Kansas City at Twins. Royals 10, Twins 6.

Quickly, quickly, all those Royals homers hypnotized Batgirl into intense sleepiness. Like sheep jumping over fences, like cows jumping over the moon, the ball kept sailing over the wall, one dinger, two dingers, three dingerzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Really, if you can't sleep some night, you should try it, just close your eyes and replay the 6th inning of this game—unless you are Travis Bowyer, in which case I wouldn't recommend it. If you are Travis Bowyer I recommend getting the memory chip removed. There, there. You won’t feel a thing. It's all going to be okay.

Anyway, as regular readers know, Batgirl played volleyball her sophomore year of high school, and if you have read closely you may have realized that her team was not very good. Batgirl's JV volleyball team made the Kansas City Royals look like the St. Louis Cardinals, the problem being that none of us knew how to play volleyball. We certainly never won a match, and Batgirl is unsure whether or not we even won a game, though Batgirl can say with some certainty that we did occasionally score points.

Probably.

Now, BatDad was a high-powered executive and rather busy with myriad better things to do than come to watch his daughter get hit on the head with volleyballs. And yet, BatDad came to every single one of Batgirl's volleyball games and he cheered his BatDad heart out, though for what BG cannot imagine. Batgirl is not sure, but she thinks this must have been even more painful than all the junior high choir concerts put together. (Though, actually for one high school concert, BatDad sat in front of the video camera, and when Batgirl's choir watched the video the next day, we got to watch BatDad nodding off through the whole thing. So I guess he didn't suffer that much.)

But the point is that he came, and Batgirl still doesn't know why, but she does know that what he experienced watching those games was something akin to what we're going through now as the Twins Quest for .500. There were moments of excitement, when Batgirl landed a serve or actually bumped the ball with her arms instead of her face, but mostly it was a bunch of pubescent girls in kneepads and polyester standing around while the ball dropped—plunk—right in the middle of the floor.

The point is, you and I, we are the only ones left. The lights are out and it is cold in here and I am so very, very hungry. Every once in awhile I think someone is coming to save me—I see a man with a blanket and some vegetarian Dome Dogs and he is smiling at me and he says, "Shh, shhh, it's going to be all right now, I am here to help you," but then I blink and he is gone. I do not care. I do not want to be saved—not yet. For these are my Twins and if they are going to spend the last games of the season getting hit in the nads with volleyballs, Batgirl will be there to watch every last bounce. For she is Batgirl, she is a Twins fan, and she needs serious and immediate psychological help.

Dingers for Dollars Update: Oh, sweet Jesus, some dingers! LNP and Li'l Rod both went long tonight. Those homers were the last two of our very generous matching grant, and including some LNP homer bonuses, that makes:

$ 3232 for hurricane relief.

Thank you to Little Nicky Punto and Li'l Rod for hitting DINGERS FOR DOLLARS.