Cleveland at Twins. Indians 5, Twins 4.

Okay, look. Guys. Guys! You know how you guys stranded a lot of runners with the bases loaded during the Bitch Sox series and it was kind of cute. Oh, ha ha, look at the Twins loading the bases and then stranding all the runners! Ooh, bases loaded, time to hit into a double play! Yes! Good job! Because we'd hate if you did something else like, you know, strike out or fly out or GET A FREAKIN' HIT.

So, yes, it was cute way back then—cute like Lew Ford tripping over first base trying to run out a grounder cute. And then last week it became a little less cute, cute maybe like Lew Ford thinking he'd grounded out on a foul ball and running back to the dugout, which is sort of cute and sort of pathetic, too. And then on Sunday when we left the bases loaded to give Johan K. Santana a two-hit loss, well, it was like Lew Ford bunting a ball off his face, which is to say extremely painful to watch and leaving a huge hideous disfiguring scar. And today, well, the metaphor came to life when Mr. Ford left the bases juiced in the bottom of the ninth, and it wasn't cute at all my friends, no it was not, in fact it was the very first thing Mr. Ford ever did in his entire life that wasn't even the eensiest weensiest bit cute.

Not to blame Lew for today's loss, for he was merely caught up in this whole vast bases-loaded suckery that has infested the team like so many kitty blackheads. We'd put up the surrender flag so many times with the bases loaded today that by the time Lew was up with two outs in the ninth, there was nothing else he could have done—to have actually converted would have torn the space-time continuum and then you end up with like 17 different Enterprises and Worf slipping from one to another and he never knows where he is and he can't get back until all the Enterprises converge on one spot and they all blow up and Worf finally gets back to the real Enterprise and finds that Deanna Troi is sure looking hot in that extremely tight uniform. They're totally married in the other universes anyway, which was cool but the one where Picard was killed by the Borg totally sucked because what's the point without Picard? So, see, you shouldn't play with this stuff, and if anyone knew the consequences, Lew did. He wasn't going to have Captain Picard's death on his head, nosiree Bob Wickman.

So, what I'm saying here is that we have a problem. And I don't think it's a skill problem or even an ass-bat problem—for the team actually leads the league in batting with runners in scoring position. What I think has happened is we have transcended the actual, the physical, and we have gone to the spiritual, to the metaphysical, nay, the theosophical. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "Beware when the great God lets loose the bases loaded." Or Immanuel Kant, "All knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to understanding, and ends with the bases loaded." Or Kierkegaard: "Anxiety is neither a category of necessity nor a category of freedom; it is entangled freedom, where freedom is not free in itself but entangled, not by necessity, but by coming to the plate with the bases loaded." Or Sartre: "Hell is having the bases loaded."

I mean, if you have a Minnesota Twin in a box and he comes up to bat with the bases loaded there is a 50% chance he will strike out and a 50% chance he will hit into a double play. So the question is, before you've opened the box, the Twin could have either struck out or hit into a double play, and you will not find out the answer until you've opened the box. So it can be said that, until the box has opened, the Twin has both struck out and hit into a double play, a paradox that quantum mathematicians have been trying to understand for decades.

Or, for a contrasting view, the Uncertainty Principle says that by observing a Twin coming to bat with the bases loaded, you have changed the experiment. It is impossible to say what might happen when a Twin goes to bat without you watching, because you are intrinsically part of the situation. Therefore, when a Twin grounds into a double play with the bases loaded, it could be said to be your fault.

Clearly, this isn't something we can just fix with some extra BP, nor am I sure that pre-post-structuralist philosophers are really going to help us here. (Nietzsche was a notorious Bitch Sox fan, which explains a lot.) What I think we need to do is explode the whole concept of "batting" with the "bases loaded" and how the Twins "totally suck at it." It's a construct. See, no matter what Saussure says, the relationship between the batter and the runners on base is not fixed at all, but rather is entirely arbitrary, and just because every Twins player has completely pissed out with the bases loaded so far does not mean that that way is somehow "true"—only perhaps privileged by the dominant culture. Yes, the relationship between the text and context has created the appearance of meaning, but it's as transitory as the location of Matt LeCroy's belt buckle. In other words, it's all an illusion—you, me, Immanuel Kant, and Lew Ford. And the next time a Twin goes to bat with the bases loaded, all he needs to do is repeat after noted sabermetrician Jacque Derrida: "Nothing is anywhere simply present or absent."

Amen.