13 Truly Terrible Opening Sentences For The Story Of The 2011 Twins

With a great and obvious debt to the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest.

Somebody has to write the story of the 2011 Twins; with the season now over one-third gone, it might as well be me. I've made a start below, but none of these seem quite, well, right.

1. The 2011 Twins were like a baby deer - born in a safe place and raised by a loving family, before thrashing about awkwardly and getting hit by a passing truck.

2. Majestically, regally, breathtakingly; a bald eagle soars through the sky in exactly the way that the 2011 Twins didn't.

3. Looking back later, Frank would reminisce about the 2011 Twins season; about how he'd felt before it began, filled with hope; and about how later he'd been accosted by muggers outside of that bar in Montreal, savagely beaten, stripped of all dignity and left for dead, and how while this might be a metaphor for the season in some way, he couldn't remember because he had long-term brain damage and really couldn't create any new memories.

4. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, but mostly it was the worst of times, excepting of course the few bright spots in the 2011 Twins season that you'll get in any season of sufficient length no matter how bad a team might be; even the truly awful teams have good wins and good days, but these were few and far between, making it mostly the worst of times, as expressed by the comparative earlier in this sentence.

5. Like a long-suffering and lonely but highly-decorated Air Force colonel with no thumbs, the Twins just couldn't get a grasp on the multi-function remote control that was their 2011 season.

6. "Well," thought Richard as his car slipped into the icy depths of the ocean, bearing its unfortunate cargo along with the remnants of his old life, "at least things can't get much worse," but then he went back inside and the 2011 Twins were on.

7. The Alps of Switzerland soar majestically into the sky, which is why they're rarely contrasted with the fetid, malodorous pool of swamp water where mosquitoes breed, but unfortunately this story is about the 2011 Twins and so we don't get to hear very much about the Alps.

8. No matter where Eduardo went, he never forgot the feeling of his one torrid night with his childhood sweetheart, Rebecca; gazing into her eyes at dinner, her laugh as they ran for the taxi in the warm late-evening rain, and how when they got back to his apartment, the Twins were down 6-5 even though they had been up 5-0 when he had checked the score at the restaurant when Rebecca was in the bathroom, and Jim Hoey was in to pitch and so it was only getting worse, just like the season as a whole.

9. The 2011 Twins just seemed to have everything go wrong at the worst possible times, like the season was a new type of inter-galactic vehicle that had been designed to need minimal input from the crew, only it had launched without a proper testing cycle because the contractor was so desperate to record the sales in the current fiscal year, and therefore the crew hadn't quite been trained as much as it needed to be to pilot a new inter-galactic vehicle and so throughout the flight things had a way of going wrong, and I suppose you could say it's bad luck but really when a company chases shareholder profits instead of quality engineering this sort of thing will always happen, and so really any company board of directors needs to have more insight and expertise into the inner workings of the firm instead of just rubber-stamping decisions of the CEO, because otherwise that spaceship is going up there without a working guidance system and without a top-notch crew and frankly life isn't all Star Trek, if you know what I'm saying.

10. Many words don't describe the 2011 Twins, such as "excellent," but let's write a few of them here just to get them out of the way so that we don't use them at all during this story: incomparable, unbeatable, obsequious, feral, mountaineering, grandiloquent.

11. Dylan wondered where things might have turned around; perhaps he might have done a better job as a soldier during the great Mining War in 2147, or maybe he might have taken the opportunity to go back to Scranton to become a dental hygenist instead of becoming a soldier - either way, he reflected, a team can't win without a bullpen, which is the kind of thing the 2011 Twins knew all about but Dylan didn't quite understand because he's not in our story.

12. It was like a Taco Bell taco that has a fingernail in it, or a Ziploc bag full of beet soup with a tiny hole that you don't find out about until it's been in the fridge three weeks - things just went from bad to worse for the 2011 Twins.

13. The 2011 Twins season in a word, stank, but not like one of those so-odorous-it's-good smells like diesel fuel, but more like the smell of a ham that's been left outside under an old tire for a week, then covered in potpourri and baked for an hour too long at 425 degrees - that sort of terrible smell.