 For very good Twins teams to lose sixteen straight playoff games over fifteen years is almost not possible.<\/p>\n
Noted historian Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote a beautiful memoir about growing up a Brooklyn Dodger fan called, \u201cWait Till Next Year.\u201d\u00a0 It is the motto for most fans each fall, as we steel ourselves to the winter ahead.\u00a0 Gradually the life came back into my baseball buddies\u2019 faces.\u00a0 We saw that the sun rose the next day.\u00a0 Our focus will shift from the Yankee beatdown to a future with a bunch of fun, talented Twins.<\/p>\n
I was lifted from my mourning when uber-fan Billy Moran sent this: \u201cLosing all these silly, short best of five series that happen in a blink are not allowed to diminish the pastoral joy of the long winding journey from winter to fall. \u00a0A season’s aesthetic pleasure. \u00a0Postseason is designed to inflict brutal agony within four days.\u00a0 Postseason can kiss my —.\u201d\u00a0 I\u2019ll let you fill in the blank.<\/p>\n
The Star Tribune\u2019s Patrick Reusse was ruminating on this, too.\u00a0 Patrick said all he really hopes for out of a baseball season, is that the local team is \u201crelevant.\u201d\u00a0 That makes a good summer for a ball fan.\u00a0 A metaphor for relevant would be competitive, or \u201cplaying meaningful games in September.\u201d \u00a0The 2019 Twins offered all of that.<\/p>\n
Ruesse wrote, \u201cStill, in the Age of the Internet, we have too many people who watch baseball as if they are watching football, where every blip is a crisis.\u00a0 It\u2019s not. There are 162 of these things and they come in every form imaginable. They should be viewed in hunks, not in single outcomes, not even in disappointing three-game eliminations.\u201d<\/p>\n
Long before the Age of the Internet, there were sixteen teams in two leagues.\u00a0 It was that way since the beginning of time.\u00a0 There weren\u2019t weeks of playoffs.\u00a0 There was a World Series between the American and National League champions.\u00a0 If you go back to the first half of the Twentieth Century, winning the pennant was the big prize, the brass ring to be grasped at each summer.\u00a0 The World Series was a fun exhibition following the real season.\u00a0 Losing it did not diminish a pennant.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s interesting that attendance did not yoyo up and down based on a team\u2019s success.\u00a0 This was a time when baseball was the only major sport.\u00a0 Fans had plans to fit so many ballgames in their summer, and a losing team wasn\u2019t going to take their baseball away from them.<\/p>\n
Then came television and ESPN and espn.com and Twitter.\u00a0 Suddenly every day is the Biggest Game of the Season.\u00a0 Stadiums went from gentle organ music and billboards on the outfield wall to constant blaring sound effects and video boards flashing messages in bombs of color.\u00a0 It\u2019s as if the game went from a quiet township road to the 35W\/494 interchange.<\/p>\n
The thing about a baseball season is that there is no Biggest Game of the Season.\u00a0 The nail biter in May counts as much as the blowout in August.\u00a0 If you include Hot Stove League and Spring Training, a baseball season is about ten months long.\u00a0 It\u2019s a journey with an unknown destination.\u00a0 It becomes part of life.\u00a0 Almost every day, I have the game on in my tractor, kitchen, car, or machine shed.<\/p>\n
In that way, it is like much of life.\u00a0 There are weddings and graduations and birthdays.\u00a0 But most of life is what happens in between, day to day to day.\u00a0 Showing up for work, taking care of a child, being a good spouse, taking care of animals; you don\u2019t succeed at these things in the celebrations.<\/p>\n
You succeed at them in the moments of drudgery.\u00a0 You succeed at them when you\u2019d rather be sitting on the couch, but you go do the tasks life has handed you. \u00a0If one can get up day after day after day and embrace it, there is deep satisfaction there.\u00a0 \u00a0You succeed in life\u2019s 162 game schedule.<\/p>\n
I get to observe my daughter and her partner parent our four-year old grandson.\u00a0 It is a different perspective from being the parent.\u00a0 When you\u2019re in the moment, you lose track of how much work a child is.\u00a0 But I see Anna either taking direct care of Levi, or else fully aware of where he is each minute of the day.\u00a0 Much of it is tedious.\u00a0 Most of it goes unnoticed.\u00a0 We undervalue that work.\u00a0 Raising a child is eighteen 162 game schedules.<\/p>\n
Sure, it\u2019ll be nice if the Twins win the World Series someday.\u00a0 It will be a heightened moment.\u00a0 But in the meantime, I love that baseball moves in and stays for all those days.\u00a0 It is perfect background to late winter melting into spring, warming to summer, and fading to autumn.\u00a0 Postseason can kiss my, well, you know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Being Catholic, I look to the saints for comfort and instruction.\u00a0 Pam makes me keep it in the basement, so you won\u2019t see it when you come in.\u00a0 But I have a small altar to St. Jude, the patron saint of desperate and lost causes.\u00a0 In front of a holy card and votive candle are …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[162],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weeds-by-randy-krzmarzick"],"aioseo_notices":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-22 13:08:59","action":"change-status","newStatus":"trash","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115421"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115421\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":115422,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115421\/revisions\/115422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}