Twins at Seattle. Twins 7, Mariners 3. (14 innings, 4.75 hours.)
Oh, my friends.
Batgirl is under the weather, possibly because of a bad bag of Big League Chew. The chew itself was green around the edges, but BG thought that was a sour apple flavor. BG is very fond of sour apple flavors, especially when they come in the form of appletinis, which are even better than DQ Blizzards, under certain circumstances. For while you can not down five or six Blizzards after a soul-suckingly depressing night of baseball, a few appletinis really takes the edge off, and pretty soon you might not remember that the Twins were shut down by Joel Pineiro, who only avoided a trip to the minors by the grace of Ryan Franklin's wee little steroid suspension. (Curiously, Pineiro was seen giving Franklin a Strawberry Cheesequake Blizzard just before the suspension. Could it have had some extra flavoring? The Stanazalol makes it go down easier.)
But BG digresses. The Big League Chew didn't really taste like green apple—it tasted a little more like some combination of Brillo pad and elastic death, but Batgirl, well, she kept chewing in hopes that a delicious green apple flavor would come out.
Naïve? Possibly. Stupid? Most likely. Fatal? Potentially. But sometimes, when faced with a giant bag full of cadaver-flavored chewing gum—despite all evidence that you should put on a yellow chemical suit and stick the thing in a biohazard waste can and call the special biohazard guys and have them take it far, far, away—you just open the pack and start chewing away.
And sometimes, when faced with a baseball team who couldn't hit BatMom toked up on catnip, when you know that each game is going to be an exercise in cadaver-flavored agony, when you can only watch in horror as the .500 mark approaches like a great big donkey toot, you just sit down in front of the TV at game time, open the bag, and start chewing.
The thing with Big League Chew is it takes a really, really long time to get through a bag, even one that hasn't turned, especially when it's a west coast game, and as you near the end, your jaw hurts and you begin to hallucinate slightly, and then it's not even the end because the bag magically replenishes itself and you just keep on chewing, even though it Hurts. So. Bad. and then you hallucinate even more and when you’re hallucinating you see Kent Hrbek who floats in on his magic potato and spreads love and good cheer and cheeseburgers and fishing lures wherever he goes, and you say, "Hrbie, honey, my jaw is sore and my teeth are rotting out and my tummy don't feel so good and I don't have any feeling in the left side of my body and I think I've been poisoned and maybe I'm chewing on shredded corpse, plus we only have Mike Redmond on the bench and Matt LeCroy is just trying to hurt me, I mean you don't strand that many runners on base in one night unless it's personal, and whatever I did I'm sorry, okay, I'm sorry, just please can we win this game so I can go to bed?"
And Kent Hrbek looks down from his giant potato and shakes his head and says, "Dude, Batgirl, what the hell's in that Big League Chew?" Then he floats away, singing Chacarron in a falsetto.
Then it's the 14th inning, you've chewed on just about the whole ass-bag, your mouth tastes like foot, you're upchucking up, down, and all over the town, you're dehydrated and you're pretty sure you're going to die soon, and you turn your head up to the heavens and you pray.
Batgirl did. No, she did not pray to God, but rather she prayed to Tony Gwynn. Because humanity is divided over the existence of God, but everybody knows there's a Tony Gwynn. And he is beneficent and omnipotent. And so Batgirl says, "Please Tony Gwynn, let us win this game. Please. Please?"
And then Batgirl takes one more bite of shredded ass-gum and something amazing happens, something truly remarkable, something which can only be ascribed to the wonder that is Tony Gwynn.
She tastes green apple.
Was it real? Another hallucination? BG doesn't know, but damn it tasted good.