Twins 6, Tigers 2.

Batgirl is suffering from some serious Batjetlag, so you must forgive her if things seem a little disjointed. It's nighttime now in Moldova—normally Team Batgirl would be just ending an evening of drinking fine Moldovan wine, engaging in some clacile basket weaving, and watching the ceremonial sass dance.

In other words, it's time for Batgirl to go to bed, or at least so her body says, yet while the sun may have set in the former Soviet Republics, it is high in the sky in the wilds of Minneapolis and Batgirl wants a Diet Coke. Bad.

The point is, Batgirl barely knows her own name right now and is having strange hallucinations, including seeing something about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes being engaged, which is obviously wrong because a) ick and b) didn't Katie end up with Dawson? In Albania, they have a whole channel devoted to Dawson's Creek reruns and a theme park set up to look just like Capeside down to the Capeside Creamery, the Peach Pit, and the Hungry Diner with that hunky Luke pouring coffee. It was to here that Team Batgirl would often lead field trips for the sick children of that country, those who could get out of their hospital beds that is.

Needless to say, the days of our journey were long and the work hard, though rewarding. It must be said that in the beginning, we saw ourselves as givers, as healers—we embraced our roles, of course; it's why we had come. But we were so arrogant, so foolish. For we would soon learn that we were mere students and the children the teachers.

You see, every once in a while Goober would hook up a complicated inter-tron system using the phalange from his Blackberry, a wire hanger, and a goat, and he would check in on the Twins and report back. I must admit that at first we thought his phalange was broken for we could not believe what we were hearing. Seven runs in the what inning? Soy Cheese Romero did what? Glenn who? But gradually it all became clear to us and we realized something terrible: we had erred. Team Batgirl had erred. Team Batgirl had left the country in hopes of making the world a better place but, in their starry-eyed idealism, they had looked too far up to the heavens and forgotten the very earth under their feeties. They had failed the Batlings, failed the Twins, and everything was going straight to Hell.

(Which, incidentally, has its own theme park in the Croatian city of Korcula.)

Things were said. Feelings were hurt. Teeth were gnashed and hair pulled. And on that day, on that horrible day when we realized just what was happening during our absence, our hearts were not in our humanitarian work. Ah, yes, it is horrible to say—but surely, here, with you, Batgirl can be honest. She must be honest. Indeed, when we got to the children's ward of the Lake Snagov hospital in Romania—so close to the purported burial place of one Vlad the Impaler, also known as Count Dracula, who would sneak into bedrooms at night and suck the sass right out of a gal, and now we sleep safe in our beds but does Dracula ever really stay buried? I ask you?—our hearts were not in it. And when Batgirl was sitting on the bed of a young suspiciously sass-deficient lass with two puncture wounds in her neck, she found she had no sass left to give. And Batgirl began to weep.

"What is it? What is wrong?" asked the lass, her brown eyes wide as the Wallachian moon.

"I am so sorry," Batgirl said, in Romanian. "My heart is heavy today."

Well, pretty soon the whole story came out, and the poor sass-deficient girl, who has suffered so much, took Batgirl's hand in her own.

"In my village," she said, "we have a song for times like these."

And then, she began to sing.

To every season -turn turn turn
There is a sucking time -turn turn turn
And a time for all the ways there are to blow.

A time to pop up, a time to strike out
A time for a wild pitch, a time for a passed ball
A time to give up seven runs in the ninth
A time to serve a pitch up over the Berlin wall.

Well, a tear dripped down Batgirl's cheek. This dated Romanian folk song had taught her so much, as had the little girl who sang it.

"Thank you, little girl," Batgirl said. "I have learned so much from you. Truly, you are the teacher, and I am the student."

"It is my pleasure," said the girl. "Now, do you have Joe Mauer's e-mail address?"

Well, Batgirl did not, but when she met up with Team Batgirl at the end of the day outside of the Troilus and Cressida theme park she sang the girl's song and the tears began to flow then. It was not our fault—it was just the sucking time; a little late this year, perhaps, it caught us unawares. But we need not be afraid. We must simply look the sucking time in the eye and say, "I name you, Sucking Time, and by naming you, you lose your power!"

"How long do you think it will go on?" asked Jeb, in Romanian.

"It usually lasts 'til after the All-Star Break," said Sooz, in Uzbek.

"Yes," said Batgirl. "We have a long road ahead of us to hoe. But, as the Belarusians say, I think we shall come out of it better people, though our hoes may be dingy and worn. And by the end of the journey, the hoes, they will thank us, for a hoe is not made to sit on the shelf and look pretty, but rather it is there to, well, hoe. So, let's hoe, my friends! Let's hoe!"

So we came home, ready to face whatever the sucking time had in store for us. And, oh, we needed our garden implements today, for the Tigers, they had brought out their brooms, and the Twins were looking awfully dusty. But Carlos Silva as everyone knows has a very full gardening shed and he strode to the mound and announced, "Baseball players of Detroit, this may be the sucking time, but I am Carlos Silva and I am here to pitch with frightening accuracy. Yes, I am here to hoe you down."

Whether that was a terrible pun or merely a problem with English, we'll never know, but did it matter? For Silva pitched another complete game—though this time it took him ninety-one whole pitches to do so—and never got to a three ball count. Meanwhile, the Twins offense—well, it still blew but it blew productively. In the first inning, Jacque Jones came up the bases loaded and two outs and promptly struck out—yet the ball got away and pitcher Jason Johnson who, apparently still stunned by the news of Tom and Katie, forgot to cover home and two runs scored. And then Matthew LeCroy, he popped out, but the Tigers, still stunned by Jason Johnson, didn't catch the ball and two more runs scored. Yes, four runs were scored in the first innings, but this time they were all by the Twins, and that is cause, my friends, for Moldovan dancing.