People ask me what's changed now that I'm retired. Well, I'm more apt to have a drink with lunch, and I think my personal grooming may have taken a hit. Also, since I'm shaving less without having made any progress on the novels of Charles Dickens, it should almost go without saying that I'm following the Twins more closely than ever. When I last took note of their progress, it was late June, and I was trying to be cheerful even though they had just fallen out of first place after being swept by Cleveland in a 4-game series at Target Field. Turns out that losing those games was not really cause for alarm. Since the Indians left town on June 19, the Twins have lost more than a dozen games to them in the standings despite going 44-38 themselves. The Indians have been rolling everyone.
The good news is that the Twins' long steady pull of "pretty good baseball" has placed them on the inside track for the American League's second wild-card berth in the playoffs. With 13 games to play, the race for that last slot looks like it's coming down to just the Twins and the Angels, who currently are 2 games behind us. While brushing my teeth (I still do that much), I think that if we go 6-7 they have to be 8-5 to catch us. While cleaning up the breakfast dishes, I think that if we go 7-6 they have to be 9-4 to catch us. Bad news: ten of our games are on the road. Good news: we're done with the Indians, and the Angels aren't. I've plainly got it pretty bad. The crazy part is that the most likely scenario is probably that the Twins claim the last wild-card slot and then have their season end a day later when they lose the wild-card game to the Yankees in the Bronx. Weeks of obsessive fretting, then elation, then nothing: like getting hit by a bus right after the doctor says he was worried but you're fine.
Really, though, the long season is the attraction, and no one can take that away. Something to look forward to every day. The players become familiar, their peculiar ways, but they change slowly, too, like your kids, and you can't remember when things became different. With the count 2-2, Byron Buxton batting, you'd avert your eyes in May, because you knew he was about to wave at a breaking ball that the catcher would backhand at dirt level behind the left-handed batter's box. Now he usually takes it, ball three, full count, then hits a foul or two, then walks, or hits a fair ball, and damn it's fun to watch him run. I have no idea what Eddie Rosario is like, but he appears to wear a perpetual small curl on his lip. After striking out, he heads back to the dugout, glancing over his shoulder at the pitcher, the curled lip, like you're lucky I missed that one, fucker, which seemed dumb because you felt he was most likely going to strike out next time, too. But now I feel that if the pitcher tries that again there really is a decent chance that the ball ends up lying by the fence in right-center field, or even on the other side of it. Since the all-star break, Rosario is batting .305 with 16 homers, 46 RBI, and a slugging percentage of .600.
Of American leaguers with at least 150 at-bats since the break, only four have a higher slugging percentage than Rosario. Buxton (.622) is one of them.
I could go on about Dozier, and Mauer, and Escobar, who is a particular favorite of mine, mainly because it is so easy to tell what a good time he's having playing the best game in the world.
UPDATE 9/24: I was wrong to say above that the Twins are done with the Indians. We have three games with them in Cleveland starting Tuesday. The real good news for the Twins was that seven of our last thirteen games are against the Tigers. Now that we've won four in Detroit, we've got three more, at home, to close out the regular season next weekend.
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