The Twins hit five home runs today and beat the Royals, 13 to 4. Since the Tigers also won, the two teams are tied after 162 games, and the division championship will be settled on Tuesday when the two teams meet for a one game playoff in the Metrodome.
There was after the game a long, televised ceremony celebrating 28 seasons of baseball in the Dome. Fans had voted earlier in the season for an All-Metrodome Team, and the winners, except for Chuck Knoblauch, who was arrested last week for domestic assault, and Kirby Puckett, who is dead, took to the field again as their names were announced. More than one was too heavy to jog. Had he survived, Puckett would have been one of those. Some years after his retirement, he was charged with an attempted sexual assault in a restroom stall at a local restaurant, and part of his defense was that it seemed unlikely he could occupy a stall simultaneously with another person.
In it Looked Like Forever, the final installment in Mark Harris's baseball tetralogy, former pitching star and current hanger-on Henry Wiggen participates in a similar ceremony honoring the World Series championship team he had played on twenty seasons ago. But the outfielding Carucci brothers have had a falling out and don't speak to one another. Sid Goldman, the slugging first baseman, sought political office but lost every campaign. The middle infielders receive necessarily brief reviews: "Ugly Jones, shortstop, dropped from sight. Gene Park, second base, also dropped from sight." Excepting Wiggen and catcher Red Traphagen, it seems that a gradually fading gray is the best that can be hoped for: "Lucky Judkins, center field, was soon traded away, played awhile else where [sic], left baseball in 1957 and to the best of my knowledge lives in Oklahoma to the present day." In the middle of the novel, more or less unconnected to anything happening at the time, Wiggen recalls how Coker Roguski, with whom he'd come up through the minor leagues, had several years after retiring been traveling near Wiggen's home. He placed a phone call and accepted an invitation for a meal and some reminiscing, but never showed up, never telephoned back, never sent an explanatory note, and never returned Wiggen's messages. We are led to conclude that, off the sports page, quirkiness had progressed into full-blown mental illness. The epigraph for the novel is Frost's "Provide, Provide":
The witch that came (the withered hag)
To wash the steps with pail and rag,
Was once the beauty Abishag,The picture pride of Hollywood.
Too many fall from great and good
For you to doubt the likelihood.Die early and avoid the fate.
Or if predestined to die late,
Make up your mind to die in state.Make the whole stock exchange your own!
If need be occupy a throne,
Where nobody can call you crone.Some have relied on what they knew;
Others on being simply true.
What worked for them might work for you.No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard,
Or keeps the end from being hard.Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide!
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