Twins Game (Kind Of)

Last night, I went to the Twins game with my mom and sister. The three of us had gone a couple of weeks ago on Mother's Day, as well. For that game, we had really great seats along the third base line. Since it was my mom's first time at the new stadium, though, she wanted to get up and explore a bit. During the seventh inning, we got up and walked around and ended up watching the top of the ninth inning from way up in foul territory. My mom really liked being up that high, though, so for the game last night,we got tickets way up in the upper deck along the first base line.

The game started out a little shaky. Actually, before the game started out a little shaky. My sister came home from work early the day before because she was feeling sick, so we weren't sure if she'd even be able to make it to the game. She felt better the day of the game, so we figured it would be okay. However, once we got to the stadium, she started to feel pretty sick again. I think she made it through the first inning before she decided she wouldn't be able to stay for the whole game. She left and walked to a friend's house who drove her home.

Before we even got to the stadium, we got to the parking ramp. We had to take an elevator to the street so we could get to the stadium, obviously. We got into the elevator, along with a bunch of other people, and were waiting for the doors to close when a man came sprinting over. He was comin' in hot and a few people inside the elevator reached out to keep the doors from closing. "There's always room for one more," the late comer said with a smile. That's completely false. In this instance, there was barely room for one more, so he gets a pass, but to say there's always room for one more? Totally not true. A couple seconds after that happened, a rather large couple came into view. Nobody made an attempt to hold the doors because there wasn't any room. Mr. Largeman thought there was, though, and jammed his arm in between the doors to keep them from closing. I thought for sure he'd realize there wasn't room for him and his lady once the doors were completely opened, but he didn't. Mr. and Mrs. Largeman waddled in, putting everyone in an uncomfortably tight squeeze. I did not hear that one guy say there was room for one more at this point.

The game, itself, was pretty bad. Our pitcher couldn't throw strikes, which meant the game went by very slowly. It was cold, too. My mom had said we'd be cold, but I thought I'd be okay with a sweatshirt under my jersey, and was very adamant about it. There's nothing worse than arguing over something with one of your parents and then being completely wrong about it, so I said I wasn't cold at all. I mean, I wasn't freezing, but I was pretty chilly. After the seventh inning, my mom (and secretly me) wanted to move around so we could warm up a little bit. We walked around and ultimately ended up behind the lower level seats near home plate. Here, we watched the rest of the game, which, by the way, ended with a three-run, walk-off homerun by Josh Willingham in the bottom of the ninth. It was incredible.

Perpetual Failure: Minnesota Sports

Thus far, my life as a sports fan has been nothing short of tragic. The only championship from a major pro sports team that I've witnessed was the Twins winning the World Series in 1991. I was three months old. Sure, just last year the Lynx won the WNBA title, but that just doesn't give me the same kind of excitement that I would expect from a championship. The major pro sports, I think, are football, baseball, basketball, and hockey. That means that, in order for me to witness a championship by one of my beloved Minnesota teams, either the Vikings, Twins, Timberwolves, or Wild would have to win one. The Vikings, Twins, and Wild are pretty awful, meaning the Timberwolves have the best shot at a title, though I think the Vikes will be a lot better this year (I'll get to that in a moment). You know Minnesota's sports outlook is pretty bleak when the Timberwolves have the best shot at a title. Their odds aren't good, either. They're not even decent. Sure, we've got Ricky Rubio and Kevin Love, arguably two of the best (if not the best in Kevin Love's case) at their respective positions of point guard and power forward, but outside of those two, we're not very good. Nikola Pekovic showed a lot of promise this year as the team's center, actually, so add him to the Love and Rubio group of "at-least-solid-starters. Derrick Williams showed flashes at times and, given that he was just a rookie, could end up being a very good player. The only problem is that he's more of a power forward than a small forward, and we've got the best power forward in basketball. The team desperately needs a shooting guard that can actually shoot (that seems like it should be easy to find, but apparently it's harder than it seems) and an athletic small forward. If we can get those this off-season, and if Rubio can fully recover from his knee injury, the Wolves will be a contender for a top-four spot in the west next year. Yeah, I said it.

*Sigh*... The Twins. This team is such a mess, I don't even know where to start. Yeah, we've won five of our last seven, which is good (it's actually really good. 1/3 of our wins have come in the last seven games), but frankly, we're a bad team. Without doing any research on this, I believe that Carl Pavano is the only current starter that was in the rotation at the start of the year. That's actually good because, even though all five of them were garbage, he was the best one. Consequently, I believe our starters had the highest ERA among starting rotations in baseball. Now we have three guys I've not heard of and Duensing in the rotation (I think), and I feel a lot more comfortable with that. It's not just the pitching though. Our hitting, though explosive at times, is inconsistent at best. It's unfortunate, too, because when the five guys on the team who can actually hit (Denard Span, Joe Mauer, Josh Willingham, Justin Morneau, and Ryan Doumit) are hitting well, we score a lot of runs. When they're not, though, that means it's up to guys like Alexi Casilla, Jamey Carroll, and Erik Komatsu to get hits. They can't get hits. Mauer and Morneau, though still good-very good, are shells of their former selves. If they were the Mauer and Morneau from five or six years ago, this team would be drastically better.

The definition of heartbreaker when it comes to sports has got to be the Minnesota Vikings. I mean, not last year. Last year they were pitiful. It's not like we've never been good, though. It's not even like we haven't been good recently, because we have. Remember 2009? Yeah, the 12-4, Brett-Favre-led Minnesota Vikings won the NFC North division, and should've at least made the Super Bowl. Yeah, I'm going to complain about that NFC Championship game a bit. First, though, I will reminisce. I remember week 3, Favre's last second, desperation heave to the endzone, miraculously caught by none other than Greg Lewis. I remember sprinting to my dorm room from my Monday night class to watch Favre beat the Packers on Monday Night Football. I remember all the "experts" saying the Cowboys would beat us in the Divisional round of the playoffs, their only reason being that the Cowboys won their Wild Card game. I remember saying, numerous times, "I hope we beat the Cowboys by 30, just so everyone will realize how dumb they are." I remember the Vikings winning 34-3, and the Cowboys complaining that we ran up the score. That game couldn't have been more perfect for me. Then, yes, I remember the NFC Championship game against my new-least-favorite team - the New Orleans Saints. The game in which Saints linebacker, Jonathan Vilma, offered $10,000 to whichever player knocked Favre out of the game. A sense of vindication came over me when the Saints' bounty system was discovered; I, along with many other Vikings fans, knew that the Saints players were playing dirty. Non-Vikings fans called us sore losers. What really bothers me, though, is that the referees just let that happen. They're just as pathetic as the Saints players.

That's not all with the heartbreak of the Vikings, though. Remember 1998? The '98 Vikings are the second best team to never win a Super Bowl, behind only the Patriots team that went 16-0 in the regular season. In '98, the Vikings went 15-1. Our kicker, Gary Andersen, didn't miss a single kick the whole year. That's unheard of! 100% accuracy on field goals for the whole year. Granted, we scored a ton of touchdowns, so Andersen didn't need to kick a lot of field goals. However, in the NFC Championship game that year, he not only kicked field goals, he missed field goals. We ended up losing in overtime, and seven-year-old Joe Russell cried.

Currently, the Vikings are not very good. We do, however, have the best running back in the league (Adrian Peterson) and the best defensive end in the league (Jared Allen). Christian Ponder, now that he has a decent left tackle in Matt Kalil, should improve drastically this year. An awful defensive secondary was improved (though only slightly) with the drafting of safety Harrison Smith and cornerback Josh Robinson. For some reason, no matter how bad the Vikings were the year before, I am always optimistic about the upcoming season at this time during the year. Knowing how horrible we were last year, looking at this year's schedule, I think six or seven wins is realistic. That's still not very good, but it's at least twice as good as last year.

(I know next to nothing about hockey, so I'm just going to assume the Wild will be bad again next year)

The thing about Minnesota sports teams is that we're not always bad, we're just never the best. I feel like if you want emotional balance in your life, you need to be a Minnesota sports fan. That sounds kind of crazy, given that it's pretty depressing here, sports-wise, but hear me out. You have to be optimistic to be a Minnesota sports fan. If you're pessimistic, the frustration, depression, and heart break will be too much, and you'll abandon ship. However, Minnesota sports turns anyone into a pessimist because Murphy's Law (what can go wrong will go wrong) is in full effect for every single sporting event. Actually, I guess it could go either way: you'll either find emotional balance, or you'll become a schizophrenic. Heh, well, good luck with that.