Cleveland at Twins. Twins 9, Toons 0.

One day, long long ago, a young Goober was riding his red dirt bike from the park to the BatFamily Manse, perhaps with a Hoth Han Solo in his pocket, when he had a startling realization: Someday, he said to himself, it is going to be 8/8/88. And that is going to be super cool. (We cannot establish the exact time of this epiphany, but we feel for certain that it was somewhere between July 7, 1977 and August 8, 1988.) There and then, Goober decided that when that singular day came about, he would celebrate in the best way he knew how—by eating a cupcake. Thus was launched Cupcake Day.

Now, when 8/8/88 rolled around, Goober was off on some wilderness adventure and he forgot all about Cupcake Day. (Even if he had remembered, they don't have cupcakes in the wilderness, and if you do happen to find one, you totally do not want to eat it. ) It was not until somewhere around 10/21/92 (though that is only an approximation) that Goober remembered Cupcake Day and the lost dreams of his youth, and he vowed that on 9/9/99 he would honor the day as God intended.

Only he forgot again. He then proceeded to forget Cupcake Day on 1/1/01, 2/2/02, 3/3/03, and 4/4/04 and he probably would have gone on forgetting had he not shared his childhood vision with Sooz earlier this year. Sooz promptly marked her calendar—and thus Cupcake Day, once a glimmer in a young boy's imagination, became a glorious reality.

But Goober was not the only man to live a long-deferr'd dream today, for surely Mr. Brad Radke had once, as a starry-eyed child with big bouffant-y hair and an Endor Han Solo in his pocket , looked at the heavens and said, "Someday it will be 5/5/05, and on that day I will pitch as though I have been touched by the gods, and then I will have a cupcake."

I do not know if today Brad Radke remembers that young child with a dream of pitching domination and delicious chocolaty cupcakes, but I believe that child was inside him today, though perhaps not in the same way as the cupcake. As Radke strode out to the mound in the ninth with a two-hit shutout and a Santana-esque line for the game, fans at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome (including Goober and Batgirl, thanks to the awesome generosity of some BatFriends) were on their feet applauding as if Brad Radke had invented Cupcake Day, nay invented the cupcake itself.

But what he'd done was better than cupcakes—yes, I said it—a virtuoso performance that showed us all why Johan Santana is our number-two starter, on a day that the Twins desperately needed a reminder that they are the ones to beat in the division. A much-loved teammate had had a crisis this week, the weight of which was borne by the entire team as they struggled through the first two games of this series. Both games could have easily been won, both were rather depressingly lost by an ineffectual and seemingly disengaged offense that turned every at bat with runners in scoring position into a mini-lesson on the major tenets of nihilism. [BG—ixnay on the osophyphilay! It's Cupcake Day!—Goober.]

And today, well, it seemed it might go the same way, for as masterfully as Brad Radke was pitching, the Twins batters were flaming out—we had runners in scoring position in each of the first three innings, with no score to show for it.

Now, perhaps one day, long ago, there was a young boy with a terrible hat-wearing disorder and a cheeseburger in his pocket who looked up into the heavens and said, "Someday it will be 5/5/05, and on that day I will pitch against my mortal enemies and make a jackass out of myself, and then I will have a cupcake."

Yes, ladies and gentlemen and Bitch Sox fans, Captain Cheeseburger Sabathia had a dream, too, and on this day, this day when dreams come true, he fulfilled it. His meltdown began in the fifth inning, with a lead-off homer by Jason Bartlett, at which point the Twins seemed to remember themselves again and the word spread through the dugout—"Come on guys, it's Cupcake Day! We can do this!" Then it was Big LeRoy's turn. One base at a time, Big LeRoy made his slow but certain assault on home plate as he, Sweetcheeks, and Junior Spiffee hit back-to-back singles. Then, with the bases loaded, DJ Cuddles came up to the plate and he whispered to himself, "Nothing is anywhere simply present or absent," and, "Gosh, cupcakes are good," and he drew a bases-loaded walk. A walk! Ah, what a glorious thing, especially for Big LeRoy who could then trot home easily, like a farm lass on her way back from market on a gentle spring day. A Naked-Batting-Practice single and a Rivas walk later, the Twins had managed to score three times with the bases loaded in one inning, and Captain Cheeseburger was sent to the showers to eat his cupcake and think about what he had done.

The Twins ended that inning with a 5-0 lead and Radke, who has never had so much run support in his life, continued to work his magic. But the Twins weren't done, oh no, for it was Cupcake Day, and there was a Big LeRoy homer in the 6th, then a 3-run inning in the 7th, and, and—

And, well, this brings up an issue I'd like to raise. Say you have 12 cupcakes. Obviously, you would be a very lucky Batling, but that's not the point. The point is that with those cupcakes, you have a choice—you can eat all those cupcakes at once, or you can put some aside for later. Now, it might seem the prudent thing to do is eat every last cupcake while the cupcake getting is good, but Batgirl proposes that a few days down the road, you'll find yourself desperately jonesing for a delicious cupcake and you'll be s.o.l. But what if, instead, you had saved some cupcakes? What if, instead of scoring 9 cupcakes in a day when your pitcher is making like Jesus (for surely Jesus was a control pitcher) and only 2 cupcakes on a day when the pitcher is feeling all too human, you can spread out the cupcakes and then everybody wins. Or, actually, no, just the Twins. But that's all that matters.

But I digress. The point is, one run would have been sufficient today, for Brad Radke gave the kind of performance you always remember, the kind you tell your kids about. "I was there on Cupcake Day '05," you might say. "And it was glorious."