I've loved Twins games on weekday nights on the west coast for around 55 years now. It's at least 54, because I know I was listening, transistor radio under the pillow, on Wednesday night, May 8, 1968, when the A's Catfish Hunter pitched a perfect game against the Twins in Oakland. The box score for that game is here. Back then, the standard starting time for night games was 8:00, and I see that the game was played in 2:28, so it would have been about half past midnight in the central time zone when Rich Reese, pinch-hitting for the pitcher, fanned for the last out. Reese worked the count full, 3-2, then fouled five consecutive pitches before whiffing on the eleventh pitch of the at-bat. You don't fall asleep five minutes after that, and I wonder whether next day I was noticeably groggy in Miss Sime's fourth grade class at Highland Elementary.
Last night's game against the A's started at 8:40 local time. My kids didn't go to bed till the seventh inning. You know you're old when you think every change seems calculated to remove the charm from life. At least I was able to cut the grass between supper and the start of the game. Also, the Twins won, which is rare: in the last ten years, their record in road games against the A's is 6-23. They've done better everywhere else, including at Yankee Stadium. It can't be the rabid fans urging on the home team. The A's have been a bad draw forever. The attendance last night was 3138. Hunter's perfect game was witnessed by 6298. A lot of the same in the intervening 54 years. Games in their stadium have a weird feel, even on TV. Not enough people to make the low hum of a baseball crowd, and there is so much foul territory that the few who are there, invariably bundled up against the cold, could as well be watching on TV themselves.
My older daughter is reading for school A Midsummer Night's Dream, which I read again myself in order to talk about it with her. Hot take: Shakespeare's comedies are skillful and amusing but they leave no imprint, and I can't fault an 8th-grader's cold response to fairies in the woods squeezing magic juice on the eyelids of the wrong sleeping lover, etc. Were I in charge of the curriculum and determined to make 8th graders read a Shakespeare play, it'd be Romeo and Juliet, or maybe Macbeth, brutal but brief. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's noticed that the plot of "The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisby," the play put on by the ridiculous rustics in A Midsummer Night's Dream, resembles closely that of Romeo and Juliet, which was also written in the mid-1590s. It's amusing to think of Shakespeare not taking himself that seriously, and imagining his tragedy played as a farce.
As a reward for subjecting myself to A Midsummer Night's Dream, last night in bed after the ballgame I started reading Unknown Man No. 89, almost the only Elmore Leonard crime novel that had somehow escaped my attention. The main character is a Detroit process server who, according to the following Chapter 1 description, is a good fit for his occupation:
He decided he liked process serving because he was his own boss. He could work two hours a day or twenty-four; and because he liked it, he usually put in at least twelve. He didn't mind being in the car most of the day. He liked to drive around and listen to music or, about a hundred days a year, a Detroit Tigers baseball game. It didn't matter what place they were in.
Someone called Leonard "the Dickens of Detroit" but—assuming there’s autobiography in this chacterization—to me he's just my doppelgänger. By the way, though it doesn't matter, the Twins are in first.
Comments