Baseball Dreaming
By: Nick Lee
Tags: Illustration, Minnesota Twins, Sketch, Baseball, 28 Day Challenge

Note: This is day eleven of a personal 28-day challenge I’m setting for myself. One sketch and a bit of writing every day in February. This one I dictated, so… we’ll see!

When I think about my life as a Minnesota sports fan, which has now dragged on for nearly four decades, the only team that is ever brought me any semblance of real, actual joy is the Minnesota Twins. I know the Minnesota Golden Gophers have won a national championship or two — in hockey anyway — but they are not my team and I did not go to college there, so may they forever lose every single game in heartbreaking fashion.

I was only 11 years old when the Twins last won the World Series, the perfect age to witness your favorite team winning a championship. But it’s been a long, long, long time since then. Now that I am an old-ish kind of man I have found myself gravitating toward baseball. The Vikings? They let me down every single year. The Timberwolves? I’ve never been able to get excited about them. Well, at least since 2004. And the Wild are too new to really get into. If they were North Stars, sure, but they’re not.

No, it’s just the Twins anymore and I must admit that I am the biggest Twins fan that I know. I read blogs about them on a daily basis. I listen to podcasts about them on a weekly basis. I follow every game, read every box score, I’m fully versed in the farm system, and if they ever made a deep playoff run I would be the first person to be screaming at my TV. You know, the opposite of the Super Bowl.

Us old-timers are excited at the napping possibilities that baseball brings.

As another spring training is about to kick off, I find myself as compelled as ever to follow the team’s every move. I know spring training games don’t actually mean anything, but I will be scouring the results as fervently as if they were game seven of the ALCS. But I have to admit that I don’t actually know who all I’m cheering for this year.

There have been plenty of good Twins players to come and go in the lean years. I’ve loved many of them. Kirby Puckett, Joe Mauer, Johan Santana. They were all great and I guess that’s the problem with the Twins coming into the season. Who are you cheering for anymore?

Their most exciting acquisitions in the off-season are names that I was not familiar with before they got here. I’m supposed to cheer for them because they are the most capable of players on the team, but for the first few weeks I am going to be just as lost as if I was cheering for the Rockies. If the front office would ever pony up the cash to acquire top-shelf free agents I would have no trouble with it. But we always scrape the bottom of the barrel because small-market teams just have to be cheap, I guess.

I’d love to be able to include some deep baseball insights here, but the fact is I get that from elsewhere. There is something very nice about following the same team day day in and day out for six months of the year. Seven or eight months, depending on how deep your team goes in the playoffs. (A guy can dream, right?) There’s a steadfastness that carries you through the spring and the summer into the fall, and by then you’re ready for the holidays. So one more time I’ll hop on the bandwagon, put on my TC cap, and enjoy the life of a baseball fan.