Having scanned the columns given over to the biography of Tom Emmer, I turned next to the sports pages. What a lot of bitterness is there on display! The Minnesota Twins, as you know if you are a fan, were this season champions of the American League Central Division, a pretty regular achievement for the team over the past decade or so. Just as regular is their early exit from the playoffs, usually courtesy of the New York Yankees, who last night dispatched the Twins for the third consecutive game, thereby ending their season on another sour note. It was the Twins' twelfth consecutive loss in a playoff game.
The analyses of Jim Souhan and LaVelle Neal, the sportswriters who cover the team regularly for the local rag, make it sound as if the Twins' defeat, at the hand of the Yankees, is to be attributed not to athletic but to moral failings. As the headline over Souhan's column says, the "Twins gave it their worst." The absence of any clutch hitting shows a lack of heart. According to Souhan, the "most symbolic moment" occurred in the fourth inning when, after Denard Span hit a lead-off single, Orlando Hudson swung at the first pitch and grounded into a double play. Had Hudson's crisply hit grounder found a hole, the Twins would probably still have lost, and Souhan would then have been obliged to discover a different "most symbolic moment."
What should Hudson have done? Souhan says he needed to "grind through an at-bat, putting pressure on [Yankee pitcher Phil] Hughes with [the Twins' best hiiter Joe] Mauer waiting on deck." Neal's take on this tragic ground ball is arguably even more ridiculous: "With Span being held at first by Mark Teixeira and a big hole between first and second, Orlando Hudson grounded into a 6-4-3 double play at a time when it's acceptable to pull an outside pitch into the hole."
It's obviously an easy game from press row. Neal might as well have blandly observed that it would have been "acceptable" for Hudson to ignite a big rally with a two-run homer. In that case, the sportswriters from New York could have composed stories about how the inexperienced Hughes became rattled soon as the Twins broke through with a couple of runs. Lacking maturity, he began to press, and the Twins took advantage to knock him out and win the game. Even if the Yankees end up surviving the Twins, Hughes has proven that he cannot be counted upon in the clutch, and the Yankees' pitching woes make it very difficult to see how they can defend their 2009 world championship.
It's in the nature of athletic competition that one team wins and another loses. If a batter hits a home run, some pitcher served it up; and if a Yankee succeeds, a Twin must fail. It's the easiest thing in the world to gob spit on whomever has failed most recently, and it seems to me that, working against deadline, sportswriters don't even attempt to resist temptation.
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