Twins at Cleveland. Twins 4, Hubrists 2.

It's a little known fact that the Greeks actually played a form of baseball during the ancient Olympic games known as "Bakbal." The sport bore striking similarities to the game today, except that it was played nude and instead of tagging players out, fielders had to wrestle them to the ground. During the wrestling matches, any kind of move was considered fair game, except for biting, scratching, and wee-wee pulling.

Bakbal was added during the Olympiad of 748, a few decades after it was invented by bands of goatherders looking for new ways to compete after the tragic synkronized swimming accident of 802 B.C. The game quickly evolved, with square pieces of stone replacing baby goats as the three "baks", and after a league-wide effort to speed up the game, the practice of the teams stopping after each "Homer" to make a ritual sacrifice to Apollo was eliminated (afterwards, the hitter simply expressed his gratitude to the gods by pointing up toward Mount Olympus).

The championship round of the first Olympic bakbal tournament saw the meeting of two rival teams, the favored and storied Mycenaean "Twins" and the upstart Cleveland "Hubrists." In previous games, the Hubrists had beaten the pants off the Twins (or would have, had they been wearing any pants) in both the bakbal point totals and in the base-path wrestling matches. During one noted match, Hubrist Travis Hafner picked up Twin and erstwhile stable boy Lew Ford, tossed him in the air, then threw him on ground, jumped on his back five times, and executed a flip on the dismount. The move was considered so revolutionary that it launched the sport of rhythmik gymnastiks, although after a few years officials substituted balls, hoops, and ribbons for Lew Ford.

As a study of the contemporaneous blog "Batphrodite" reveals, fans of the Twins were rather saturnine coming into the tournament finals. Much more was at stake in the game than the Olympic laurel, for they knew the Hubrists and their fans would become intolerable if the Hubrists won again.

Most people were puzzled the Twins chose to start retired water-cart puller Terence Mulholland, affectionately knows as "Geras," as "pik-tur" that day, given that in his previous starts, Geras had been, metaphorically speaking, chained to a cliff while an eagle ate out his liver. And certainly during the first "epoch," when Geras had runners on first and third bak with nobody "nek," it seemed the game was going to be an unfortunate repeat of the previous days' first-epoch "ass-whupping."

But good ol' Geras showed he still had some life in him yet, and after the second epoch, he began to pitch like the fabled Mycenaean pik-tur Johannos Santanapopadapolis (without all the strikeouts or the tremendous hotness). The Hubrists pik-tur, meanwhile, seemed like he was ready to throw in the toga early, walking batters with the alacrity of Zeus crashing an all-female symposium. But, tragically, every time the Twins came to the "platter" with "runners in scoring position," the batters turned promptly to stone, their faces frozen for eternity in a mask of horror. Why? Could it have been the fault of the Hubrists' mascot, Golly the Gorgon? Or could it have been simply the fault of the legendary offensive lugubriousness of the '48 Twins?

Truly, it was a painful game to watch for Twins fans. Again and again, their star hitters came up with run-scoring opportunities but were transformed into hideous statues and had to be dragged off the field by the Herculean grounds crew. By the sixth epoch, they only had one animate player left—Jose Offermanos, a Minotaur-breeder from the Trojan foothills. So with two on and two nek, Offermanos walked up to the platter. Twins fans could barely watch—they'd seen this tragic drama before, but Offermanos surprised everyone by lining a nice double to the eastern field fence, giving the Twins two points and tying the game.

The Hubrists, they were ready to come back—if only old Geras would let them. But ah! Their ambitions were thwarted—nothing would work for them, not ritual sacrifice, not rally caps, not even a lead-off single in the ninth, for the great reliever BooBerrious came on and caused the Hubrists to sit down. Bitch.

It was then that the miracle happened. Was it the inspiration of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, or simply of Batphrodite, blogger of love? We cannot know. All we know for sure is, in the tenth epoch, the Hubrists beaned Lew Ford in the head (starting the ancient sport of Dodgeball which premiered two Olympiads later) and the statue of Cordel Koskos suddenly came magically to life! Reanimated, Koskos strode up to the platter, and, Boom!, he hit the ball to Thermopylae, to give the Twins two points. Then came on the mighty Twin closer, a member of the noble family of Choculous, to set the Hubrists down.

It was truly a great victory for the Twins, who had suffered much at the expense of these Cleveland barbarians. While the latter team had the better tournament record, the Twins ended up with the final victory that led to the "division championship" and title of "supreme baseball team of all time." Truly, the Bakbal tables had turned.