Wednesday

I have always been a sports fan. Growing up with three of my five brothers close in age to me and with a neighborhood full of boys my age, we were always playing sports. We had nearby Lynhurst Park in South Minneapolis to play team sports, and we played them all: baseball, football, soccer, and hockey. Well, all except basketball.

We also followed all the sports, including Gophers’ basketball. A few years before I was born, the Vikings were a football expansion team and then the Twins came to town. The North Stars began not long after I could talk about sports. The three teams occupied most of our conversations around the breakfast table. And since my parents always had several radios around the house tuned into ‘CCO 24/7, we heard all the sports calls, sports reports, and, of course, Sid Hartman’s “Sports Hero.” We fought over Sid’s column at the breakfast table; and I can honestly say I learned to read through Sid’s column.

But of all the sports, baseball was foremost in our household. Part of it was the Twins’ success. From 1965 to 1970, the Twins always had great teams and nothing spurs fans like success. But even after the Twins faded in the standings and the Vikings became a perennial playoff team, The Twins were first in our hearts. My parents were part of the Greatest Generation, which is why baseball on the radio was such a central part of their lives.

Of all my parent’s 11 children, I was most fond of baseball. Part of it came from wanting to spend time with my dad. He didn’t play catch with us or come to our games. There were too many of us and he was too busy trying to keep us all fed. Plus, as the youngest, he was in his mid-50s when I played ball and he’d already had his first heart attack. So he probably couldn’t have played catch if he had the time or energy for it.

When he had free time, he loved to sit with my mom and a beverage and listen to Herb Carneal call the Twins game. I gravitated to these settings to be near him. The subtlest inflection in Herb’s voice helped us understand the difference between a slow roller and a made-to-order double play; between a close pitch and a bad call; between a routine fly ball and a great catch. I spent countless evenings while my buddies were playing kickball in the street, sitting with my parents in the backyard or the living room and watching the game unfold before my mind.

Oddly enough, the years that cemented my love affair with the Twins were the mid-70s, when Gene Mauch was manager. Thanks to the stingy Calvin Griffith and the advent of free agency, Mauch had some of the worst teams in the league talent-wise. But he won dozens of games he shouldn’t have by sheer guile; and you could tell Herb loved every stolen victory. Herb’s knack for conveying the options before the manager—whether he would sacrifice or hit-and-run; whether he would bring in the lefty with a right handed pinch hitter on the opposing team’s bench; whether he would pinch hit for a good fielding shortstop late in the game—kept the listener in rapt attention. Herb didn’t just call the game, he gave you an education on the subtle complexities of the game of baseball. And I couldn’t get enough of it.

Baseball was the sport I was best at and I found it an endless fascination. Of course, I kept up on the statistics, such as they were. I listened to every pitch and kept track of pitch counts and ball-to-strike ratios. I followed the team so closely it began to interfere with my playing of the game. I even passed up summer league one year to spend more time with my parents in front of the radio.

Eventually, I became a one-sport player and, even though I was best at baseball, my one sport was hockey. My brother Mark was all conference at Holy Angels and I was supposed to be the next Mark. So, even though I never quite grasped the concept that you can’t skate as fast as you can all the time and be effective in hockey, I was pushed into making hockey my one sport. But as my baseball playing days faded, my fan days blossomed. In the summer of 1977, I could tell you from one at bat to the next what Rod Carew’s batting average was.

Just when it seemed the Twins would have a great team to go along with a great manager, everything fell apart. First Larry Hisle and Lymon Bostock (God rest his soul) left for free agency. Then Calvin did the unthinkable: He traded Rod Carew. I never forgave him for that. Rod was my hero and I thought it was sacrilege that he would be in a different uniform. I stopped being a Twins fan overnight and didn’t follow the team, or baseball, for nine years.

I convinced myself that I would never miss it. I did all kinds of things to keep myself busy. I raced sailboats and bicycles. I taught fitness at the Y and worked at Great Harvest Bakery. I went to seminary for a year only to meet my future wife, graduate from college and get married. And in 1987—the year my dad died—I rediscovered the Twins. My wife Beth says if she had known about the sleeping Twins fan within me, she would have never married me.

The ’87 Twins awakened a sleeping giant and the giant has only grown within me since then. In those nine years, the business of baseball and the Twins franchise had changed completely. Calvin Griffith was gone, and his cronies from the old days of baseball had been replaced by a team of young executives with an understanding of what it takes to win. The Twins were fun to watch because they never quit. They were led on the bench by a manager who could rival Gene Mauch in strategy if not personality. And they were led on the field and in the clubhouse by a spunky center fielder who had all the tools. Kirby Puckett would replace Rod Carew as my new Twins hero.

The new executives systematically rebuilt the scouting department and the farm system; which gave me another outlet for the nine years of pent-up Twins fan to geek out on. Each spring, I would buy the Twins media guide from the Pro Shop. Throughout the year, I used that guide as the basis for an extensive notation system on rising Twins stars, augmented by the weekly minor league report in the Mpls. StarTribune. Being a Twins fan was no longer just a six-month obsession; it was year round. As soon as the World Series was over, the General Managers would meet. Then the owners would meet. Trades and free agency and all kinds of deadlines finally gave way to spring training. And the cycle would repeat itself with the seasons.

This was my model through the glorious 1991 season, when I watched from behind home plate as Kirby made The Catch and hit The Homerun. And this was my way of life through the dark years of the 90s, when promising minor leaguers like Rich Becker and Scott Stahoviak could never seem to sustain a major league career.

As salaries from New York to LA careened out of control, pundits from the papers predicted that the economics of baseball would not allow a team with so little capital as the Twins to compete. The conventional wisdom said the best you could do was to promote three good players a year from the minors, even with a strong system. With the Twins budget, you could only afford them for four or five years. So the best you could do was fill a half of a team before you had to start over again.

Though my obsession waned a bit in the mid-to-late ‘90s, I never lost faith. Every year, Terry Ryan would sign a couple of bargain basement free agents. Then, when his team inevitably was out of contention, he would trade these players for minor leaguers. I noticed that several of these new players were the same age, and, if he managed to combine this extra talent with the guys within the system and bring them all up together, he could have something special. In 1999, my dream came true, with 19 rookies—almost a whole team—promoted at the same time. After that team took its lumps, it became the core of a team that would have a winning record for five consecutive years.

The ’99 Twins revitalized my enthusiasm for baseball and the Twins. I can’t really imagine being a fan of baseball without the Twins. Which is why I didn’t follow baseball after Calvin’s betrayal. And I almost lost my obsession with baseball when Carl Pohlad offered his team up for contraction. But let us not speak of that unfortunate time. The Twins survived contraction and matured into a great team, in part because of revenue sharing and other advances that led to the contraction debate.

Rather than using paper to follow the Twins’ system, I use the Internet now. As the former editor in chief of ComputerUser.com Web site and magazine and the current editor at large of that publication, I am somewhat of an expert on the Internet. So the Internet became the tool to further deepen my obsession. Through the Internet, I discovered sabermetrics, Baseball Prospectus, and all the blogs.

Even though I had one of the first blogs on the Internet with ComputerUser, I never thought to blog on the Twins until Twins Geek offered any member of Twins Territory the opportunity to have their own blog on the site. Ultimately, my writing on that site allowed me to write this column. Which brings me back full circle to the question: Why baseball?

Though my interest in baseball has evolved over 40 years, the game has not. It is still a game where one bounce can turn the whole game around against all odds. It is still a game that can hinge on a strategic decision as much as a chess match. It is the only game in which players have to earn their way to the majors through years of minor league development. It is the only game in which I regularly see something I’ve never seen. It is the only game that so closely mimics life that I find myself regularly gleaning inspiration from the way players fight through adversity and struggle to maintain consistency. It is the only game that is simply too complex to admit of exact numerical analysis. It is the only sport in which body type and athleticism are less important than being able to play ball.

In short, baseball mirrors life. What better way to hone my craft than to write about baseball?