Game 14: Twins @ Angels

Time: 8:38 Central. Vegas Line: -130 LAA / MIN +110

Weather: 72° at first pitch, no wind, no rain, no wildfires

Opponent’s SB site: Halos Heaven

TV: BS North. Radio: Is there anybody awake out there

Today’s Angels Angels of Anaheim starter, Andrew Heaney, fits the profile of an innings-eater in some ways (throws a low-90s sinking fastball, goofy breaker and effective change), although he’s generally not someone who pitches a lot of innings (injury history). His projected opponent, “alternate site” callup Lewis Thorpe, has a somewhat similar lefty arsenal, has also faced injury, but is younger and a little less accurate. SSS digits (2020 for Heaney, MLB career for Thorpe):

It is basically required that whenever the Twins start an Australian pitcher, we play a hilariously dated commercial for the now-defunct Australian car manufacturer, Holden:

I thought we might try a little something new on Fridays this year, and see how it works: who wants to share pictures/stories of their baseball stuff?

The idea is, anyone interested could send me a picture and description of some baseball item they love. It could be a jersey, a game ball, a card, anything. Just nothing Yankees (unless the Yanquis lost).

I’ll get this started.

In 2002, I had fully caught “Get To Know ‘Em” fever. As a fairly rootless recent transplant to the Twin Cities, and someone with rather unfortunate memories of my boyhood baseball love getting Mean Parented away, enjoying those (then) no-name Twins riding to a division title was really exciting on many levels.

So I decided to buy a Twins jersey. And one without a player name on the back (they get traded), still, a fairly nice one. I took a bus to the MOA (site of a former Twins stadium, as y’all know, but I didn’t at the time).

At this time, the MOA had two sporting-apparel stores. I went to one store, found a jersey I liked, walked to the other store for comparison shopping, they had the same one. Easy! Just buy it where it was cheapest. But I’d forgotten the price at the first store.

So I went back. And I was pretty sure the price at the other store was a little cheaper. But I wasn’t sure.

Anybody sensing a little OCD, here?

Obviously, the wisest thing would have been to just borrow a piece of paper and a pen from a cashier. But I felt silly about asking. So I bounced back and forth a few times, finally gave up and bought one, then carried it + the price tag to the other store to see.

Of course, they were priced exactly the same.

Anyhoo, I’ve worn this to every Twins game I’ve attended since. I’ve bleached mustard spots out of it. I love this jersey. It reminds me of the place I landed where my life went from “rootless” to “getting pretty happily rooted.”

SO..... if anybody wants to share similar stories (they don’t have to be as long, nor do they have to be specifically about Twins stuff), send them to: twinsbrewer@gmail.com. Put “TwinkieTown baseball memorabilia” or some such in the subject line.

Be aware! This isn’t my regular email address. I’ll only be checking it for this. If it starts getting flooded with spam, I’ll just ignore the thing. (For hating my writing, my regular email is the normal one, not hard to find on this site if you look.)

We’ll see if anyone’s interested. If not, no big deal!