Published Sept. 24, 2006 in the Hibbing Daily Tribune
By Aaron J. Brown
Some would call it trite to base your worldview on a line from a movie, but these same people are usually intolerable in small group settings and unlikely to reproduce. So here goes.
In the classic baseball film “Bull Durham,” veteran catcher Crash Davis tells a rookie, “Sometimes you win; sometimes you lose; sometimes it rains,” before turning on the sprinklers and flooding the ball field during a losing streak. Simple words, yes, but my experiences so far have led me to believe something very close to that philosophy. You can never experience total success, but you can always extract knowledge from defeat. Sometimes you can’t control circumstances; often you can.
So, explain to me why the winning or losing of the Minnesota Twins can so dramatically affect my mood? Let’s say I have a great day. Work goes well. My toddler son learns how to speak words that one might find in the dictionary. It’s macaroni and cheese night. I’m warm and cozy in my smoking jacket, watching the sun set behind the pine horizon of our wooded country estate. Then Scott Baker leaves a curveball up in the zone during the first inning. Home Run! Crap! I angrily flip around the channels the same way the infield does throwing drills after a strikeout. VH1, no. Movies, no. Animal documentary, no. Sportscenter … the White Sox are winning … NO! I always end up back on the Twins game, though. Right to the triumphant and/or bitter end.
Fortunately, for me and Twins fans everywhere, our team has been winning. Still, I can’t help but feeling that – just like whiskey and ice cream – you can have too much of a good thing. Now I don’t check to see IF the Twins won, but if they won AS EXPECTED. Even when they play great teams, victory is within our grasp. The result is that a loss becomes even more crushing than normal, while you need to string together several wins to get the same high you used to get. I think I just described drug addiction. The Twins are still legal, but if they miss the playoffs after a season like this one we’ll need quite a few recovery support groups around the state.
But see, I’m talking negatively. New York Yankees fans don’t talk that way. Yankee fans know that they’re going to the playoffs. If they ever miss the playoffs, which happens every decade or two, the problem can be easily solved by firing people, genetically engineering a new shortstop from a test tube and some sort of low grade media-induced psychological torture on their soon to be ex-manager. Then the next year they’ll win 100 games.
We Twins fans don’t have this luxury. Though the last few years have been consistently good, we all remember some lean times for Twins baseball. I remember a year when our best player was Ron Coomer. He’s that rather rotund fellow with the greased hair doing commentary for Twins games on Fox Sports North. Go to any tavern in Minnesota and I guarantee you’ll find someone remarkably similar to Ron Coomer sitting at the end of the bar. That might explain a lot about the Twins in the late 1990s.
I remember when news of a Twins win made for a good week, not just a good night. I suppose we just need to get used to our new found success. How Minnesotan is that?
The Twins are still in the midst of their playoff hunt. With only a few games left, they’ll probably lose some and, ideally, win more. Thanks to the Dome, we know it won’t rain.
Aaron J. Brown is a columnist for the Hibbing Daily Tribune.