I was stuck for three days. Since I posted last Saturday’s piece about the measuring cups, I sat down more than once trying to find this week’s idea and came up empty every time. Nothing rough, nothing I could fix later. Just nothing.
Tuesday was the first day of the baseball playoffs, and I missed nearly all of it. A long day at work ran well past quitting time. By the time I finally shut the computer down, the Yankees and Red Sox were playing, two teams I have never rooted for and never will. A few years back I saw them play at Fenway, and even without a rooting interest, there is something about that ballpark that gets its hooks in you. Watching two teams I do not like, it hit me. I needed to write about baseball.
Baseball. What it has meant, and what it still means.
Three days earlier, on a Saturday, I was sitting at a table inside Target Field with two friends I have known for most of my adult life. They both live in the Twin Cities, so getting the three of us together should really just be a matter of picking a date that works. Except this year even that turned into its own project. We started talking about it back in April, floated several dates in May, settled on two of them, and then had to change both. It was not until a few weeks before the end of the season that we finally landed on this Saturday, the second-to-last day of the regular season.
We spent part of the morning worried the game would be rained out altogether, a concern we never had in the Metrodome days. But as we have often done, we met at a bar near the stadium first to catch up before heading over. By the time we walked to the ballpark, the news was official. First pitch, scheduled for 3:10, had been pushed back to 5:10.
Our seats were in the Thrivent Club, which will always be the Delta Club to me no matter how many times the sponsor changes. Padded seats, better food, and an indoor concourse made the two-hour wait considerably easier to take. We wandered the club for a while looking at pictures and memorabilia of past Twins greats. With the rain, we needed an inside home base, so we found a spot along the third base line, got some beer and a basket of peanuts, and picked up the conversation from the bar.
We have been going to these games for nearly forty years now, and every so often we try to reconstruct how it started. None of us is entirely sure our memories match the actual facts anymore, but we all tell the story the same way, so we have decided that is close enough. We talked about the games we could still see clearly, 1987 and 1991, the two years the Twins won it all, along with a handful of others that have blurred together over four decades of sitting next to each other.
Mostly, though, we talked about our lives. What was going on, what was good, and a few things that were genuinely bothering one of us. We even got into Istanbul, the Ottoman Empire, and how it all connects to today. We brought up old romantic interests, the ones from before any of us got married, and agreed, all three of us, that we had each ended up marrying above our station. We chose wisely, and we know it.
We used to talk about what our lives would look like in thirty or forty years. Now we are living in that future, and somehow, every time the three of us are together, it still feels like we are back in college. Except the conversation has changed. We do not talk about dorm rooms anymore. We talk about what retirement might actually look like. We talk about aging parents, the ones we have already lost and what that loss meant, and the ones we are still watching decline. We talk about people we care about who are struggling, in ways none of us would have known how to talk about when we were twenty.
None of us knew it at the time, but while we stood there with our beer and our peanuts, waiting out a rain delay in Minneapolis, Justin Verlander was making the final start of his career several hundred miles away in Detroit. I did not see any of it until I got back to the hotel that night. I pulled up the video and watched it more than once.
Verlander was pulled in the sixth inning. His manager walked out of the dugout, and everyone in the ballpark assumed they knew what came next, a handshake, a pat on the back, the long walk to the dugout. Instead, the manager pointed toward the stands. Verlander’s seven-year-old daughter came sprinting onto the field and out to the mound ahead of him. Verlander, one of the most decorated pitchers of his generation, stood there and cried while his own kid hugged him goodbye in front of forty thousand people. Then he walked off holding her hand, toward his wife and the rest of his family waiting at the edge of the field.
Eventually, the rain stopped. We finished our beers, left the club, and made our way to our seats. The seats were still wet. Maybe that was another reminder that ballparks change, too. The Metrodome was gone. The Delta Club had become the Thrivent Club. The three guys walking toward their seats were pushing sixty instead of twenty.
The Twins scored first. Texas answered with four runs in the second, added a couple more, and by the middle innings the outcome was becoming fairly obvious. We left early and checked the final score the next morning. Rangers 6, Twins 2. None of us had been there to see the end of it, and none of us minded.
Maybe that is my answer. Baseball is slow, and the slowness is the point. The game unfolds in front of you instead of being handed over all at once, and you have no choice but to sit inside that pace and let it happen.
That pace gives you time. Time to see the strategy, argue about it, and talk it through with whoever is sitting next to you. For three guys who have been doing this since college, the pause between pitches has always been the whole point. It is not dead time. It is the time we actually get to spend together, second-guessing a bullpen call or talking about life, the same way we have for forty years.
Baseball is also, mostly, a sport built on failure. This season, hitters around the league managed a hit in about twenty-four percent of their official at bats. Three out of four times, the answer was no. The best players in the world fail far more often than they succeed, and the game asks them to walk back to the dugout, sit down, and do it again the next time their name is called.
I think that is why it has stayed with me for most of my life. It is slow, and most of what happens on a baseball field does not work. And still, every so often, something does. A ball finds a gap. A daughter sprints onto a mound to walk her father off it for the last time. A rain delay turns into two hours you would not trade for a dry forecast.
There is a reason Field of Dreams ends the way it does, with Terence Mann standing at the edge of a cornfield talking about memory, about all that was once good, and about the chance that it could be again. He is talking about a game, but he is really talking about everything the game carries with it. Three guys standing around a high-top table with beer and peanuts, forty years in, know exactly what he means.
