Twins 16, Devil Rays 4.

I do not know how it happened. Perhaps there was a magic fairy who zipped around the clubhouse touching the Twins players with her golden fairy stick, awakening each Twin as she passed. Perhaps whatever vile potion they had been fed or whatever insidious spell they'd been under--cast by some malevolent warlock or foul-smelling troll--simply wore off tonight, player by player. Perhaps Gardy spent an hour before the game trying to break the players out of some evil hypnotic trance placed on them by a Manchurian all-star candidate, and somewhere between the third and fourth innings he finally succeeded. Or perhaps one by one, imperceptibly, each Twin returned from the bizarro world in which they had fallen, in which down was up and day was night and the Devil Rays kicked our sad little asses.

Or perhaps it was nothing magical at all. Perhaps it was only the clear demonstration of their opponents' tremendous incompetence that finally awoke the Twins from whatever soporific, suckarific haze they've been in. We cannot know the cause. The reasons are lost to us. But one thing is certain: the Twins broke out of that haze tonight. You could see it happening, in the clubhouse, on the field, one after another each member of the ballclub we know and love started suddenly, shook his head, blinked rapidly, took in the scene around him and said:

" Hey, guys! Did you know we're playing the freakin' Devil Rays?"

And his compatriot on the field or in the dugout started suddenly, shook his head, blinked rapidly, took in the scene around him and said:

"We are???"
"Totally!"
"Holy shit!" (blink, blink) "…Let's kick the crap out of these guys!"

And so it went, player after player, blinking and headshaking and cries of, "Holy shit!" all over the field. And then the Twins, awake and alive, alive like they've never been alive before, said, "Oh, I had the strangest dream. And you were there Gardy! And you were there Batgirl! And you were there Sooz! But now I am home, in my own bed, and I realize that this is where I am meant to be all along. And, hey, I'm a far better baseball team than these freakin' Devil Rays, so let's kick some freakin' manta-butt!"

I think the catalyst, for breaking the spell or the fairy or the potion or the trance, was in the second inning, when Julio Lugo hit a ball into the dirt in front of home plate and stood perfectly still, in the batters box, while Corey Koskie fielded the ball, strolled it over to Dougie, tagged the base, and left the field. In the first at bat after that showing of either rank incompetence or offensive indifference Torii Hunter launched a 1-1 pitch a dozen rows up into the lower pavilion. A few Devil Ray errors later, it was 4-0, and then suddenly in the fifth inning, oh how the spell broke. We scored six runs in the fifth—granted three Devil Ray pitchers combined to walk four batters and hit one in the inning, but still. Yesterday, before the fairy/deconditioning/de-spelling, the Devil Rays still would have beaten us.

Ah, but no—we are Snow White after the Prince's kiss, and there were five homers today: two by Corey, and one each by Jacque, Torii, and Matty Go Boom. This is more than we expect from the Twins offense, except when we play the freakin' Devil Rays, when it is only just. Is this the beginning? Can we now live happily ever after? Stay tuned...

Posted by Batgirl at June 1, 2004 10:57 PM