Home Runs and Playoffs and other Convoluted Thoughts

The Minnesota Twins hit 307 home runs this season. That is more home runs than any team in the history of major league baseball! The New York Yankees hit 306 this year. The Twins and Yankees won their respective divisions and will meet this week in the divisional playoffs.

The fact that the Yankees were out-homered by the Twins will be an extra incentive for the Yankees -- giving them something to prove; motivating, energizing, focusing their hitters. It's the kind of thing managers sometimes use to fire up a team.

On the other hand, the Twins can look at their remarkable home run record and feel confident, secure, motivated to prove it wasn't a fluke. Indeed, more Twins players (5) hit thirty or more home runs this year than any team in history (the Yankees had just two 30+ HR hitters). The Twins power can come from anywhere in the lineup. Heck, the backup catcher is a home run threat!

On the other hand, the playoff series starts in Yankee Stadium, a place where the Twins have not done well historically and where the ballpark favors the home team's big left-handed sluggers.

On the other hand, the rookie manager and most of the Twins players are not part of that Yankee Stadium futility. They have no reason to fear the jinx. Moreover, the Twins have the best road record in the major leagues this year, so being away from home is no big deal.

It is a little tiring to listen to the baseball analysts on the TV and the radio and the bar stool (and this blog) because the hell of it is that nobody knows.

Let's play ball!

Craig Finn, from somewhere down near the Iowa border, founded The Hold Steady and moved to New York, but he's still a Twins fan and wrote this song as an homage. Enjoy!

And besides, the Twins have La Tortuga. Nobody hurdles La Tortuga...

Richard III (not Richard the Third)

This is one part of a nine-poem series called The Galilee Hitchhiker, first published as a chap book in the early 1960's, then included in a collection called "The Pill Versus the Spring Hill Mine Disaster" in 1968.

A Baseball Game

Part 7

Baudelaire went
to a baseball game
and bought a hot dog
and lit up a pipe
of opium.
The New York Yankees
were playing
the Detroit Tigers.
In the fourth inning
an angel committed
suicide by jumping
off a low cloud.
The angel landed on second base,
causing the
whole infield
to crack like
a huge mirror.

The game was
called on
account of
fear.

The Yankees, I suspect, were winning and the angel could not abide another smug, arrogant Yankee victory and this was his unselfish, heroic way of changing the outcome. Yes, he told himself, it's just a game, it's just one game in a long season, but that sense of entitlement, that smirk, that swagger -- someone has to put a stop to it, send them a sign, restore some balance to the world if only for an afternoon.

Of course, I do not think Brautigan was a Yankee-hater, I think he was a Baudelaire-lover and the angel incident was a Baudelaire hallucination. But I do wish someone would wipe that smirk off the Yankees faces.

Come to think of it, the Red Sox are doing a fair job of that this year, as is the Yankees bullpen.

What a great closing line, though: The game was called on account of fear. Wouldn't you love to hear James Earl Jones say that?