Game 45: Twins at North Ohio

First Pitch: 3:10 pm CDT

TV: Bally Sports North / MLBN

Radio: WCCO 830 / The Wolf 102.9 FM / TIBN / Audacy

Welcome back to Lasagna Town.

In the wake of back-to-back wins, Minnesota is looking to establish a bit of a streak. They’ve only strung together three victories once this season (Apr 3 - Apr 5), and as James mentioned last night, the 10-0 drubbing of Cleveland marked the club’s first consecutive wins since facing the Rangers in early May.

Hoping to stir up some good streaking mojo, I went digging around for anything on the history of streaking. Unfortunately, the internet - as it does sometimes about particularly niche topics - proved relatively uninformative. Perhaps it’s one of those things that you have to (gasp!) check out a book to learn more about.

I suppose it’s not as though streaking is an obscure subject; we’ve all seen a nationally-televised game where all of a sudden the camera seems intently focused on not returning to the field. I guess it’s more that there isn’t much to write home about. You can document the individual instances to your heart’s content, but there are only so many words to describe the event, and make it sound different from any other time it’s happened.

Even the Wikipedia article on streaking is relegated to a subsection of the broader entry for “exhibitionism,” under streaking (in sport.) It’s not to be confused with streaking (microbiology), which is “a technique used to isolated a pure strain from a single species of microorganism.” But all you microbiologists out there probably already knew that.

The earliest documented accounts that Wikipedia has on file are from the early 1970’s, with middle-aged English football spectator John Taylor earning the honor of “first streaker” at a match between Manchester City and Arsenal. If you’re like me, your first thought was that John Taylor probably wasn’t the first streaker ever; surely there must have been some crazy naked peasant charging through the Colosseum at one point or another. And we’re not even counting things like ancient Olympic athletes competing in the nude.

Probably the most entertaining account I was able to find was a 1974 cricket match — the early days of cricket streaking, for the unfamiliar — in which a streaker was chased by attending police into the men’s lavatory. Rather farcically, when the officers burst into the room, they were greeted by twenty completely clothed individuals, and no grounds on which to identify any of them as the speedy nudist, without making some very awkward requests.

Hopefully, Kenta Maeda won’t need the energy of a stripped sprinter to mow down the Cleveland lineup; nor should the Twin batting order have to take off more than just their elbow guards at the ends of plate appearances.

Today, Minnesota will be looking to establish a streak of a more metaphorical type.

GO TWINS GO!