Game 57: Twins at Royals

Time: 7:10 Central. Vegas Line: -122 KC / MIN +112

Weather: Hot but pleasant, 84° at first pitch

Opponent’s excellent SB site: Royals Review

TV: BS North. Radio: Tune right in, you may find the love you lost

The title of “most disappointing 2021 Twins acquisition” is probably already engraved on a plaque reading “Alex Colomé,” but Brad Shoemaker gets something resembling honorable mention in a season Randy Dobnak recently summed up thusly: “it sucks.”

His mound co-duelist is one Brad Keller, a 25-year-old sinker/slider guy whose sinkers have been unluckily made into base hits this season. A fun thing about Keller is that his goofy jersey nickname was “Yeldarb.” Apparently that’s how he wrote it when he was little. Kids do things like this. Digits:

Keller is from Flowery Branch, GA, a rural-y area northeast of Atlanta. About the most interesting things on the Wiki page for Flowery Branch are that Phil Niekro once lived there (in retirement?) and that it has a street named Jim Crow. “Jim” was the nickname of local farmer Glennon C. Crow, a well-liked person, and the town of Flowery Branch is renaming the street “G. C. Crow” for obvious reasons.

Our continuing doomed series in “Stories About Baseball Stuff I Own” isn’t stuff this week, per se, and I don’t own it, but somebody does. It’s a parrot I encountered recently which answers to “T.C.”

This parrot lives in a Twin Cities nursing home, and says some usual parrot things such as “hello.” When I met it, it was regularly doing the “da-da-da-da-da-da” whistle, the one where the crowd responds “chaaarge!” I tried filming it, and the parrot became a little camera-shy until the end:

Note that the brief, haughty whistle finally added by this parrot is, in fact, in the correct key for “chaaarge!” Or close enough.

As always, you can share your own images/descriptions of baseball items in your possesion by emailing twinsbrewer@gmail.com, or yahoo.com, or c/o Santa Claus at the North Pole because NONE OF YOU WILL DO THESE THINGS AND I’M VERY DISAPPOINTED