Cleveland at Twins. Twins 4, Indians 1.

Batgirl can't quite remember the provenance of all this exuberant nose-touching the Twins are doing. You know what she means—whenever someone does something good they look into the dugout and tap their noses. Jeb says it comes from Mike Redmond, who with runners in scoring position is fond of yelling, "SMELL 'EM." This is all fun and games until you consider Mr. Redmond's nudist predilections.

Regardless, while there was a lot of smelling going on around the Dome this weekend, it was more of the nose-holding variety. That is the sort of thing that makes a (bat) girl end up in a hole. How the team that accomplished the preternatural miracle of winning two games from the Tigers could suddenly suck beyond all recognition is a great mystery. Batgirl thinks Lew Ford, desperate to contribute to the team while he was on the DL, came up with a plan. He would build a wayback machine and journey through time to kidnap last year's 3-5 starters, install them in the rotation, and then all would be well again in Twinsland. (He, naturally, didn't think of the consequences of his actions, as any Star Trek viewer knows, once Silva '05 and Silva '06 ran into each other in the clubhouse, the whole space time continuum would be destabilized and one would have to give up himself to save the other and the whole world and with our luck it would be the one with the low ERA.) Well, Lew built his machine and, as these things go, something went very wrong with the flux capacitor and what emerged in the clubhouse Thursday morning was last year's offense. Naturally, it took a few days to figure things out, though they should have had some clue when Justin Morneau got boils and Little Nicky Punto was heard humming "My Humps." Needless to say, once they did figure out what had happened, Lew got benched. Again.

Well, it took some doing to right things again and there was a moment where the thing threatened to reverse itself and suck in Brad Radke all the way to last year, who hung onto the clubhouse towel racks for dear life, shouting SWEET JESUS NO I AM NOT GOING BACK THERE, and from the ethereal distance Christopher Lloyd shouted, "Then pitch, my good man, pitch like you've never pitched before!" and Bradke held onto his hair and closed his eyes tight and said, "There's no place like home, there's no place like home," and the flux capacitor exploded and all was back to normal.

Mostly. As you may expect, the explosion left a rift in the fabric of time that lingered in the clubhouse. "Do you see that?" Juan Rincon said to Pat Neshek. "That's a portal that will take you all the way back to last year."

"Cool!" said Neshek.

"No, no, it's horrible! Horrible! You must stay far far away, my young friend, or else all your worst nightmares will come true."

But before tonight's game, Johan Santana called the team together in front of the rift. "You see this?" he said, speaking loudly over the giant sucking sound. "This great big hole wants to take us back to last year. And we have been afraid of it—yes, I see it in your eyes, Justin Morneau and Michael Cuddyer and Little Nicky Punto. But we must not be afraid. Together, we are stronger than all the sucking forces in the world!"

"Yeah!" shouted the Twins.

"Now, go on," exhorted Johan. "Look into this horrible abyss. Gaze at your fears, then scoff at them, laugh at them, spit in it if you must. For it is 2006, and we do not suck anymore."

Well one by one the Twins lined up to stare into the abyss, to confront it, to mock it and eventually—yes, to overcome. And if the 2005 Twins found great loogies being hocked at them from above, they surely did not notice, for they had their own problems. And if Carlos Silva tried surreptitiously to crawl in, well, can you blame him? When the last player was done, the Twins rose up and stormed the field, the sucking sound all but forgotten until after the game when after all the players had left and Mike Redmond had finished sweeping and prepared to shut off the lights for the night, gazed at the abyss, put his finger on his nose and said, "Smell This."

BatNote: Tonight, Baseball Tonight will be featuring Twins All-Time Web Gems. Thanks to Will for the heads up! Please note that in the clip Matt Weiner refers to Justin Morneau as our catcher. And they say we get no respect...